Like Emefiele, Like Umahi: The Scapegoat Script Is Playing Out

October 15, 2026

Like Emefiele, Like Umahi: The Scapegoat Script Is Playing Out Again

Nigerians have seen this film before. The cast changes, but the ending doesn’t. Today’s focus: Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway

A president wants a signature project. One official is handed the job, the microphone and the blame. The money gets questioned, the deadlines slip, and the institutions start circling. Then the project turns toxic, and the man who explained it is the only one left standing in the light. Godwin Emefiele lived that script. Dave Umahi is reading the same pages.

Stage one: the president’s project, the minister’s face

The Naira redesign carried Emefiele’s name on every headline, but the CBN cannot change the currency without presidential approval, and President Buhari unveiled the new notes himself in November 2022. When cash vanished and Nigerians queued at empty ATMs, the anger fell on the governor. Emefiele was suspended in June 2023, arrested, and charged. The approval at the top never faced the same consequences.

The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway follows the same shape. The government itself calls it a flagship legacy project of the Tinubu administration. The Federal Executive Council approved it in February 2024. Ever since, Umahi has been the one answering for it, on television, before the House, and against political critiques.

Stage two: the numbers nobody can reconcile

Umahi’s own cost figures don’t fit together. He put the 700km road at about N15.36 trillion. He also gave a figure of N4 billion per kilometre, and N4 billion times 700 is roughly N2.8 trillion. The sources I could find don’t explain a gap that large. Observers also alleges that the 2024 budget gave the project N500 million while N1.06 trillion was released for the first phase, and that the National Assembly never cleared it. Those are opposition allegations, but they are exactly the kind of questions auditors and investigators later ask in the open.

Stage three: the deadlines that keep sliding

Umahi said in 2025 that construction would be finished in January 2026. Later reporting gave April and then May 2026 as targets for Section One. In July 2026 the first 47.47km phase was only temporarily opened, and the completion of Sections One and Two has now been pushed to December 2026. Public officials who set dates and miss them build a record against themselves, and that record belongs to the man who announced it.

Stage four: the legal and political heat

The government’s own legal team has said 27 court cases were filed against the Federal Government over the project. The House of Representatives resolved to probe it. Petitions now accuse Umahi of diverting the Ondo section, and he says he welcomes them. The route has changed more than once, including Tinubu’s directive to run the Ondo-to-Edo continuation along the existing East-West Road. Afenifere’s secretary has accused the ministry of moving the road away from the coast to protect estate owners, which Umahi denies, citing soil tests.

Stage five: whose name is on the record

Read how Umahi explains himself. The President directed the realignment. The President ordered the East-West alignment. The President, he says, never recommended a contractor and never influenced the costing. Every directive is on the record as Tinubu’s, and every defence is Umahi’s. That is how a scapegoat is built: the order belongs to the top, and the explanation belongs to the minister.

Peter Obi called it, and the road is proving him right

In April 2024, Peter Obi said the project was a misplaced priority. He urged the government to finish its abandoned road projects first, and he named the East-West Road among those in need. He cited roughly 50 abandoned federal highways, and he asked why begin another huge project that wouldn’t be completed in 20 or 30 years.

Today, the coastal highway is being tied into the East-West Road, which has to be raised about two metres above flood levels. The government’s own engineers are now fixing the road Obi told them to fix. That is the good governance argument in plain terms: finish what exists, price it honestly, and put citizens before monuments. Peter Obi’s template has held up better than the minister’s defence of the numbers.

The verdict

Look at the stages again. A presidential project. A single public face. Costs that don’t add up. Deadlines that keep moving. Lawsuits, petitions and a House probe. Directives that point upward and explanations that point back at one man. Emefiele’s story had every one of these before it ended.

I can’t tell you the date, because I’m not claiming a leak or a charge. I’m reading the pattern, and the pattern points one way. When the winds turn, the system needs someone to answer for the numbers, and history says it won’t be the man who approved the project. It will be the man who explained it.

Like Emefiele, Like Umahi… David Umahi, when you’re done being a disposable errand boy… YOU WILL END UP THE EMEFIELE WAY.

That would be the perfect time to remind You of 2 major factors: One would be about the young lady whose precious life was ended in Your house, the other I would I reserve for later.