There is a pure signature of malice, a quiet symptom of bad faith, when nothing makes a difference between good news and bad news once it concerns certain people, while every word from another camp is celebrated with absolute faith and fanfare.
I have just realized that this reflex is not always conscious or intentional. It is a trait people acquire without knowing it, rooted in emotional vulnerability devoid of strength. For who would truly want to propagate good news from an opponent, a rival, a perceived villain who can never be right even for a minute, who does not deserve to be liked, hoped for, or acknowledged even sometimes?
Yet emotional maturity, as Daniel Goleman teaches in his theory of emotional intelligence, tells us that no one is capable of being right all the time, not even your cleric or pastor whose every action you validate as worship, and equally no one is wrong all the time, not even a mad man who can be right sometimes and deserves a fair hearing rather than profiling and prejudice.
Social psychology calls this motivated reasoning, where Festinger’s cognitive dissonance makes us filter facts to protect our political identity, so much so that celebration of the other side feels like betrayal.
How does this relate to Niger which is a microcosm of Nigeria?
There is probably no bigger news coming from both Tinubu’s administration and Governor Bago for the people of Niger State than the announcement of the groundbreaking ceremony for the reconstruction and dualisation of the Lambata-Bida-Mokwa-Makera-Kontagora Federal Highway following Federal Government approval of N1.5 trillion for the project on Tuesday, 13th October 2026 at 12 noon in Bida, to be graced by Governor Mohammed Umaru Bago, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, the Chairman of Hi-Tech Construction, Senator Engr. David Umahi, Minister of Works, and Mohammed Idris, Minister of Information and National Orientation. On the surface alone, this is monumental.
The notice of 13th October is not a new road but the latest metamorphosis of a corridor that has lived through multiple contracts and funding models, a perfect case of what institutional theorists call policy layering and policy conversion.
What is now called Lambata-Bida-Mokwa-Makera-Kontagora began as the 124.88km Bida-Lapai-Lambata reconstruction awarded to CGC in 2018 for N33.3bn and still incomplete by 2024. Under Buhari’s Executive Order 007 of 2019, the Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme allowed companies to build roads and recover costs via tax credits, with NNPC committing N621.24bn for 21 roads including Bida-Lambata in Phase I and N1.97trn for 44 roads in Phase II.
Performance remained poor, leading to tanker blockades in 2021, frequent accidents and fires including the Esso disaster where fuel and lives were lost in seconds, and eventually NNPC’s exit in late 2024 that left projects in limbo.
This created three overlapping layers we see today: emergency palliatives ordered by Minister Bello Goronyo in September 2026 on the 123.4km Bida-Lapai-Lambata, the inherited NNPC reconstruction, and a new strategic dualisation. In mid-2026 FEC rescoped the corridor as 400.9km of dual carriageway, 801.8km of carriageway, re-awarded to Dangote Group for N1.8325trn to replace the CGC contract, which explains the N1.5trn figure in the invitation as a revised envelope for the expanded alignment with Hi-Tech Construction as executing contractor, a firm renowned for concrete highways.
The arrangement remains a tax-credit public-private partnership, not a toll concession, where Dangote finances construction upfront with reinforced concrete pavement designed for heavy articulated traffic and recovers it through FIRS tax credits, with supervision by the Ministry of Works. Dangote’s presence is logical because of his track record on concrete highways like Obajana-Kabba and Apapa-Oshodi, his cement capacity, and his own logistics interest along the corridor.
The road’s importance transcends Niger State because it is the shortest North-South link between Lagos and Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger, carrying over sixty percent of fuel to the North and serving as the critical alternative when Abuja-Lokoja floods or the Jebba-Mokwa bridge fails, a redundancy the FRSC itself relied on in 2022, while the Tegina-Bokani-Mokwa alternative has become insecure.
The failure of the road has therefore choked Bida’s rice and shea markets, raised transport costs, endangered IBB University Lapai whose students and staff sit directly on the route and have watched commuters lose interest, and fuelled recurring tanker falls and explosions that take days to clear. If executed as designed with proper drainage, truck parks and maintenance, the dualisation promises durable concrete roads, funding certainty unlike annual budgets, and a resilient national logistics backbone that ends the cycle of patching and gridlock.
Yet even noble intentions to appease desperate citizens do not seem to mean anything to wailers despite the overwhelming nature of news that looks too good not to rejoice before criticizing. It is in the face of this too good news that even before thanking God for giving leaders the intention to come up with something, wailers who do not want to give any credit or praise to one already condemned start calling it a scam for election, asking why now, what about previous contracts, declaring the project a complete failure so that even defending such a project is irrational. How shocking can that be?
It is like hearing that a woman has given birth and shouting impossible because you know she had abortions in the past and was barren for over ten years, so what has changed? Is that not revealing? Even if you build paradise, those who never like you would still look for fault and throw pessimism and cynicism, the same people who could believe everything from another person promising to return fuel subsidy even when it’s also campaign time and when you point out this contradiction they look lost, betrayed by their own emotion, unable to notice the malice or venom they let out even unconsciously, a textbook case of what psychologists call confirmation bias and tribal epistemology.
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
