Oshiomhole’s Call for Prudence in Nigeria’s Road Revolution

Senator Adams Oshiomhole has built a reputation across decades for saying, loudly and on record, what many of his colleagues choose to leave unsaid. His latest intervention is no different and, this time, concerns something every Nigerian who has driven between cities understands immediately.

Oshiomhole’s concern, expressed on the Senate floor, was that the Federal Minister of Works was seeking approval for 20 new road projects while existing highways across the country remained in dangerous disrepair. Oshiomhole argued that the minister needed to be guided, that the logic of construction without maintenance was the wrong sequence.

Roads in Nigeria carry more than physical things; they determine whether a farmer’s produce reaches a market before it spoils, whether a sick person reaches a hospital in time, whether a child travels safely to school each morning. When those roads collapse and stay collapsed while fresh ones are announced elsewhere, the grievance is not abstract.

The senator representing Edo North has a record that gives his words on public accountability a particular texture. During a Senate committee probe into the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, he declared the NNPCL a “house of thieves” after an unaccounted sum of N210 trillion surfaced. When Senate leadership distanced itself from that wording, he held his position publicly.

He went on live television to allege that signatures were forged on a committee report used to suspend Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. He challenged his own colleagues in mid-2026 for attempting to amend Senate Standing Rules in ways he called “immoral.” He also stated publicly that the APC’s pre-2023 naira redesign policy had deliberately hurt ordinary Nigerians, a frank admission that few inside the ruling party were willing to make.

Critics have lots of bones to pick with the good senator. What is harder to dispute is that on roads, as on oil money and forged signatures, Oshiomhole tends to say the quiet part out loud. In a legislature where silence is often the safer political choice, that impulse alone is worth noting.