By Mercy IyeneAbasi Etim
No, you cannot literally eat concrete, but without it, you will starve.
Recently, David Mark, a man who spent at least 16 years as a senator, served as Senate President for eight years, and now leads a faction of the ADC, quipped after acknowledging President Bola Tinubu’s undeniable infrastructure reforms: “Na road we go chop?”
The remark attempts to mock the administration’s aggressive, capital-intensive infrastructure drive by framing it as disconnected from the immediate, everyday needs of the people.
While this rhetoric is politically convenient for the opposition during periods of inflation, it fundamentally misunderstands how economies function. Frankly, anyone who parrots this line or postures that we must tackle “stomach infrastructure” before touching anything else displays a glaring ignorance of nation-building.
And it is a indeed a profound shame that an individual who steered the nation’s legislature for nearly a decade would champion such a backward economic philosophy.
Infrastructure is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity for life and sustainable economic growth. It is the primary conveyor belt that brings food to the table, and it is one of the most tangible ways the downtrodden feel the direct impact of governance.
If you allow yourself to think even a little, you will realise that investing in infrastructure—colloquially dismissed here as “eating roads”—is exactly how a nation feeds its people, creates jobs, and lowers the cost of living over the long term.
To argue that road construction offers no immediate relief to the poor means you have never visited civil engineering sites.
These large-scale projects are massive, localized economic lifelines. They instantly absorb an army of local laborers, site engineers, surveyors, and security personnel.
Hundreds of local youths and fresh graduates gain hands-on technical experience. It allows them to apply classroom theory to heavy machinery and modern concrete technology, permanently elevating their career marketability.
Furthermore, every major construction site births an immediate micro-economy. The local mama put, the akara and kuli-kuli sellers, the cement supplier, the iron rod merchant, and the nearby vulcanizer all experience an instant surge in daily patronage and disposable income.
For our SMEs and industries, bad roads are a punitive, undeclared tax. When an Aba fashion designer or a Lagos tech distributor cannot safely deliver packages nationwide, business suffocates. Manufacturing gridlocks without timely raw materials, forcing companies to bleed capital on mechanics and spare parts instead of funding expansion and salary increments.
No serious investor pours capital into a nation locked in gridlock. Landmark projects like the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway and the Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway open entirely new economic corridors, instantly transforming isolated land into industrial hubs.
By leveraging private-sector tax-credit schemes, the Tinubu administration is systematically plugging our decades-long infrastructure deficit and choking the root drivers of inflation—all without draining scarce liquid revenue.
The most direct rebuttal to David Mark’s query lies in the agricultural sector. Nigeria’s primary food crisis is not a failure of production, but a failure of transportation.
Due to deplorable rural roads, a staggering percentage of harvested perishable crops rot before ever reaching urban centers. Smooth, modern roads act as an active preservation mechanism by slashing transit times.
When a truck driver spends days navigating deep craters between Benue and Lagos, the exorbitant costs of diesel, vehicle maintenance, and transit delays are passed directly to the consumer at the market stall. Reliable transport networks break the monopoly of exploitative middlemen. Farmers gain the independence to transport and sell their produce directly to major markets, dramatically increasing their household income.
To dismiss infrastructure because you cannot chew it is standard populist foolishness. You cannot eat the trunk of a fruit tree either, but without it, the branches can never hold the harvest you need to survive.
By the way, it is highly instructional that David Mark spent eight uninterrupted years flying over the shattered Akwanga–Makurdi road in a helicopter because it was too dangerous for the poor people to ply. Yet today, under a Tinubu administration that fixed that exact corridor in under three years, the former Senate President can finally drive home to his village.
President Tinubu’s focus on concrete infrastructure is the long-awaited structural cure for an economy nearly ruined by decades of superficial fixes. The immediate pain of macroeconomic reforms is real, but playing politics with our long-term survival is reckless. If you genuinely want the poor to continue to eat, you must build the roads today.
Something that David would know if, as a Senator, he made his Mark.