The Third Mainland Bridge

It starts at Oworonshoki and ends on the island, and for most of the people on it that is the entire fact of the matter. A route. Somewhere you sit.

The crossing runs for 11.8 kilometres, carrying eight lanes across 33.1 metres. For six years it was the longest bridge in Africa. It was commissioned by the Ministry of Works and Transport and Lagos State Government.

None of that is secret. It is written down, it is on the signs, it is in the engineering record. It simply isn't looked at.

The road you drive on is not resting on the lagoon. It is resting on columns, and those columns are resting on piles driven down through soft mud until they reach something that will hold.

The record describes two slender concrete shafts for every pier, carrying spans of 45 metres, and some up to 60. That is a lot of separate holes in the bottom of a lagoon.

That is the whole engineering problem of building anything large in Lagos. Not the distance. The ground.

We have a figure for how deep those piles go. We are not printing it, because how deep the piles go is not something we can currently attribute to anyone.

A bridge is an answer to a question somebody asked at a particular moment. The question here was what to do about a city that had outgrown two crossings — the Eko and the Carter — in a decade when traffic was rising faster than anything could be built. The film at the top of this page is the traffic that caused this bridge: cars, bicycles and people, all using the same road at once.

It was built in two phases, fourteen years apart. Phase one reached the interchange at Ebute Metta and stopped. Phase two, which carried it north to Oworonshoki, did not begin for another eight years.

Nothing in the engineering record explains the gap. That silence is the most interesting thing on the page.

The bridge did what it was built to do, and then it did something else. Traffic moved. Then more people came, and the city that arrived to use it grew until the crossing was full again.

You can see Makoko from the deck. Most people do, for about four seconds, at speed. It is one of the most photographed settlements in West Africa and one of the least counted: no reliable population figure exists. The absence of a number is worth saying out loud, because every figure you have ever read about it was invented by somebody.

There is now a fourth crossing planned, on the same reasoning as this one.

This is the station the reporting has to earn. Not the engineering — the choosing. Who signed, who benefited, who was living on the route, and who found out when the machines arrived.

We know the client was commissioned by the Ministry of Works and Transport and Lagos State Government. We do not yet know who was in the room.