IATA wants action over expensive Lagos and Abuja airports

Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos and Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja are the two most expensive airports in Africa, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said, calling for policy changes to make Nigeria competitive in West Africa.

IATA’s Regional Vice-President for Africa and Middle East, Kamil Alawadhi, speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the ongoing 80th IATA General Meeting in Dubai, UAE said: “Nigeria has the most expensive airport. Passengers on airlines are paying a lot of money to an expensive airport that provides nothing in return. The most expensive airports in all of Africa are Lagos and Abuja both in Nigeria.”

Inadequate infrastructure, challenges with baggage and air conditioning are few of the challenges militating against the aviation sector in Nigeria.

“What you can do about it is to demonstrate the negative impact of increasing airport charges. Sometimes, there’s a private airport sometimes it also depends on who you’re talking to. [In Nigeria] we were actually heavily focused on trying to get the blocked funds unblocked. This is still very recent. The actual safety of the runway, and the security of the airport itself, these are top priorities. Once they start improving the infrastructure, then we move to the other things,” he said.

He indicated that with the unblocking of airlines’ funds “services [by some airlines] are now set to resume. We’ve seen Emirates [announcing their return to Nigeria]. Now, automatically, we will see fares dropping because the airfares are actually quite expensive in Nigeria, but the fact is that now you will see aviation blossom, [more] competition and so on and so forth that you’re going to have more traffic in and out of Nigeria because people can afford to travel.”