The Shocking Outrageous Expenditure On The Niger Bridge And The Ongoing Fraud
The Second Niger Bridge Project costs a whopping N414bn (approx $1.09B). The bridge alone costs N206bn ($540m), while the link roads cost 208bn ($545m). This puts it very close to the most expensive bridges in the world. While there has been far costlier bridge projects in the world, the Niger Bridge has nothing spectacular about its design or the terrain to justify the heavy expenditure. It is neither a suspension bridge (Supension bridges can be very costly) nor a cable stayed one. It is just a beam bridge and these are the cheapest bridge designs you can ever find. Secondly we can't even say that the Niger is very deep or the topography is a mountaneous one that requires complex foundations or towering beams. Additionally, the Niger bridge is just 1.6km. Beam Bridges that surpass this in cost have had to multiply the distance by nothing less than twenty times and cheaper bridges are even far longer. For example, the Dhola Sadiya Bridge, a similar beam bridge in india (a country with labour and construction costs similar to ours), completed in 2017, has a length of 9.15km and a span that is equal to one twin of the 2nd Niger bridge. Now, doing the math, 3.2km of this bridge should be similar in costs to the 1.6km Second Niger Bridge, but things get shockingly funny. This bridge only costs $158 million totally so 3.2km of the bridge should be about $53 million. But here our bridge being made of 'gold' and not reinforced concrete costs $540 millon. Lets drive home the seriousness of this inflation with another example. Kacchi Dargah–Bidupur Bridge is under construction in india (Started in 2017, after Second Niger Bridge, and will commissioned in 2021, before Second Niger Bridge) is a six lane bridge(Second Niger bridge is six-lane as well). Now see its peculiarites, Firstly it is a 9.76km suspension bridge (Remember I said, suspension bridges are costly) with 13.24 km of approach roads. Now, the Second Niger Bridge is 1.6km bridge with 10.3km of approach roads. Let me shock you, the Kacchi Dargah–Bidupur Bridge total project costs only $699 milllon dollars while its baby brother in Nigeria has a net worth of $1.09bn. Is the Nigerian Government not wonderful? I have a clue to the reason for all this. Maybe, its because the Nigerian Government is not paying for it, as well as other projects Nigerians are celebrating. Go check the costs. There seems to be an agreement between the Nigerian Government and its Chinese investors to heavily take advantage of the huge Nigerian population and use unreasonable costs to build infrastructure and dupe citizens. If you don't know, these bridges are being tolled, the railways are being paid for by Nigerians. The old bridge will be blocked to major traffic and every driver, transporter, commuter, sheep, goat, cow, anything at all passing that bridge will pay that $1.09bn to the last dime. This goes for the railways as well. Since railways are cheaper to run, the tickets will be hiked and Nigerians will pay the bloated costs. This is daylight robbery. Pic 1: Second Niger Bridge Pic 2: Dhola–Sadiya Bridge pic 3: Kacchi Dargah–Bidupur Bridge All rights reserved Modified: The Second Niger Bridge will be tolled for a whole 25 years!
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