Lagos-Ibadan Expressway Gridlock Is Back in the News, Which Is Like Saying Rain Is Back in the Rainy Season

Here's a fun experiment: go online right now and search "Lagos-Ibadan Expressway gridlock." You'll find headlines from 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025, and now this week, and honestly, you could swap the years around, and nobody would notice. Same road. Same suffering. Different Friday.

This week's version has the classic ingredients. A truck or two "fell" somewhere around the Kara Bridge or the Berger-OPIC axis, it's always somewhere around there, and what should be a normal Tuesday commute turned into people trekking from the old toll gate all the way into Ibadan like they're on a religious pilgrimage nobody signed up for. Truck drivers are sleeping on the highway. Passengers are abandoning buses mid-journey to walk the rest of the way, luggage and all, because at least your legs don't need diesel.

And every single time, somewhere in the official statement, an agency spokesperson finds a way to gently blame the motorists themselves, "impatience," "lane indiscipline," "illegal U-turns", as if Nigerians are out here creating gridlock for sport and not because the actual infrastructure has been "under construction" since what feels like the Jonathan administration.

To be fair to the officials, they're not entirely wrong, someone will always try to dodge the queue by driving one-way against traffic, turning a bad situation into a worse one. But you try telling that to a man who's been sitting in the same spot for six hours with a car full of children asking if we've reached yet.

The task forces get set up. The barriers go up. The contractors promise night-shift work. And a few months later, we're all here again, watching the same photos of stranded buses at Ojodu Berger, wondering if this road will ever actually finish, or if it's just permanently, spiritually, under construction.