Contracts And Concessions: Big Announcements, Old Habits

For once, the Federal Executive Council sat down, looked at a 20-year mess, and decided to end it. No drama, no fresh committee, no white paper gathering dust somewhere in Abuja. They closed it. The dispute between the federal government and Bi-Courtney over the Murtala Muhammed Airport Terminal Two, MM2 for short, is finally done.

After two decades of court cases, arguments over concession agreements, and that famous N132 billion judgment hanging like a stubborn cloud, both sides have agreed to move on. Bi-Courtney drops the money. The government returns some assets. Everybody smiles for the cameras.

You almost want to clap. Almost.

Because if you’ve followed how this country handles infrastructure deals, you know better than to pop champagne this early. Let’s slow down.

A company wins a concession. Terms are signed. Disputes begin almost immediately. Years pass. Governments change. Ministers come and go. The courts get involved. At some point, the Supreme Court of Nigeria issued a ruling in this case, ordering the government to pay over N132 billion, plus interest dating back to 2009. Pause there.N132 billion. From 2009. Add interest.

That’s not a small clerical error. That’s a policy failure stretched over multiple administrations. And now in one clean sweep, the money is “written off. ”Good news? Yes. But also a quiet confession that something was deeply broken in the first place. Because here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to sit with: how did we allow a concession dispute to spiral for 20 years before deciding to act like adults? Twenty years. Some of the graduates working at MM2 today were probably in primary school when this dispute started.

This is how we do governance: we inherit problems, ignore them, then celebrate when we finally do what should have been done years ago.

Now, to be fair, there are parts of this agreement that deserve acknowledgement.

Bi-Courtney dropped its claim to MM1. That alone removes a major source of tension in Lagos aviation operations. The exclusivity clause is gone, which, frankly, should never have existed in that form if the goal was competition and efficiency. And then the hotel and conference centre, abandoned, half-finished, sitting there like a monument to Nigerian project abandonment, is handed back for completion within 24 months.

Then comes the part that raised my eyebrow. Regional flights may be moved to MM2, capacity permitting, and the government will now begin earning revenue from the terminal.Wait.Is the government just now figuring out how to earn from an airport concession that has been operating for years? You see the pattern. We sign deals first, then spend years figuring out what they even mean.

Now shift your attention to the other announcement from the same FEC meeting. Over Ntrillion has been approved for roads and bridges across the country. One sitting. One announcement. Figures flying around like confetti — Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, Sokoto-Badagry Expressway, Carter Bridge reconstruction, dozens of others.N7 trillion. Let that sink in. That’s not budgeting. That’s ambition on steroids. And I get it, infrastructure is critical. Roads, bridges, rail lines, no country grows without them. The approval of nearly $3 billion for rail projects in Lagos, Kano, and Kaduna shows a government that understands the importance of mobility.

Fine. But here’s where experience kicks in, and it’s not a pleasant voice. We’ve seen this movie before. Big announcements. Massive figures.Groundbreaking ceremonies with hard hats and cameras. Then… silence. Or worse, abandoned sites and contractors making excuses.

Remember the Suleja-Minna road? Five years under a tax credit scheme and “nothing tangible” achieved. That’s not my phrase; that’s straight from the minister. Five years.

So when new contracts are announced for the same corridor, forgive me if I don’t rush to celebrate. We have a consistency problem.

Not in making announcements, we’re world-class at that. In execution.In follow-through.In finishing what we start. Take the Carter Bridge in Lagos. Now we’re told it has to be completely demolished and rebuilt because its structural elements have deteriorated over time. Reports from 2013, 2019, and now all point to the same conclusion.

So we knew. For years, we knew. And only now do we act.

This is the quiet tragedy of our infrastructure story: delayed decisions that make problems more expensive than they needed to be. And then we praise ourselves for fixing them.

Let me say something that might annoy a few people. Throwing trillions at projects doesn’t impress me anymore.

Show me one corridor, just one, that is completed on time, within budget, and maintained properly five years after commissioning. Not patched. Not ceremonially reopened. Properly maintained.

Because roads in Nigeria don’t just fail, they collapse into neglect. Drainage ignored. Overloading unchecked. Maintenance is treated like an afterthought. Then we start another project beside the old one. It’s a cycle.

Now, before someone says “at least something is being done,” yes, something is being done. That matters. You can’t fix roads by writing essays.

But effort without discipline leads to half-finished highways and ballooning costs. And we’ve mastered that art.

Let’s go back to MM2 for a second.

That resolution  if it holds  offers a small lesson.Disputes don’t solve themselves. They linger, grow, become expensive, and poison investor confidence. It took 20 years to fix what should have been sorted in a fraction of that time. Twenty.

So here’s my worry, and I hope I’m wrong. We’re entering another phase of massive infrastructure commitments, roads, bridges, and rail lines, without fixing the underlying habits that caused past failures.

Procurement delays. Contract disputes. Political interference. Weak monitoring. Contractors disappearing halfway into projects. All still there. And if those habits remain, these shiny approvals will become tomorrow’s abandoned sites. You can already see the seeds.

External financing for Sokoto-Badagry. Tolling plans. Cost per kilometre comparisons. It all sounds good on paper. But paper is where many of our projects shine brightest.

On the ground? That’s where reality shows up uninvited. Let me bring it home. If this government wants to be taken seriously on infrastructure and not just remembered for big numbers, it needs to do a few things differently.

First, publish timelines and stick to them. Not vague timelines, real ones, with milestones.

Second, make the project status public. Nigerians shouldn’t have to rely on rumours to know if a road is 20% or 80% complete.

Third, enforce consequences. Contractors who fail should not quietly win new contracts elsewhere. That’s how mediocrity spreads.

Fourth, and this one is uncomfortable, reduce the number of simultaneous mega-projects. Focus. Finish. Then expand. Because right now, it feels like we’re trying to build everything everywhere all at once. And that rarely ends well.

Back to where we started. The MM2 dispute is over. That’s good. It shows that the government can, when it chooses, resolve long-standing issues and move forward.

But it also reminds us how long it takes us to do the obvious. Twenty years to fix a concession dispute.

So when I hear about trillions approved in one meeting, forgive me if I don’t join the applause immediately.

I’ve seen too many announcements age badly. Let the bulldozers move. Let the projects reach completion. Let Nigerians actually use these roads, these bridges, these rail lines, not just hear about them.

Then we can talk. For now, we watch. Because in this country, the difference between promise and performance is where the real story lives.