Concrete without value: The high cost of performative governance in Nigeria

What should officials be rewarded for? New landmarks, or quieter improvements that people feel every day?

In Nigeria, we have conflated the act of pouring concrete with the art of governing. Since 1960, our political class has operated on a simple, yet very flawed, premise: if you can’t see it, it doesn’t count as an achievement. This obsession with “commissioning” projects has left the landscape littered with hollow shells that are really monuments to vanity, serving as a brutal reminder of the gap between performance and performative governance.

Think about it this way: a bridge that leads to nowhere or a five-star hotel that has never hosted a guest is not an asset; it is a liability. It is a drain on the national purse and a slap in the face of the taxpayer. To understand the scale of this structural failure, one needs only look across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones at the “white elephants” we have birthed since the return to democracy in 1999.

In the South-South, the Tinapa Free Trade Zone and Resort in Calabar stands as a ghostly testament to what happens when grand visions ignore market realities. Built with over $450 million, it was supposed to be West Africa’s premier business and leisure hub. Today, its vast halls are largely empty and crumbling, a victim of poor federal integration and regulatory bottlenecks.

Moving to the Southeast, the dredging of the Lower River Niger, a project spanning multiple states, including Anambra and Imo, has swallowed billions of naira with negligible impact on inland water transportation. Despite repeated flag-offs and “completions”, the promised barges of commerce remain a fantasy, while riverbank communities face worsening erosion.

In the Southwest, the Olokola LNG project was meant to be a flagship energy hub. Billions were committed, yet it remains a stagnant site of missed opportunities and abandoned infrastructure.

Up in the North Central, the Ajaokuta Steel Mill is perhaps our most enduring shame. Though its roots predate 1999, every administration since then has poured money into its “revival”. In the 2026 budget alone, over ₦6 billion was allocated for personnel costs for a plant that has not produced a single sheet of steel in my lifetime, and I am close to 50!

In the Northeast, the Mambilla Hydroelectric Power Project in Taraba remains a mirage. Decades of legal battles and contract disputes have stalled a project that was supposed to add 3,050MW to the national grid. We have spent more on “feasibility” and consultants than on actual turbines.

Finally, in the Northwest, the Kano ICT Industrial Park, though recently re-commissioned after vandalisation, highlights the fragility of building “digital hubs” in environments where basic security and consistent power are still luxuries.

If we want to be brutally frank, the incentives are skewed. A governor gets more “clout” from a flashy airport (think Dutse), even if it handles less than two flights a week, than from fixing the primary healthcare centres in 50 villages. New projects offer opportunities for “ribbon-cutting” ceremonies and, more cynically, for inflating contracts. Maintenance, however, is quiet, thankless, and offers no photo-ops.

We have built a culture where the “landmark” is king, while the “lived reality” of the citizen, such as the price of jollof rice, the safety of the roads, or the reliability of the light bulb, is treated as a secondary concern.

That tells you everything you need to know about our priorities. We need to move away from the “Big Man” school of development. Governance should not be about the builder’s ego; it should be about empowering the people.

What Nigeria needs right away is a sustained, intentional PR campaign, not to praise the government, but to disabuse the citizenry of the notion that building things is the only measure of success. We must start rewarding officials for the “quieter” improvements: the percentage reduction in maternal mortality, the increase in literacy rates, or the stability of electricity. Until we value the maintenance of what we have over the vanity of what we “start”, our map will continue to be dotted with the skeletons of projects that were meant to save us but only served to bankrupt us.

Good governance is not a photo op; it is not about looking impressive in the short term but about delivering lasting value and improving the lives of ordinary people.

It is when the ancient city of Benin becomes a top tourist destination, an eventuality that will let talent stay. Good governance is when a bridge shortens the trip from Agenebode to Idah. It is a supply chain that keeps a craft alive.

And good governance generates changes that people still remember decades later.

Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence.