THE HITECH MYSTERY: WHAT EXACTLY IS SO GOOD ABOUT CHAGOURY’S COMPANY?
By Kio Amachree
Letters from Stockholm — Worldview International
THE QUESTION NOBODY IN ABUJA WILL ANSWER
Every serious country asks a simple question before handing a contractor billions of dollars of public money: what has this company built, and why is it better than the alternatives? Nigeria under Bola Tinubu has stopped asking. Instead, one conglomerate — Hitech Construction, the flagship of the Chagoury Group — has become the default recipient of the largest infrastructure awards in the nation’s history, and no one in government can explain, in engineering terms, why.
Consider the record. The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, an estimated 11 to 13 billion dollar project, was awarded to Hitech in 2024 without a public tender. In early 2025, ITB Construction Nigeria, another Chagoury Group subsidiary, was selected for further work. A 700 million dollar Lagos ports renovation went to a Chagoury firm despite questions about its experience in port development, with reports indicating Tinubu had the final say in the award. And now, the Federal Executive Council has approved 1.7 trillion naira — about 1.24 billion dollars — for the Sokoto-Badagry Super Highway, handed again to Hitech, weeks after Tinubu conferred on Gilbert Chagoury Nigeria’s second-highest national honour.
Critics now point out that Chagoury’s corporate empire has systematically cornered virtually all the most lucrative mega-infrastructure contracts under the Tinubu dispensation, including the roughly 15 trillion naira Lagos-Calabar project.
That is not a procurement system. That is a pipeline.
THE MAN BEHIND THE MACHINE
Who is the beneficiary of this extraordinary generosity with Nigerian public funds? The documented history answers for itself.
Gilbert Chagoury was convicted in 2000 of money laundering and aiding a criminal organisation. In the 1990s he set up accounts with a Geneva bank for the Abacha family, enabling them to benefit from illegal transfers of over 120 million dollars from the Central Bank of Nigeria, and he later paid a 600,000 fine in Geneva and refunded 66 million dollars to the Nigerian government. He also separately pleaded guilty in a US federal court to conspiracy to launder money linked to Abacha-looted funds.
The story does not end with Abacha. In 2010, FBI agents pulled Chagoury off a private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey; he had been placed on the US terrorism no-fly list, and a 2013 FBI intelligence report cited suspicions he had sent funds to a Lebanese politician who transferred money to Hezbollah — allegations he contested, eventually securing a travel waiver. In 2021, US authorities reached a civil forfeiture settlement of 1.8 million dollars with Chagoury following claims he had made illegal foreign political donations to US candidates through straw donors across three election cycles, and he later entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Justice Department. One of those illicit donations — 30,000 dollars — led to the criminal conviction of a sitting US Congressman, Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, for lying to the FBI about it.
This is the résumé that the Tinubu government has decided qualifies a man’s companies for the largest no-bid awards in Nigerian history.
AND THE FAMILY CONNECTION
The relationship is not merely historical friendship. OCCRP discovered that President Tinubu’s son, Oluwaseyi Tinubu, was a majority shareholder in an offshore company alongside Ronald Chagoury Jr, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. The younger generations of both families were in business together — offshore — while the older generation now sits on opposite sides of a contract-awarding table. The government itself listed Chagoury as Tinubu’s “confidante” when he travelled as part of Nigeria’s delegation to COP28 in Dubai.
The public works minister, David Umahi, admitted the tender process was bypassed, citing Hitech’s expertise in coastal projects. He also initially claimed the contractor would fund the project entirely on its own — but the government subsequently allocated 3.6 billion dollars of public funds to the company for construction. Every justification offered has dissolved on contact with the facts.
NOW COMPARE JULIUS BERGER
Set this against the company that actually built modern Nigeria. Julius Berger’s Nigerian story began in the mid-1960s, with the landmark Eko Bridge project commencing in August 1965. For six decades the German-engineered firm delivered the Third Mainland Bridge, the city of Abuja itself, refineries, dams and expressways. The company today points to a track record of project execution in Nigeria since 1965, with over 10,000 direct workers and more than 150,000 indirect workers.
Julius Berger is not a saint. The Senate authorised the arrest of its Managing Director in December 2024 over abandoned projects and the escalation of the Odukpani-Itu-Ikot Ekpene Road contract from 54 billion to 195 billion naira — and it deserves scrutiny for every naira of that. But observe the difference in treatment. When Julius Berger held out on pricing amid Nigeria’s currency collapse, the Works Minister gave the company seven days to accept a revised 740.8 billion naira contract or face termination, declaring that the Federal Government cannot be held to ransom by contractors’ desire for unrealistic pricing. The ministry then terminated the Abuja-Kaduna section outright, and the contract was withdrawn from Julius Berger and awarded to Inforquest Nigerian Limited in January 2025.
So the sixty-year veteran gets ultimatums, arrest warrants and terminations. The confidante’s company gets no-bid awards, sovereign financing and national honours. When Julius Berger asks for price variation in a collapsing naira, it is “holding the government to ransom.” When Hitech’s coastal highway needs money, the Finance Ministry closes 1.26 billion dollars in financing for a single phase and section, fully underwritten by First Abu Dhabi Bank at 262 million dollars and Afreximbank at 500 million, and the President applauds.
To be fair to the engineers on the ground: lenders have commended Hitech’s rapid site progress and early opening of key road sections. Hitech can build — its work on Eko Atlantic’s sea wall proves the firm has real coastal capability. But competence is not the question. Julius Berger is competent. China’s CCECC is competent. The question is why one politically connected family firm receives everything without competition, at prices no rival was ever allowed to challenge.
WHO BENEFITS?
Follow the structure of the arrangement. A president’s longtime financial ally receives contracts worth, cumulatively, well over 15 billion dollars without competitive bidding. The president’s son held offshore shares alongside the ally’s son. The state guarantees and arranges the financing. The ally provides, in return, what allies of that kind provide: Chagoury reportedly supplied the private jet used by Tinubu’s delegation on the 2024 state visit to South Africa, and though unelected and outside government, he is widely regarded as Tinubu’s right-hand man — a quiet fixer with money, experience and international reach.
Who does not benefit? Abuja’s public schools sit shuttered, workers go unpaid, and land reserved for education and community use is quietly reallocated to insiders, in a pattern of governance that prioritises private enrichment over public welfare. The Nigerian taxpayer pays for a highway priced by nobody but the man building it. The Nigerian engineering profession watches contracts of national destiny bypass every local firm that might have grown into a Julius Berger of its own. And Nigerian democracy absorbs one more lesson that proximity to power, not merit, is the only procurement criterion that matters.
Sixty years ago, my father’s generation built institutions on the principle that public office is a public trust. The Chagoury arrangement is the negation of that principle — a state where the treasury and the friendship circle have become indistinguishable. The 2027 electorate should remember that roads can be rebuilt. Institutions, once sold, are far harder to recover.
Kio Amachree writes from Stockholm. Worldview International — diaspora accountability for Nigerian governance.
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