What exactly is the productive structure that these subnational aviation investments are expected to support? What categories of goods are being produced at sufficient scale, value, and frequency to justify the proliferation of airports and state-backed airlines across an economy still struggling with weak industrial capacity, declining agricultural productivity in several regions, poor logistics integration, and limited domestic purchasing power?
In my last few articles, I have argued that the Nigerian economy, though large in size, is not structurally deep enough to attract, absorb, and retain the volume of investment required to transform it into a broad-based, resilient, and productivity-driven economy. Over the years, successive administrations have introduced various economic reforms. While some were iterative, many were fundamentally divergent from one another, reflecting a deeper lack of continuity in governance. This inconsistency has weakened policy credibility, undermined investor confidence, and affected the integrity and image of the economy itself.
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More importantly, I have also argued that the conduct and policy choices of many political officeholders often contradict the very spirit and objectives of the reforms. These contradictions not only highlight weak institutional discipline, but also reveal poor coordination both across and within the different tiers and arms of government. The result is an economy in which reform intentions are frequently disconnected from actual developmental priorities and implementation realities.
This contradiction is becoming increasingly evident in the growing elitisation of Nigeria’s transportation system. In many respects, Nigeria appears to be building the mobility architecture of an upper-middle-income consumption economy, while much of its productive base still operates within the structural realities of a low-productivity and welfare-constrained agrarian system.
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Nigeria is often described as a country of over 250 million people, endowed with vast agricultural and mineral resources, expanding urbanisation, and rapidly growing information and communication technology penetration. Yet beneath these macro-level indicators lies a far more fragile developmental reality. The country continues to face severe infrastructural deficiencies, widening deprivation, inadequate access to socio-economic services, and a rapidly expanding incidence of insecurity across both urban and rural areas.
Nigeria’s development structure also remains heavily rural and welfare-constrained. The 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index estimated that about 133 million Nigerians — roughly 63 per cent of the population — were multidimensionally poor, with rural poverty significantly higher than urban poverty. More recently, the World Bank’s 2025 poverty assessment placed rural poverty at about 75.5 per cent, further highlighting the scale of deprivation outside Nigeria’s relatively small urban consumption centres.
Profoundly important, agriculture remains the country’s largest source of employment and one of the most significant contributors to GDP. National Bureau of Statistics-linked reporting estimated that agriculture, forestry, and fishing accounted for over 25 million jobs, representing about 30.1 per cent of total employment in 2023. This reveals the underlying structure of the Nigerian economy: production, livelihoods, and commercial activity remain predominantly tied to rural and semi-rural spaces, where the dominant transportation needs are accessible roads, functional rail systems, and safe inland waterways capable of moving people, agricultural produce, raw materials, and basic goods at scale.
Yet, despite these realities, several state governments are increasingly committing scarce public resources to state-owned airlines and airport infrastructure projects whose direct economic utility appears concentrated within a narrow upper-income segment of the population. The issue is not whether aviation infrastructure is important in itself. Rather, it is whether current investment priorities reflect the actual structural needs of the Nigerian economy or merely reinforce an elite-oriented model of development disconnected from the productive realities of the broader population.
Many of the justifications advanced for these investments revolve around improving export capacity, attracting investment, enhancing tourism, facilitating the rapid movement of people across states amidst rising insecurity, and positioning states as emerging commercial hubs. While these objectives may appear rational at face value, they nonetheless raise deeper structural questions about the current organisation of the Nigerian economy and the actual productive base capable of sustaining such infrastructure.
This raises important questions regarding infrastructure prioritisation at the subnational level. For instance, rather than primarily investing in cargo airports and considering airline operations, states such as Ogun could generate broader developmental impact by expanding rail connectivity across agricultural and industrial corridors. Such infrastructure could create nodal evacuation systems capable of moving agricultural produce efficiently from rural production centres into urban markets, processing zones, and export channels, thereby strengthening local value chains and reducing post-harvest losses.
What exactly is the productive structure that these subnational aviation investments are expected to support? What categories of goods are being produced at sufficient scale, value, and frequency to justify the proliferation of airports and state-backed airlines across an economy still struggling with weak industrial capacity, declining agricultural productivity in several regions, poor logistics integration, and limited domestic purchasing power?
Even within agriculture — frequently cited as the sector expected to benefit from cargo aviation infrastructure — production remains heavily constrained by insecurity, post-harvest losses, inadequate rural roads, weak storage systems, fragmented market access, and low levels of mechanisation. Under such conditions, the more immediate developmental challenge appears less about the speed of airlifting exports and more about the ability to move produce efficiently from farms to markets without excessive losses and transportation costs.
Fundamentally, transportation systems derive their economic logic from the structure of production and the spatial organisation of economic activity. Air transportation is typically most efficient in economies characterised by high-value, time-sensitive production systems, deep business travel networks, strong consumer purchasing power, advanced tourism ecosystems, and integrated industrial supply chains. This pattern is evident in advanced industrial economies such as the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and others, where land and water transportation systems remain the fulcrum of logistics and commercial distribution because of their affordability, scalability, and integration with production networks.
