Azuri Towers was commissioned in December 2021. Nigeria's tallest residential tower — at 146 metres — delivered on schedule. An office tower delivering 27,000 sqm of Grade-A commercial space ready for beneficial occupancy. The light-up ceremony marked the completion of the most significant building project in Eko Atlantic City's first decade.
What the press releases did not say — because press releases never do — is what that delivery actually required. This article is an account of the decisions, the disciplines, and the lessons learned on a programme that ran through COVID-19, a global supply chain crisis, currency volatility, and the ordinary chaos of complex construction.
It is written because the decisions that made Azuri Towers work are the same decisions that will make or break the next generation of EAC projects. And because the people most likely to make those projects are reading this.
The pre-COVID groundwork that made pandemic-era delivery possible
When COVID-19 arrived in Nigeria in March 2020, Azuri Towers had already been under construction for three years. The structural frame was substantially advanced. The critical procurement decisions — steel, façade systems, MEP plant — had already been made, and most of the long-lead items were in transit or on site.
This was not accident. The programme had been planned from the outset on the assumption that long-lead procurement needed to be completed significantly ahead of the construction programme's dependency on it. The specification of imported materials was locked down early, purchase orders were placed against firm delivery commitments, and factory inspections were conducted before the COVID lockdowns made international travel impossible.
The lesson: in a complex project with significant imported content, the procurement programme is not a consequence of the construction programme. It is a parallel programme that must be managed with the same rigour. The developers who navigated COVID without programme collapse were those who had already done the procurement work. Those who hadn't, lost twelve to eighteen months.
How the financial model was stress-tested
The Azuri Towers financial model was not built on base-case assumptions. It was built on the assumption that something would go wrong — and the question was whether the capital structure would survive it.
Specifically, the model was stress-tested against: a twelve-month construction extension, a 20% reduction in projected sales velocity during the construction period, a 15% increase in construction cost against the agreed contract sum, and a significant naira depreciation against the currencies in which imported materials were priced. These were not extreme scenarios. They were realistic conservative outcomes that the team had agreed were within the range of possibility.
The equity investors were presented with the stress-tested model, not just the base case. The construction finance facility was sized to accommodate the stress scenarios, not the optimistic ones. When COVID arrived and all four stress conditions were triggered simultaneously, the programme did not stop — because the capital structure had been built to withstand exactly that.
The lesson: the financial model you show investors and the financial model you actually manage to are different things only if the first one is dishonest. The discipline of stress-testing, and of sizing the capital structure against the stress scenarios rather than the base case, is what separates programmes that survive shocks from programmes that require emergency renegotiation when they occur.
The procurement decisions that proved correct under pressure
Three procurement decisions on Azuri Towers were prescient in ways that were not fully appreciated at the time they were made.
Steel: The structural steel was procured from a supplier with factory capacity in multiple countries. When one country's production was disrupted by COVID lockdowns, the order was fulfilled from an alternative facility. A developer who had sourced from a single-factory supplier would have faced a structural hold.
The façade system: The curtain wall and glazing system — the element that gives Azuri Towers its distinctive appearance and which is visible in the aerial photography of the completed building — was specified early and procured against a fixed-price contract that included a supply certainty clause. The supplier absorbed a portion of the material cost increase that occurred during COVID. The developer absorbed the remainder. But the programme was not delayed.
The MEP contractor: The mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractor was appointed at an early stage and involved in the design development process. This is not how most Nigerian construction projects are run. It is how the projects that are delivered without major MEP coordination problems are run. The cost of early MEP contractor involvement is negligible relative to the cost of resolving MEP coordination failures during construction.
What we would do differently
Azuri Towers was delivered. That is a fact. But delivery is not the same as flawless execution, and honesty requires acknowledging the things that would be done differently with the benefit of hindsight.
The off-plan sales programme started later than optimal. The pricing strategy was conservative relative to what the market would have absorbed. The marketing approach was conventional when the product deserved something more distinctive. None of these issues prevented delivery — but they affected the return profile, and they are correctable on the next programme with better information and more deliberate planning.
The construction management approach was stronger on technical delivery than on stakeholder communication. Investors received accurate information — but less frequently and less proactively than they deserved. A more structured investor reporting cadence, established at the beginning of the programme rather than retrofitted mid-construction, would have built more confidence during the COVID period when progress was genuinely difficult to demonstrate photographically.
What the completion metrics proved
Azuri Towers proved three things that were genuinely uncertain before it was completed.
First, that tower construction at the scale and specification required for EAC's premium positioning is achievable in Nigeria, on schedule, and to international quality standards. Before Azuri Towers was completed, this was an open question. It is no longer open.
Second, that the EAC market will absorb Grade-A office space at the rental levels required to justify the cost of delivery. The Azuri Office Tower, commissioned at the end of 2021, achieved occupancy at rates that validated the investment thesis.
Third, that the development risk in EAC — which was substantial in the early phases of the city's construction — has reduced materially as the infrastructure has matured and as proof-of-concept developments have been delivered. The developer who builds the second tower in EAC faces a fundamentally different risk profile from the developer who built the first one.
The most valuable thing about having delivered Azuri Towers is not the building itself. It is the knowledge of what actually happened — which decisions mattered, which risks materialised, which assumptions were wrong — and the ability to apply that knowledge to the next project before it is designed, rather than after it is built.
That knowledge is what Makaya Consult brings to every advisory mandate. If you are planning a development in EAC, the experience described in this article is available to you — before your programme begins, not after your problems emerge.