Between Lenin Road and Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway — by Louis Odion

The inspiration to pen this came as I began videoing the breathtaking eye-view while seated by the passenger window in a bus gliding down the iconic Lenin Road, nestling the equally legendary Black Sea, this Friday morning (October 16, 2026) in the coastal city of Sochi, Russia.

It is my third day in the tranquil and tranquillising city of Sochi, attending a summit on competition involving antimonopoly authorities from across the world.

Busing from my hotel down Lenin Road for several kilometres this morning easily evokes the memory of a car cruise from Eko Atlantic City junction (on Victoria Island) towards Eleko Beach (a completed section of the Lagos-Calabar Highway currently under construction) back in Nigeria.

It reminds me also of a ride down the pristine beauty of Park Road 22, which straddles the Gulf of Mexico (renamed Gulf of America) in Corpus Christi, Texas, United States of America.

Or riding along the antique splendour of Corniche Road, which borders the Mediterranean Sea in central Beirut, Lebanon. From there, you could almost hear the gurgling sound of the vast, boundless waters a few metres away each time the wind triggers a wave.

That calming, therapeutic feeling.

For me, the parallel is striking. Just as the Lagos-Calabar Road obviously aspires to take full advantage of the gift of the Atlantic Ocean, so does Lenin Road, conceived decades ago by visionary leadership with a sharp eye for aesthetics, also aim to profit from its proximity to the Black Sea.

Now, back to the bus taking us leisurely across the undulating topography of Sochi. Amid the soft cacophony of voices of fellow tourists in the Mercedes bus, you couldn’t help feeling the stark irony. I sniffed around. I deployed search tools. There is no record that anyone had stood against the bulldozers or raised a voice of dissent while Lenin Road was being built several years ago. Or, the silliest of all, that some rats came at night to cart away any of the road furniture, either during or after construction.

Rather, everyone in Sochi had rejoiced at the approaching train of development.

In the case of Lenin Road, the state spirit manifested where it really counts. The builders created a place for humanity in engineering. Because the art of engineering is meant to serve man and not the reverse, the road alignment and coordinates were tweaked here and there along the way to preserve communities that existed before, just as the Black Sea itself predated the human dwellings along the beach line.

But not so with our own emerging Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway. Only in Nigeria will water get stuck between the teeth while you are drinking. Now, not only is the road project increasingly having to endure sustained threats from thieves targeting its entrails, it is also facing much darker vandalism from shallow critics, either wallowing in the squalor of ignorance or playing toxic politics. That is, the relentless onslaught of a tribe of bushmen and women, cavemen and women, often incapable of seeing beyond their narrow provinces, who have continued to quarrel with the very idea of the coastal superhighway from Eko Beach in Lagos to the harbour of Calabar in Cross River State.

Just days ago, they added a comedy. They started gnashing their scanty teeth following reports that the road alignment had been tweaked a little to give some communities in Edo and Delta states a sense of belonging.

Yet, when the same 700-kilometre regional project was started by the Tinubu administration in 2023, they shouted that it was a grand scam. With several sections of the highway now completed in record time, amounting to hundreds of kilometres in total, the orchestra of clowns has changed tune. They are now quarrelling with the addition of communities in Ondo, Edo and Delta states to the road design. But the grumpy tribe conveniently turns a blind eye to the other side of Lagos, where a project of similar magnitude, the Badagry-Sokoto Superhighway, is also taking shape rapidly.

The sophists would seem filled with melancholy whenever they hear good news. They fret, for instance, at reports that travel time has been cut drastically when commuting along the Victoria Island and Ijebu-Ode corridor. They fret like “agbotikuyo” (he who rejoices at the news of death).

Verily, verily, it will take future historians to fully capture the ramifications of such primitive thinking. Let us be charitable enough not to name the appropriate underlying affliction: idiocy.