Nigeria Awards $1.2bn Highway Job to Chagoury’s Hitech

NIGERIA · POWER PLAYERS

Nigeria has approved roughly 1.7 trillion naira, about 1.24 billion dollars, for the next stretch of the Sokoto-Badagry highway. The work goes to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech Construction, reviving a familiar argument about how the country builds its biggest roads.

Inside the Sokoto-Badagry highway deal

The Federal Executive Council signed off on the contract for a section of the superhighway running through Kebbi State. Reporting by Billionaires.Africa put the award at about 1.24 billion dollars.

The builder is Hitech Construction Company, part of the Chagoury Group. It is the same firm delivering the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway, the administration’s other signature corridor.

The full Sokoto-Badagry route is planned at more than 1,000 kilometres. It crosses Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Kwara, Oyo, Ogun and Lagos states, and the council had already approved about 2 trillion naira for other sections in 2025.

Officials cast the section-by-section phasing as pragmatic engineering. Critics read it as momentum politics, each approval making the next harder to question.

Kebbi’s stretch also crosses terrain where farming and banditry intersect. Building there means contending with the insecurity that has plagued Nigeria’s northwest for years.

Why the name Chagoury raises temperatures

Gilbert Chagoury, the Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire behind the group, is one of the country’s most connected businessmen. He is the developer of Lagos’s Eko Atlantic city, and he is also a lightning rod.

He was convicted in Geneva in 2000 over funds linked to the late dictator Sani Abacha. He paid a settlement, the record was later cleared under Swiss procedure, and critics revived that history within hours of the new award.

Civil-society outlets, including West Africa Weekly, also object that the era’s largest road contracts have gone to Chagoury-linked firms without open competitive bidding. The presidency has not publicly detailed the procurement path for the Kebbi section.

Hitech’s defenders answer that the firm delivers, pointing to Lagos roadworks and the Eko Atlantic seawall. Proven heavy-construction capacity is genuinely scarce in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s procurement rules do allow selective tendering in defined circumstances. Whether trillion-naira corridors fit those circumstances is the heart of the dispute.

The case for the road

Strip away the politics and the corridor answers a real need. Nigeria’s northwest — populous, agricultural and insecurity-prone — is poorly stitched to the ports and markets of the coast.

A modern highway from Sokoto to Badagry would cut haulage times across seven states. It would give farm produce a faster route to Lagos and to export, and road transport carries the overwhelming share of Nigerian freight.

The government frames the project, with the coastal highway, as the infrastructure legacy of President Bola Tinubu’s term. Construction jobs and cement demand arrive quickly; the corridor’s full value depends on finishing it.

For Sokoto and Kebbi, the promise is concrete: markets reached before produce spoils, and a coastline days closer. Big roads are abstractions until the first harvest travels one.

What to watch

Financing is the first question, as trillion-naira approvals still need funded schedules behind them. Nigeria’s fiscal space is tight, and earlier sections have leaned on financing facilities that take time to close.

Oil receipts, the treasury’s backbone, are under pressure from swelling global supply. Every soft month for crude makes the road bill heavier.

Delivery is the second. Nigerian mega-roads have a history of outliving the governments that launch them, and the Sokoto-Badagry corridor will span at least two political cycles.

Land, drainage and compensation disputes slow even well-funded stretches. The coastal highway’s own progress shows both the capacity and the friction involved.

The corridor would eventually link into the wider West African network, where Lagos–Abidjan planning inches ahead. Nigeria’s highways are regional infrastructure whether or not they are planned that way.

The third is precedent. How Nigeria awards, prices and audits its flagship roads will shape investor confidence in the whole programme, which is why this contract’s critics refuse to let the question drop.

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