But even if we are to continue to play the ostrich on this matter, as the idea of the coastal highway suggests we are minded to, we may still wonder whether this highway is an optimal solution to part of our infrastructure challenges. The same way we continue to ask why our focus on rehabilitating our rail infrastructure is on moving people, rather than goods.
Nigeria's infrastructure needs are as plentiful as are the volumes of research papers and public commentary acknowledging these needs. The shortages that we admit to are of both physical and social infrastructure. But because of the multiplier effects of the former in the economy, its dimensions tend to hog discussions in the policy space. Roads. Bridges. Railways. Broadband connections. All this matter to any effort to make the country better. Our commercial space will benefit from improvements in the speed with which we are able to move goods, people, and services across the country and how far into the country's recesses this reach.
It was understandable, then, the excitement which greeted the Federal Government's announcement that it planned to finance a coastal highway that will reach from Lagos to Calabar. Imagine the boost to our littoral communities from such a project. Besides moving people and goods, we might well benefit from a fillip to tourism on the back of it. The cost of the project did, however, dampen the initial ardour. It looked like being one of the most expensive of such projects anywhere in the world.
And this for understandable reasons. Anywhere you turn, the talk is about a warming earth, and what humanity may do to adapt to, or mitigate the threats from this. The heatwave that we experienced in the country over the last couple of months indicate that adaptation will be something of a challenge.
The health implications of working and living in an oven are obvious. The economic implications maybe not so much -- but, at the very least, inequality will worsen. With heat and humidity combining to make temperatures in parts of the continent feel hotter than 60°C, the president of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Guelleh, recently warned that as the world heats up, the Horn of Africa may no longer support human life. That, though, is but part of the threats that we face from a hotter world. Melting polar ice caps mean a hotter world will be a wetter one in many ways, too. Consequently, one of the ways in which rising temperatures will impact places like ours is through rising sea levels.
This matters because most of our littoral areas are low-lying. In other words, below sea-level. Were the Atlantic Ocean to rise (and there is no reason it would be minded to do otherwise), Lagos, Port-Harcourt, and all the cities along the path of the planned coastal highway might no longer be feasible places to live. One can imagine, then, how a proper environmental impact assessment survey for the coastal highway may drive up its costs. As, indeed, would the fancy engineering required to reinforce it as sea levels rise.
Which leads to the question whether, given what we know, this is the most efficient use of public resources at this moment. What do we know? Global warming and its implications for life on the continent are worrisome enough for places such as Freetown (Sierra Leone) to have appointed a "chief heat officer." At some point in the near future, Nigeria will be caught in an environmental pincer. An encroaching desert in the north will look to introduce itself to rising water levels in the south. Caught in between both forces of nature, citizens' lives will be unliveable without adjustments which we must start now. Cultivars that are heat-resistant will matter, just as much as those that can tolerate the wet and salty soils that we will recover from previous wetlands and mangrove swamps.
Then there are idiosyncratic worries. In The Netherlands, these are about the effect of oxygen and rust on the metal supports of houses that previously had no need to worry about such things before a drier world exposed such supports. In London, it is about the effect of a drier clay soil on the integrity of physical infrastructure. In China, The Economist newspaper reports that half of the big cities there are sinking. Apparently, underground aquifers are emptying, just as buildings are getting heavier. With much of the water on the mainland sourced from boreholes, and developers demolishing single-use buildings to erect multi-tenant facilities, ought Lagosians to be concerned about possible subsidence? Without question, the debate about adapting to a warmer world and finding ways to mitigate against it should be front and centre of the national conversation.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
But even if we are to continue to play the ostrich on this matter, as the idea of the coastal highway suggests we are minded to, we may still wonder whether this highway is an optimal solution to part of our infrastructure challenges. The same way we continue to ask why our focus on rehabilitating our rail infrastructure is on moving people, rather than goods.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
