Why is Nigeria building everywhere but the East?

By Aloy Ejimakor

Every day, the arteries between Lagos and the Southeast throb with the lifeblood of the Nigerian economy. Studies of inter-urban travel from Lagos show that 36.5 per cent of passengers are headed to the Southeast which is more than the South-South, and every northern zone combined.

The cargo story is starker: The National Inland Waterways Authority confirms that 60 to 65 per cent of all containerised cargo berthing at Lagos ports is destined for Onitsha and Aba. The Southeast is not a peripheral region; it is the commercial engine that keeps the Lagos ports relevant and profitable, which fattens the federation account that gives more to the regions that contributed far less.

Better yet, federal infrastructure spending since 2015 has behaved as if the opposite were true. In the 2016 capital budget, the Northwest received 25.7 per cent; and the Southeast received a measly 9.8 per cent.

Under the NNPCL’s road scheme, the North-Central got ₦244.87 billion for 791 kilometres, while the Southeast got ₦43.28 billion for 122 kilometres. The message is unmistakable: the roads that carry the most people and the most goods are the least funded. Why?

Meanwhile, the trunk routes northward have been lavished with attention. The Lagos–Kano railway was contracted at US$1.9 billion spur into Niger Republic that economists have bluntly called “not likely to pay for the public investment.” Still, it was prioritised despite carrying a fraction of the traffic flowing East.

And now the Lagos–Calabar coastal highway, at ₦15 trillion, is being routed through the South-South littoral, skirting the Onitsha–Aba industrial corridor that actually generates the cargo and the humans the coastal road claims to serve.

This is not a neutral allocation of scarce resources. It is a geography of neglect dressed up as national development. The Lagos–Kano and Kano–Maradi corridors serve political constituencies and a dream of Sahelian trade; the Lagos–Onitsha–Aba corridor serves the actual economy. One carries aspirations; the other carries containers.

The coastal highway should be re-routed through the Southeast. A route that links Lagos to Onitsha, Aba, and the emerging industrial clusters of the East would move the freight that already exists, relieve the death-trap highways that currently choke commerce, and connect production to port far more efficiently than a coastal run through sparsely industrialised littoral states.

If the federal government can justify billions for a railway into Niger Republic, it cannot credibly argue that a highway through Nigeria’s second-largest commercial bloc (the Southeast) is economically unwise.

Infrastructure is not charity; it is an investment that should follow demand. The demand is eastward, and it has been consistent from before and after the Civil War. Yet, federal government spending has been northward, and sometimes westward. And when the East is remembered, they spend on a coastal road to a part of the East that bypasses the Southeast. Why?

Until that contradiction is resolved, Nigeria will keep building expensive roads to places the economy is not going, while the roads that matter crumble under the weight of the traffic they were never funded to carry.

• Aloy Ejimakor, a public policy analyst, writes via email.