By Gbenga Onabanjo
In the mid 1970s, Nigeria did something remarkable. It built a real expressway, the first of its kind in Africa. The Lagos Ibadan Expressway arrived with dignity. It had toll gates, interchanges, weighbridges, forests on both sides, and a clearly respected Right of Way. From toll gate to toll gate, 103 kilometres could be covered in under an hour.
There were no hawkers. No villages. No goats negotiating right of passage. For once, infrastructure actually worked.
Then three brothers, Lagos, Ogun, and Oyo, looked at this modern miracle slicing through their land and saw opportunity. Unfortunately, they skipped the inconvenient part called planning and foresight.
Villages began to sprout along the corridor. They were unplanned, unserviced, but hopeful. The Right of Way quietly surrendered. Since nature hates a vacuum, herdsmen found the Kara River irresistible and settled in, unchallenged.
Then heaven intervened. GO received divine instruction to establish a camp in the forest. Heaven spoke. Earth complied. Planning looked away.
Toll revenues soon discovered more pressing national priorities. Weighbridges were compromised, resisted, and later abandoned. Preventive maintenance became folklore. The big Daddy who owned the road pretended not to notice.
Then OBJ scrapped toll gates altogether in his bid to justify an increase in fuel price, apparently convinced that roads regenerate by faith alone.
Encroachment followed. Pedestrians crossed freely, some seemingly eager to fast track eternity. Maintenance vanished. The expressway began its slow descent from pride to pity, a shadow of its former self. Drivers began to spend over twenty four hours moving from one toll point to the other.
Big Brother eventually returned with a verdict. This road needs a complete overhaul.
Enter Bi Courtney, promising a ten lane superhighway with rest areas, trailer parks, proper interchanges, and sealed settlements. Utopia was announced. Funding, however, missed the briefing. The project stalled. The road waited. Years passed.
Then Fashola arrived, armed with legal clarity and stubborn persistence. With a magic wand, work began. After nearly sixteen years, a rebuilt road emerged, barely wider than the old one.
The ten lane dream quietly evaporated.
What followed was innovation Nigerian style. U turns appeared. Pedestrian crossings multiplied. Cattle crossings joined the party. Unrestricted access was granted right from the Lagos end. Humans and animals now negotiate priority daily. Wooden bridges appeared over the median, illegal, ingenious, temporary, and permanent. With no weighbridges, heavy trucks punished the pavement. The road cracked, sank, and sighed. The median, meant for drainage, became a forest and occasionally a convenience facility. Maintenance once again failed to show up. The Lagos Ibadan Expressway became a pipe dream.
Then December came. Then came the accident.
Two lives were lost. Suddenly, outrage found its voice. Suddenly, neglect became obvious. Yet nothing here was accidental. This tragedy had been pencilled into the design years ago.
The Lagos Ibadan Expressway did not fail because Nigerians lack intelligence. It failed because we treat infrastructure as a project, not as a system.
We build.
We abandon.
We encroach.
We improvise.
We fail to maintain.
And we pray.
A sane society would have built alternative corridors long ago. A serious nation would have protected the Right of Way as sacred. A disciplined country would enforce standards without apology. More interchanges would have been built. The corridors would have been preserved.
Until then, the Lagos Ibadan Expressway remains exactly what it has become, a very long road to a very distant utopia.
