In the beginning, there was earth. Then came the first Nigerian governor, who looked upon this earth and said, “Let there be road.” And behold, there was road. And it was good. For exactly seventeen days.
On the eighteenth day, the second Nigerian governor looked upon this road and declared it an abomination unto his political legacy. “This road,” he announced to a gathering of confused journalists and genuinely bewildered goats, “was built by my predecessor using inferior Chinese asphalt mixed with the tears of opposition voters. I shall build a proper road—a road so magnificent that historians will weep when they speak of it.”
Thus began the Great Nigerian Road Construction Cycle, a phenomenon so perfectly engineered that it operates with the precision of a Swiss watch, if Swiss watches were designed by a committee of caffeinated monkeys with engineering degrees from God knows who.
The process is elegantly simple. First, a contractor (usually the governor’s brother-in-law’s roommate from secondary school) wins a contract worth ₦50 billion to build a 2-kilometre stretch. This contractor, armed with the unshakeable confidence that comes from knowing absolutely nothing about civil engineering, begins by digging up the existing road. Not just the surface but the entire road, including the metaphysical concept of “roadness” that once existed there.
The original road, which had taken twelve months to build and had served faithfully despite developing only minor quirks (like occasional attempts to swallow small vehicles), is completely obliterated. In its place emerges something that can only be described as “agricultural land with governmental intentions”.
Six months into construction, the second governor loses the election. The third governor arrives, surveys the construction site (now resembling a NASA crater experiment), and announces that the project is “not in alignment with our administration’s vision of roads that actually exist”. He cancels the project and awards a new contract worth ₦75 billion to build a different road in the same location.
This new contractor (the governor’s wife’s cousin) brings revolutionary ideas to the table. Instead of building on ground level like some sort of peasant, he decides that this road should be elevated. Not elevated enough to be a bridge—that would be too functional. Just elevated enough to ensure that connecting it to any existing road requires the services of a physicist and a priest.
The construction process involves sophisticated machinery imported specially from a catalogue that appears to have been designed by someone who had heard roads described but had never actually seen one. These machines proceed to dig holes with the enthusiasm of children building sandcastles, except the children have been given dynamite, and the sandcastle is expected to support commercial traffic.
Eighteen months later, the third governor is caught in a scandal involving the mysterious appearance of road construction equipment in his personal garden. The fourth governor takes office and immediately declares the elevated road project “a monument to fiscal irresponsibility” and “an insult to the memory of actual roads”.
He commissions a feasibility study (₦30 billion) to determine whether the location is suitable for a road. The study, conducted by a team of consultants who arrive by helicopter because the area has become completely inaccessible by land, concludes that the location is perfect for a road, provided someone first builds a road to get to where the road should be built.
Governor Four awards a new contract (₦100 billion) for a “comprehensive road solution” that will involve building a road to the road construction site, then building the actual road, then building a road to connect the road to other roads, and finally, building a small access road so that people can come and admire the road system.
The new contractor (the governor’s barber’s mechanic’s spiritual advisor) brings an innovative approach: instead of removing the previous construction attempts, he decides to build on top of them. This creates a road system with multiple levels, like a very poorly planned parking garage, except instead of parking spaces, there are potholes that go down several geological epochs.
At this point, the local community organises a celebration. Not because the road is complete—nobody remembers what “complete” means in this context—but because the construction site has become a tourist attraction. Travel bloggers arrive from neighbouring states to photograph the “Eighth Wonder of Infrastructure,” a road construction project so complex that it has developed its own weather system.
The celebration attracts the attention of Governor Five, who campaigns on a platform of “Roads That Actually Go Somewhere.” Upon taking office, he surveys the construction site (now visible from satellite images as a geometric anomaly that appears to be slowly rotating) and makes a bold decision: he will not build a new road. Instead, he will “complete the existing road project”.
This sounds reasonable until one realises that nobody can determine which of the seven ongoing construction projects is the “existing” one, or indeed, whether any of them qualify as roads in the traditional sense of the word. The completion process involves hiring a team of archaeologists to excavate the original road (now buried under 47 feet of “improvements”), a team of anthropologists to study the indigenous construction techniques used by the previous contractors, and a team of philosophers to determine what, ontologically speaking, constitutes a road.
Governor Five’s contractor (his personal trainer’s accountant’s brother) takes a holistic approach. He decides that the road should not merely connect Point A to Point B; it should connect Point A to the spiritual essence of Point B, while simultaneously providing access to several parallel dimensions where Point B might theoretically exist.
The construction process involves machinery so advanced that it appears to be from the future, operated by workers who seem to be from the past, supervised by engineers who are clearly from a different planet altogether. The road takes shape—if “shape” can be applied to something that exists in eleven dimensions and occasionally phases in and out of reality.
By the time Governor Six takes office, the road project has achieved something unprecedented: it has become self-sustaining. The construction site generates its own economy, with vendors selling food to construction workers who are building facilities for other construction workers who are constructing administrative offices for the people who oversee the construction oversight committee.
Governor Six, a pragmatist, decides to embrace this development. He officially declares the construction site to be “Nigeria’s First Perpetual Infrastructure Project” and establishes it as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the category “Outstanding Universal Example of Ambitious Confusion.”
The road, now in its fifteenth year of construction and seventh administration, has become a metaphor for Nigerian resilience. It doesn’t go anywhere in particular, and you can’t really drive on it, but it provides employment for thousands of people and has single-handedly prevented soil erosion across a 50-kilometre radius due to the complex system of trenches, embankments, and mysterious concrete structures that now populate the landscape.
Local children, born after construction began, have never known a world in which this stretch of earth was not under construction. They’ve developed games around the machinery and have created a rich folklore about the mythical time “when the road is finished”. Their grandparents speak in hushed tones about the ancient days when you could drive from Point A to Point B without requiring a GPS, a four-wheel drive vehicle, and a spiritual advisor.
Meanwhile, the original problem—the need for a road between Point A and Point B—has been solved by the natural evolution of human ingenuity. People now travel by helicopter, or they’ve simply moved their homes and businesses to locations that don’t require crossing the Great Construction Zone. Point B has developed its own identity as a destination unreachable by land, attracting adventure tourists and philosophers interested in exploring the concept of “unreachable destinations”.
The road construction project has become a permanent installation, like a very large, very expensive sculpture that happens to occasionally produce small amounts of asphalt. It serves as a reminder that in Nigeria, the journey is more important than the destination, especially when the journey never actually ends and the destination remains a theoretical concept discussed in planning meetings that have been ongoing since 2003.
And so, the Great Nigerian Road continues its eternal dance of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, a perfect cycle of governmental optimism and engineering creativity. A world without end.
In the words of the current Governor Seven, as he stands atop the latest construction crane overlooking his domain: “This road will be completed during my administration, God willing, and so far the creek doesn’t rise and the rains don’t come and the harmattan doesn’t blow and the contractor remembers where he put the blueprints.”
The road project is expected to be completed sometime between next Tuesday and the heat death of the universe, weather permitting.
Oluwanifemi Bakare is a young Nigerian adult with a passion for films, poetry, and the arts. He is on X/Twitter @femibakare_
Waooh! It was a creative masterpiece of ingenuity. Perfect description of Nigeria endless journey of development.