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Nigeria’s federal government has designated the Mararaba-Keffi Road as the testing ground for a nationwide highway surveillance program that, if rolled out as planned, would install closed-circuit television cameras along every major transportation corridor in the country — an ambition Works Minister David Umahi framed Saturday as a direct presidential directive, not a ministry initiative.
The scope of what President Bola Tinubu is asking for is considerable.
Umahi, speaking during a site inspection of the Mararaba-Keffi reconstruction project, said the president wants CCTV coverage on all federal routes — and that the Abuja-Keffi corridor will serve as the template for how that coverage is built and operated.
The surveillance infrastructure, he said, would be solar-powered, integrated with observation facilities, and linked to security agencies capable of monitoring road activity in real time. Rapid-response mechanisms would be embedded in the system to reduce emergency response times on highways where incidents currently go undetected for extended periods. The program will not rely on the police alone.
Umahi disclosed that the federal government is working with the Nigeria Police Force to revive the Highway Patrol and Safety Unit — a department that has existed on paper within the police structure but has functioned at diminished capacity for years.
The CCTV network, in the minister’s framing, is the hardware side of a security architecture that requires the highway patrol’s revival as its human infrastructure. One without the other, he suggested, produces surveillance footage without the response capacity to act on it.
The Mararaba-Keffi corridor connects the Federal Capital Territory to Nasarawa State and carries heavy daily traffic through one of the more congested approach routes into Abuja. Its selection as the pilot site reflects both its strategic visibility and its ongoing reconstruction — conditions that allow surveillance infrastructure to be embedded during active construction rather than retrofitted after completion. Umahi drew a direct parallel to the second Niger Bridge, which he said had been equipped with similar observation and CCTV capacity as a reference model.
The construction itself has produced results that the minister found worth acknowledging publicly.
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JRB Construction Limited, an indigenous Nigerian firm handling approximately 40 kilometers of the road, has completed roughly 21 kilometers of binder course within eight months — progress Umahi described as creditable given that the company mobilized to the site and began work before receiving full payment from the government. That sequencing — contractor absorbs financial risk to prevent project delay — is not standard practice in Nigeria’s federal roads sector, where funding disbursement delays have historically stalled projects for months or years. Umahi called JRB one of the most reliable indigenous contractors in the country, citing both the quality of its equipment and its willingness to operate under fiscal uncertainty.
That commendation arrived alongside a warning directed at contractors less willing to do the same.
The minister said the government would shortly begin a systematic performance review of all contractors handling federal road projects, with no exemption for either indigenous or foreign firms.
Companies that had collected mobilization funds without deploying equipment, commencing work, or demonstrating measurable progress would, he said, no longer be accommodated. “We are going to identify those contractors who are genuine partners in progress and those who simply wait for mobilisation funds before doing any work,” Umahi said. The review is intended to cull the roster of federal road contractors to those the government regards as functional partners rather than rent-seekers on public infrastructure budgets.
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Ministry officials were also placed on notice.
Directors and project supervisors within the Ministry of Works, Umahi said, would be held personally accountable for failures to implement approved directives on federal projects. The instruction reflects a broader pattern of accountability rhetoric from Tinubu’s infrastructure agenda — one that has produced measurable activity on some corridors while others remain years behind schedule.
Whether the accountability mechanisms being described translate into consequences for specific officials has historically been the gap between announcement and outcome in Nigeria’s public works sector.
In the immediate term, Umahi ordered repairs to failed and potholed sections of the existing Mararaba-Keffi pavement to relieve traffic pressure on motorists while the full reconstruction proceeds. He also directed that milled asphalt removed from project sites be recycled and reused rather than disposed of — a materials management instruction that carries both cost and environmental implications for a road network that generates substantial quantities of milled material annually.
The CCTV pilot has no announced implementation date. The nationwide rollout it is designed to model has no announced cost.
What exists, for now, is a presidential directive, a minister who has publicly committed to it, a road that is being reconstructed, and a surveillance architecture that Nigeria’s highways have never had — and that the government is betting this particular stretch of tarmac can prove is deliverable at scale.
