In recent years, a number of state governments - Akwa Ibom, Jigawa, Kebbi, Delta - have spent tens of billions of naira building airports, as part of their 'development' agenda. They always have a nice supporting speech on the need to 'open up' their states and 'attract investors', bla bla bla.
Now, airports are good, but, within our context, fail to make a lot of sense. And what is that context? It is that, one, our roads are awful and our railway lines either painfully inefficient or completely non-existent. Airports are a great add-on when you've got the cheaper and higher-capacity modes - roads and railways - functioning perfectly. But to focus on airports for the one or two percent, when the roads for the ninety percent are in poor state, is one definition of madness. Two, most of Nigeria's airports do not make commercial sense. Only about four of the more than twenty airports in the country are self-sustaining, the others are loss-making and dependent on government subsidies to stay open. I can bet that all these new airports currently suck plenty of money from the states that have built them, in subsidy payments to attract reluctant airlines to those routes.
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