When billion-dollar infrastructure projects stall across Africa, fingers typically point at contractors, funding gaps, or government bureaucracy.

For Ghana and much of the continent, these failures are not simply engineering setbacks — they represent billions of dollars lost, communities left behind, and development ambitions stalled.

Legal expert Joanna Ayibam believes the real problem starts much earlier and she has research to prove it.

Ayibam, a legal practitioner and researcher specializing in corporate governance and public procurement, with a focus on infrastructure governance, has made it her work to understand why major government projects — roads, dams, railways, airports — fail not on the construction site, but in the legal planning room.

Her 2024 paper, "Legal Structuring of Public Infrastructure Projects: A Practical Guide for Government Lawyers and Project Teams," published in Jurnal Ilmu Sosiologi Dialektika Kontemporer, examines a widespread and costly problem.

A Pattern She Could Not Ignore

Ayibam's research examines high-profile infrastructure failures across multiple continents. Nigeria's Mambilla Hydropower Project, proposed in 1972, and designed to generate 4.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually remains stalled over five decades later, paralyzed by contract disputes and arbitration worth over $6 billion.

Uganda's Karuma Hydropower Project faced procurement-related legal battles that significantly delayed construction. Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway was slowed by compensation disputes that drove up government spending.

Similar challenges have also been observed in Ghana, where infrastructure delivery has been affected by procurement inefficiencies, land acquisition issues, and regulatory coordination constraints.

Even wealthy nations, she notes, are not spared. The UK's HS2 railway and the United States' Dallas Floodway project have both been mired in years of litigation-driven delays.

"These cases differ in geography and sector," Ayibam writes, "but they point to the same underlying reality: construction success often depends on legal structuring done before construction begins, not after disputes erupt."

What Governments Are Getting Wrong

Her work contributes to broader discussions on how legal and governance frameworks influence infrastructure delivery outcomes.

Through her research, Ayibam identifies recurring legal failures that derail public projects worldwide. Poorly defined project scope creates disputes and costly redesigns mid-construction. Land acquisition and compensation issues, which are often chronically underestimated, account for a disproportionate share of delays, particularly in developing economies.

Procurement defects, from non-transparent tenders to unclear evaluation criteria, invite legal challenges long after contracts are awarded. And contracts drafted without clear risk allocation leave contractors exposed and projects vulnerable to breakdown.

Her most pointed finding: legal advisors are consistently brought in too late. "Legal advisors must be embedded at the planning stage and throughout execution," she argues, "not only at the contract signature point."

A Practical Roadmap

What sets Ayibam's work apart is its actionability. Rather than simply cataloguing failures, she offers concrete guidelines for governments and project teams: conduct legal analysis before designs are finalized, treat land acquisition as a prerequisite to construction, design contracts as risk-management instruments, and build dispute resolution mechanisms into project governance from day one.

Her work is particularly relevant for Ghana and other African nations pursuing large-scale infrastructure through public-private partnerships and development financing, where the cost of legal missteps falls hardest on the communities these projects are meant to serve.

For Ayibam, the message is straightforward: the technical expertise to build world-class infrastructure already exists. What must catch up is the legal architecture that allows engineering efforts to reach completion without disruption.

"The cost of prevention," she concludes, "is always lower than the cost of litigation."