(OPINION) N30b-renovated Kwara Hotel: It was never about the renovation; it’s about the opportunity cost

By Abdulyekeen, Mohd Bashir

I have noticed how some data boys of Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq have been sharing pictures of the renovated Kwara Hotel, and attempting to create the impression that members of the opposition PDP were against the renovation of this legacy facility. That framing is dishonest, and it deserves a response. As patriotic Kwarans, we hold that heritage and legacy projects should not be neglected like how Abdulrahman has abandoned the once-thriving Harmony Advanced Diagnostics Centre to rot.

For us as Kwarans and members of the opposition, the concern has never been about renovating Kwara Hotel. Our concern has always been the exorbitant cost of the project and whether such expenditure represents the best use of the state’s scarce resources.

At the inception of the project in 2023, the Kwara State Government announced that the renovation would cost N17.8 billion. By December 2025, reports indicated that N27.7 billion had already been spent, and we have no clear figure of the additional billions that have gone into it since then. An initial N17.8 billion price tag was already outrageous and difficult to justify; the additional billions the project has since swallowed over the last three years make it even harder to defend. If Governor Abdulrahman is now spending upward of N30 billion to renovate an existing facility, how much would he use to deliver a brand-new hotel of comparable scale with Kwara Hotel? Maybe 300 billion or even more.

For perspective, consider the Premier Hotel in Ibadan, whose remodeling began a few months before work started on Kwara Hotel. The facility is managed by the Odu’a Investment Company, which is owned by the six South-West states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, and Ondo. Unlike the Kwara Hotel project, which is essentially a renovation of existing structures, Premier Hotel has been transformed from an 87-room facility to a 154-room ultra-modern five-star hotel, nearly doubling its original capacity and with additional new amenities. That project was estimated to cost about N20 billion, as revealed by the Chairman of Odu’a Investment Company in 2025. It has since been completed, was inaugurated in June, and is expected to begin commercial operations before the end of the year.

Set that against Kwara Hotel, whose renovation cost has climbed from an initial N17.8 billion to N30 billion, with the final figure likely to rise further. In the interest of transparency and accountability, we challenge Governor Abdulrahman to disclose to the Kwara public exactly how much the Kwara Hotel renovation has cost to date, and what exactly accounts for the cost? How does a project that was initially estimated at N17.8 billion end up approaching N30 billion, particularly when another major hotel project in a neighbouring state, involving substantial expansion and the addition of new facilities, cost N20 billion?

Looking purely at the economics side of the project, how reasonable and economically wise is it for a state like Kwara, one still grappling with a significant infrastructure deficit, to spend N30 billion to renovate a single hotel? How many years will it take the state to recover that investment? 10 years? 20 years? And will the facility not require another facelift within the next decade?

For those who do not know, the management of Odu’a Investment Company had to seek investment to renovate the Premier Hotel because of the huge funds involved. “Odu’a does not have the funds to turn Premier Hotel around, hence the need to engage a critical partner to bring technical expertise and financial resources needed. The asset will belong to both the partner and Odu’a. In taking this decision, what we did was to understand our limitations and bring in a joint partner, which has the strength to cover our weaknesses. This is a process supported by globally renowned KPMG. This makes it go through a transparent valuation system, which places everything open. We cleared all the impediments that could prevent the joint venture to take place,” the ex-GMD of Odu’a Investment Company, Mr. Adewale Raji told The Nation newspaper in 2023.

If an investment company owned by six states could not singlehandedly fund the renovation of Premier Hotel and had to seek investment to rejuvenate the facility, why didn’t the Kwara State government seek out joint-partnership to renovate the Kwara Hotel? It shows how financially reckless Governor Abdulrahman is. This form of partnership with an established player in the global hospitality industry would have saved the state money and benefited the hotel in terms of management and sustainability.

Our concern, then, has never been about renovating Kwara Hotel. It is about the staggering cost of the project and its opportunity cost. As we were taught in elementary economics, opportunity cost is the value of the next-best alternative given up when a choice is made because resources like time and money are limited. So we ask Governor Abdulrahman and some of his “ignorant” supporters: What is the opportunity cost of renovating Kwara Hotel at a price tag exceeding N30 billion?

What critical, high-impact developmental projects could have been executed with this amount but were traded off for a hotel renovation? Is it truly in the best interest of Kwarans for their government to spend more than N30 billion refurbishing a hotel while several critical roads across the state remain in disrepair, while schools sit in dilapidated condition, while the health system struggles, and while the state still lacks basic, critical medical equipment such as CT scan and MRI machines, forcing Kwarans to travel elsewhere for these services, often at great risk to their lives?

These are our concerns. Not the renovation itself, but everything it has cost us, and everything it could have paid for instead.

Abdulyekeen, Mohd Bashir, a Kwara-born political analyst and PDP member, writes from Ilorin.