Written by By Alex Preston for
BBC News
When one of Nigeria's long line of military rulers, General Olusegun Obasanjo, seized the land on which Abuja was to be built in the late 1970s, he could hardly have imagined that the city would remain unfinished 35 years on.Abuja has a makeshift, haphazard feel to it: A place of bureaucrats and building sites, its streets eerily empty after the buzz of Lagos or the enterprising bustle of Kano.
It is one of the most expensive cities in Africa, and one of the most charmless.
The skyline is dominated by the space-rocket spires of the National Christian Centre and the golden dome of the National Mosque, facing each other pugnaciously across a busy highway at the city's centre.
Its other striking landmark is the vast construction site of the Millennium Tower, which, if it is ever completed, will be Nigeria's tallest building.
The skyscraper was intended to mark Abuja's 20th birthday in 2011. Now delayed until who-knows-when, hugely over-budget and the subject of numerous official investigations.
The National Mosque stands at the side of a busy road in the city centre
All the people of Abuja have to show for the billions invested in the project are two stunted fingers of scaffold-clad concrete.
I had been in Abuja for three days - about two-and-a-half too many - when my friend, Atta, a sociologist, picked me up from my hotel.
We drove out towards Aso Rock, the monolith looming over the presidential palace.
On either side of the road there are complexes of bulky, imposing mansions, most of them unfinished.
Some had empty swimming pools; others had mock-Tudor timbering, but were windowless and often roofless.
Atta told me that 65% of the houses in these developments were uninhabited, put up only to launder Abuja's dirty money.
Like the Millennium Tower, these grandiose schemes are ruins before they are completed, bleak monuments to a city built by kleptocratic politicians on stolen land.
We pulled off the Murtala Mohammed Highway at Mpape Junction, and immediately the road deteriorated.
There are many uninhabited mansions near Aso Rock
"I am going to show you the real Abuja," Atta told me, as his car struggled up a deeply-rutted dirt track.
A warm wind from the desert to the north - the Harmattan - whipped clouds of red dust around us as we climbed through rocky scrubland into the hills.
The presidency has ordered all government functionaries to desist from addressing President Goodluck Jonathan as the “Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” at non-military functions.
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