On Friday, 10 April 2026, President Bola Tinubu landed in Yenagoa dressed not in his usual agbada but in "a fitting, colourful Ijaw 'Don', complemented by a matching black fedora hat," looking, by one account, "every inch like Ijaw or Niger Delta royalty." His first stop was a 630-metre bridge across the River Nun at Angiama, newly completed, linking the state capital to Oporoma. He told the crowd Bayelsa's governor, Douye Diri, had "done a great job" and called him "a very progressive governor."
Diri is PDP. Tinubu is APC. The bridge itself was flagged off in February 2022 by a different APC administration again: then-Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, under President Buhari. The construction itself was executed by Bayelsa's own works ministry and built by CCECC. We found no documentation of a direct federal financial contribution to the build, only the two ceremonies, four years and two presidencies apart.
While checking the sourcing behind NGScorecard's Capital Projects tracker, this turned up as a pattern, not a one-off: the person photographed at a project's opening is very often not the one who approved it, financed it, or was in office when it started.
1. The flag-off and the finish
Two Rivers governors, one road. On 17 July 2023, days before leaving office, Nyesom Wike flagged off construction of the Port Harcourt Ring Road (51.15km, ₦195.3bn), contracted to Julius Berger. His successor, Siminalayi Fubara, inherited it. By March 2024, Fubara was personally inspecting the site and telling reporters he intended to meet the original 36-month target, meaning that if the road opens on schedule, it opens on Wike's promise and Fubara's watch.
Delta did the same thing with less public drama. Governor Ifeanyi Okowa's administration approved construction of the Kwale-Beneku Bridge in December 2018. It fell to his successor, Sheriff Oborevwori, to commission the finished 360-metre bridge in May 2025, on his own second anniversary in office: a governor's signature achievement, on a project he did not originate.
In both cases the office changes hands and delivery becomes a joint production that neither man signed up to share.
2. The state builds, the federal government inaugurates
Return to the Angiama-Oporoma bridge: the whole project was executed by Bayelsa's own works ministry and built by CCECC. What the federal government supplied, on the documentary record, was a flag-off (Osinbajo, 2022) and a commissioning (Tinubu, 2026): two ceremonies, two presidencies, and no documented financial role in the build itself. (Bayelsa's capital budget, like most Nigerian states', itself runs substantially on federal transfers, specifically FAAC and 13% derivation, so the money is rarely as cleanly "state" or "federal" as a ribbon-cutting implies. What is clear is who executed the build and who showed up to open it.)
Neither side went home empty-handed. Diri told the crowd the bridge was "a project promised by the federal government more than six decades ago" that his "modest effort" had finally delivered, crediting the old federal promise while claiming his own administration's follow-through. Tinubu, for his part, credited Diri personally, and thanked him for "being a very progressive governor." Both men left the ceremony with a share of the same achievement.
3. The rivalry, and the road that stalled alongside it
Wike and Fubara's story did not stay collegial. Their public relationship broke down through 2024, and on 18 March 2025 President Tinubu declared a state of emergency in Rivers State, suspending Fubara, his deputy and the entire House of Assembly for six months and installing a sole administrator, Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas (retd). Wike, by then a federal minister in Tinubu's government, backed the move publicly at an April 2025 media parley in Abuja. "As a politician, I am not happy with the declaration of Emergency Rule in Rivers state. I wanted the outright removal of the governor. But for the interest of the state, the president did the right thing to prevent anarchy in the state," he told journalists, of the sole administrator's appointment: "Mr president came in and saved the situation, saved Rivers people from that calamity and anarchy" (Channels Television, 18 April 2025). Tinubu announced the emergency's end on 17 September 2025, effective from midnight; Fubara and the suspended officials resumed office the next day.
The Ring Road did not simply keep moving through all of this. Julius Berger's work stalled on funding gaps at some point in this period, and the contractor had to be remobilised to the site in October 2025 (weeks after Fubara's reinstatement), following fresh talks with the state government. The site engineer put the project's original mid-2026 completion date at December 2026 instead. The political emergency and the road's funding trouble ran on overlapping timelines; the reporting we found does not establish that one caused the other, only that both were true of Rivers State at once.
What this means
None of this makes the roads or bridges fake. Every project named here is real, and independently verified in our own dataset. What it complicates is the idea of a single owner for a delivery.
That is also why we track it the way we do. A project can belong in more than one government's history, but each government's specific contribution (approval, funding, contract award, construction, commissioning) is documented on its own terms, not collapsed into one identical achievement for everyone who touched it. Okowa's Delta scorecard lists the Kwale-Beneku Bridge as approved under him in December 2018, with the completion date he himself promised, February 2022, explicitly noted as missed; it is not credited to him as delivered. Oborevwori's scorecard lists the same bridge as the one he commissioned, finished, in May 2025. A reader comparing the two sees the same bridge with two different roles attached, not two governors each claiming the same win.
Not every later administration's role is this thin: a successor can genuinely fund, approve or finish real work of their own, and that belongs in their record too. But for the case that opened this piece, the honest caption for the next president in unfamiliar royal dress cutting a ribbon is not "he built this." It is "he was there when it opened."