Mohammad Hovi 🇳🇬

We Complain, Yet We Destroy: A Hard Look at Nigeria’s Railway Progress | Article written by Etisang P. J Peteretisang29@gmail.om Let’s be honest with ourselves for once, not every problem we see in this country comes from the government. Some of it comes from us. You hear about derailments and disruptions on the railway, and the first instinct is to blame poor planning or incompetence. But how often do we talk about vandalized tracks, stolen rail clips, tampered signalling systems, or even people encroaching on rail corridors like it is nobody’s business? These things may look small on the surface, but they are enough to destabilize an entire system. The truth is simple: infrastructure cannot survive where there is no sense of collective ownership. You can deploy all the surveillance you want, but no government can realistically monitor over a thousand kilometres of railway lines cutting across communities, farmlands, and open terrain. At some point, it comes down to whether the people themselves see these assets as theirs to protect or just another “government thing” to exploit. And until we fix that mindset, we will keep slowing down our own progress while complaining about it. Now, in the middle of all this, someone still has the responsibility to make things work. That is where the Minister of Transportation Sa’idu Ahmed Alkali comes into the picture. Not as someone who started these railway projects, but as someone who inherited them at a time when momentum was, at best, sluggish. The Kaduna–Kano standard gauge line, a project valued at roughly $1.9 billion, was sitting at about 15 percent completion. The Kano–Maradi rail corridor, estimated at over $2 billion, was barely moving at around 5 percent. At that stage, these were not projects that inspired confidence; they were more like long conversations Nigerians had learned to ignore. But today, the story has changed in a way that is difficult to dismiss. The Kaduna–Kano line has moved beyond the halfway mark, now standing at over 50 percent completion, while Kano–Maradi has climbed to around 60 percent. These are not just numbers thrown around in briefings; they represent visible work, tracks being laid, stations taking shape, and a sense that these projects are finally leaving the realm of promises. What is even more interesting is that much of this progress has not come with unnecessary noise. Behind the scenes, there has been deliberate effort to secure financing and keep these multi-billion-dollar projects alive. Support from institutions like the China Development Bank, alongside federal funding commitments, has helped restore momentum. These are the kinds of decisions that rarely make headlines, but without them, projects of this scale simply stall. And when you look beyond the construction figures, the real significance becomes clearer. The Kaduna–Kano rail line is a major economic artery, linking the commercial strength of Kano to Abuja and the wider national rail network. Kano–Maradi goes even further, opening up a strategic corridor into Niger Republic and positioning Nigeria within a broader West African trade framework. These are not just transport projects; they are long-term economic investments capable of moving millions of tonnes of goods and thousands of passengers daily when fully operational. There is also a noticeable shift in thinking, an attempt to avoid the usual cycle where government builds and then struggles to sustain. The push towards Public-Private Partnerships signals a move to bring in efficiency and long-term funding stability. The gradual decentralization of railway development, allowing states to play a role, also suggests that the future of rail in Nigeria may not rest on federal shoulders alone. When combined with efforts to improve operations and build technical capacity, it points to a system that could actually endure.