By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA.

There is this utterly insane and most idiotic post circulating on social media to the effect that the Coastal Road should be cancelled because it will cost ten times as much to construct 700 plus kilometres of it than it will cost to construct a road across Africa from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt.

I have never seen a most nonsensical concoction of blatant falsehood in my entire life!

Anyone who believes that a highway from Cape to Cairo, the entire length of Africa, would cost a mere pittance of $1.6b is the biggest ignoramus and compound fool in the whole world.

This is the problem with ignorance and the gullibility of sections of the general public: malcontents and agent provocateurs, such as Obidients and Atikulates, prey on such intellectual vulnerabilities to gaslight the unwary into buying misinformation and purchasing disinformation from their putrid stock of lies.

There is simply no way a highway from Cape Town to Cairo will cost anything less than at least ten times what the Nigerian Coastal Road will cost.

If you know, you know:

1. It should be far more costly to construct a road from Dakar, Senegal, along the West African Coast through Banjul, Gambia, Conakry, Guinea, Bissau, Guinea Bissau, Freetown, Sierra Leone, Monrovia, for Liberia, Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, Accra Ghana, Lome, Togo, Porto Novo, Benin, and, Lagos, down to Calabar, Nigeria, than to construct one from the same Dakar, across the West African hinterland through Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and then into Nigeria from say Kano through Nasarawa, Benue and Enugu into Cross River down to the same Calabar, and that is due to the different challenges the topography and geology of the coast and the hinterland pose;
2. There is absolutely no such concise infrastructural project as the Cape Town to Cairo road, an international route cutting across Africa from the South to the North of an an entire continent, similar to the Coastal Road which is our own internal project within our own borders;

And,

3. What you have in the so-called Cape Town-Cairo highway is a Pan-Africanist vision for connecting our continent consisting of individual routes within various countries, with each nation handling sections within their national borders.

I would expect all of us to be pretty used to and more eagle-eyed about the rather diabolically dishonest antics of the opposition by now and certainly not to be falling for the sort of miserably unintelligent crap encapsulated in the post under reference.

It is not even possible to construct a brand new section of such a Trans African highway from Cairo in the North of Egypt to the southern border it shares with Sudan at $1.6b – I’m pretty sure any highway from Cairo to Aswan (within the same Egypt) would cost far more than the entire cost of our Coastal Road because the road would have to run adjacent to the River Nile over terrain with similar geological profile to the litoral states of Nigeria.

That is just one country: then you have to figure out what the other sections across Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe, down to and through much of South Africa will cost to its terminus in Cape Town!

Mind you, along this route I have chosen, you would have to include spurs to link the main artery to several other neighbouring countries including Ethiopia, Chad, Kenya, Congo DR, Zambia and Mozambique!

I would be quite dumbfounded if anyone were able to deliver such a project at a cost of even as much as $200b!

$1.6b my foot!

Rubbish!

Immediately after the presidential election, I had predicted to close friends and associates that the failed cranks on the other side who unsuccessfully deployed ethnicism, religion and regionalism in canvassing their quite imbecilic presidential bids will keep giving us hell with relentless lies, misinformation and disinformation going forward.

It is the duty and forte of intelligent and patriotic Nigerians to refute and expose them for the utterly despicable liars they are.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, is Chairman, Tinubu Media Support Group, TMSG, and writes from Abuja.