HOW DRU CATCH SEES IT

The Road That Unpaved Itself

Nigeria's Works Minister David Umahi took to a podium in Mabushi, Abuja, and declared he felt zero remorse about steering 67 kilometres of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway away from Ondo's shoreline. The rationale: subterranean pits plunging past 100 metres, plus sand instability reaching 300 metres. Compelling geology - except it invites an obvious follow-up that nobody at the ministry appears keen to field. Were those pits freshly excavated? Did the earth rearrange itself after the original route was drawn? Or did someone simply run the numbers on filling costs and decide the coast was negotiable?

The fishing families left on the waterline are not petitioning for a six-lane luxury corridor. They want to stop loading a woman in labour into a dugout canoe at two in the morning and paddling for hours toward a hospital. Ilaje fishermen's leader Agboola Abilogun, speaking through an interpreter, told reporters the community's hope of retiring canoes that double as emergency transport had collapsed. That is not a zoning quibble. That is survival arithmetic tallied in paddle strokes and lost hours on open water.

The Pits Were There Before the Promise Was

The structural absurdity runs deeper than any pit the minister cited. Former Cross River Governor Donald Duke flagged the obvious contradiction: the East-West Road already existed when the coastal route was designed, so pivoting to it now looks less like a discovery and more like an admission that the original pledge was scenery. If the terrain was always unbuildable, the promise was theatre performed for an audience that paddles to funerals. If the terrain is buildable but expensive, what Umahi announced is a budget trim marketed as an engineering verdict.

Senior Advocate Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, himself from Ilaje, laid out the legal case in an open letter, calling the realignment tantamount to sabotage and demanding that cost calculations be measured transparently against the project's founding purpose. The Ijaw Youths Council escalated further, warning the government that soliciting votes while withdrawing roads carries political consequences. Ondo attorneys added that their state holds Nigeria's longest coastline - roughly 80 to 100 kilometres - making a coastal highway that skips it a contradiction baked into the project title.

A Government Arguing With Itself While People Paddle

The story acquired a bureaucratic plot twist when the Presidency posted on X that President Tinubu never ordered the highway diverted onto the East-West Road, framing that reconstruction as a separate, additional project. Which leaves a neat riddle: a minister publicly confirmed a rerouting, the presidency publicly denied authorising it, and no one has publicly explained who signed off on the decision the communities are living with. Meanwhile, Sections 1 and 2 near Lagos are either finished or due next month, while Ondo's stretch exists mainly as a debate topic. The result is a government in vigorous argument with its own announcements while the people the road was named for keep boarding canoes.