By contrast, Nigeria’s economic geography remains largely dependent on the movement of bulk agricultural produce, raw materials, informal trade, and low-to-medium value goods across dispersed rural and semi-urban locations. In such an environment, the foundational transport infrastructure required for broad-based economic transformation is more likely to be extensive road connectivity, functional rail systems, and efficient inland water transportation capable of lowering logistics costs across the wider productive economy. Unfortunately, this is not where the current emphasis of transportation expansion appears to lie. Increasingly, scarce public resources are being channelled toward some of the most capital-intensive and elite-oriented modes of transportation within an economy whose productive foundations still depend overwhelmingly on basic logistics connectivity, rural accessibility, and low-cost cargo mobility. It is therefore not surprising that the rate of losses experienced from farm to table continues to rise, as does the loss of investment in the Nigerian agricultural value chain.
This raises important questions regarding infrastructure prioritisation at the subnational level. For instance, rather than primarily investing in cargo airports and considering airline operations, states such as Ogun could generate broader developmental impact by expanding rail connectivity across agricultural and industrial corridors. Such infrastructure could create nodal evacuation systems capable of moving agricultural produce efficiently from rural production centres into urban markets, processing zones, and export channels, thereby strengthening local value chains and reducing post-harvest losses. Similar arguments could also be advanced in relation to Akwa Ibom, Abia, and Cross River States.
More importantly, where airport infrastructure is considered strategically necessary, its viability would ordinarily depend on integration into a wider multimodal transportation network. In the case of Ogun State, stronger developmental logic may emerge if the airport is effectively connected to existing rail infrastructure capable of linking passengers and cargo flows to Abeokuta, Lagos, Ibadan, and adjoining commercial corridors. Such integration would not only improve accessibility and passenger catchment, but also enhance the economic sustainability of the airport itself by embedding it within broader regional mobility and production systems, rather than allowing it to function as an isolated infrastructure asset.
Against this backdrop, one is compelled to ask whether the passenger traffic volume and commercial activity within many of these states are sufficient to generate the level of returns required to justify the scale of scarce public resources now being committed to aviation-related projects.
Based on publicly accessible records, at least four Nigerian states now operate or have established state-backed airline services, while several others are reportedly at advanced stages of investment planning. Ibom Air alone reportedly committed over US$900 million in aircraft acquisition arrangements, while Enugu Air has been linked to investments estimated at about US$40 million. Across airport infrastructure, states such as Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Ogun, Nasarawa, Kebbi, Ekiti, and Zamfara have collectively committed several hundreds of billions of naira toward airport construction, expansion, or rehabilitation projects.
Ultimately, the deeper issue is not merely that states are investing in aviation infrastructure, but that many of these investments increasingly appear fragmented, politically driven, and weakly integrated into a coherent national transportation and production strategy. Infrastructure investment only becomes transformational when it aligns with the dominant structure of production, reduces economy-wide transaction costs, strengthens productive linkages, and expands the capacity for domestic value addition.
This reality becomes even more important within the context of rising living costs, weakening household purchasing power, and increasing pressure on disposable incomes across the country. Air transportation remains one of the most expensive modes of mobility in Nigeria, making sustained passenger demand heavily dependent on a relatively narrow upper-income segment of the population. This raises further questions regarding the long-term commercial sustainability of proliferating subnational airline operations within an economy experiencing widening welfare pressures and declining mass purchasing power.
The developmental question, therefore, is not necessarily about the potential long-term importance of these projects to state revenue generation or the stimulation of economic growth, but rather about the immediate productive investments being deferred in the process — rural roads, irrigation systems, storage infrastructure, rail connectivity, healthcare facilities, schools, and agricultural logistics networks that may potentially generate broader welfare and productivity gains across the economy.
This observation also highlights the deeper problem of weak coordination across the federating units. While subnational governments possess constitutional autonomy, the effectiveness of their developmental role ultimately depends on the extent to which their investment decisions align with broader national economic priorities and strategic infrastructure objectives.
In this regard, the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan was conceived precisely to provide a coordinated framework for infrastructure development across sectors and levels of government. Equally important, the Nigerian Governors’ Forum should function beyond a political platform into a mechanism for development coordination, peer learning, policy harmonisation, and strategic economic cooperation among the states.
Ultimately, the deeper issue is not merely that states are investing in aviation infrastructure, but that many of these investments increasingly appear fragmented, politically driven, and weakly integrated into a coherent national transportation and production strategy. Infrastructure investment only becomes transformational when it aligns with the dominant structure of production, reduces economy-wide transaction costs, strengthens productive linkages, and expands the capacity for domestic value addition.
Development is not measured by the sophistication of isolated infrastructure assets, but by the extent to which infrastructure supports broad-based productivity, expands economic participation, reduces structural inequality, and strengthens the resilience of the productive economy. Without this alignment, infrastructure risks becoming an expensive symbol of modernity existing alongside widespread economic fragility and deepening social exclusion.
An economy does not become transformational merely because capital is being spent; transformation depends on whether such capital is being allocated toward the productive foundations capable of compounding growth across the wider economy.
Dipo Baruwa is a business climate development analyst.
