President Bola Tinubu has highlighted the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, the Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway, the Trans-Sahara Superhighway, electricity grid upgrades, and the modernisation of key infrastructure as the concrete reasons Nigeria is borrowing from abroad. Speaking in defense of the country's foreign loans, Tinubu tied each project directly to his administration's push to grow Nigeria's economy to $1 trillion.
The president's argument is straightforward: big infrastructure requires big financing, and foreign loans are part of how that gets done. The highways and grid upgrades he cited are meant to move goods, connect regions, and bring more Nigerians into a functioning, modern economy.
The $1 trillion economy target is the number Tinubu keeps returning to as the destination all this spending is meant to reach. Whether the projects stay on track, and whether Nigerians feel the benefit before the debt becomes the headline, is the question his critics are already asking.
Originally published by BusinessDay.