Construction on the 125-kilometre Benin-Asaba Expressway is set for a significant acceleration from October, once the rainy season subsides, according to the company handling the project.
The Benin-Asaba Expressway Concession Company Limited (BAECC) says it is mobilising extra personnel, equipment and materials ahead of the dry-season construction window.
The planned push will focus on finishing drainage work, laying pavement, installing asphalt binder and wearing courses, building culverts, and completing other permanent works across several sections of the corridor.
BAECC Chief Executive Officer Samuel Daramola said the coming months would bring visible progress after a rain-hampered stretch of the project. “As the rains recede, Nigerians will see a significant acceleration of permanent works,” he said in a statement.
Rain Has Slowed, Not Stopped, the Work
The company says persistent rainfall has been the biggest obstacle in the current phase, with waterlogged ground disrupting earthworks, pavement stabilisation and asphalt operations.
Daramola was careful to frame this as a matter of pace rather than a halt: crews have kept working on other engineering tasks and on temporary fixes even when weather has ruled out permanent paving.
Despite the setbacks, BAECC points to progress already made across the corridor, earthworks and subgrade preparation, drainage and culvert construction, asphalt and binder-course work, and expansion of the carriageway.
The company has also brought in asphalt plants, concrete batching and moulding plants, Wet Mix Macadam plants, paving machinery and other heavy equipment, backing it with what it describes as billions of naira in private-sector investment.
Much of that groundwork, Daramola noted, isn’t obvious to people driving the route day to day, but it has to happen before finished asphalt appears.
The project is running on a 36-month construction schedule and includes reconstruction, expansion, drainage systems, culverts and traffic management alongside the paving work itself.
Balancing Construction With a Road That Can’t Close
Part of the difficulty, according to BAECC, is rebuilding a heavily used highway without shutting it down. Thousands of private cars, buses, commercial vehicles and trucks rely on the corridor daily, which has occasionally pushed the company to reopen newly treated sections sooner than its engineers would prefer, purely to relieve congestion.
Daramola acknowledged the trade-off directly, saying the company is essentially building and managing traffic simultaneously, and that motorist needs sometimes override the ideal construction timeline. Palliative measures, temporary fixes on the roughest stretches, will continue in the meantime to ease the burden on road users while the permanent work proceeds.
A Call for Patience, With a Timeline Attached
BAECC used the update to ask motorists and communities along the route to judge the project by its eventual outcome rather than its current state, pledging continued cooperation with the Federal Government and other stakeholders who share the goal of a safe, durable highway.
The company’s message: the disruption on the ground now isn’t the finished product, and the real test of the project will come once construction wraps up.
