Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Nigeria's only airport serving the federal capital, closed on 8 March 2017 for emergency repairs to a runway that officials said had become unsafe for continued use. The Minister of State for Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, said the government had concluded that a full closure, rather than a piecemeal overnight-repair approach, was the only way to guarantee the work would hold. The runway, built decades earlier, had already damaged the tyres of aircraft belonging to several foreign carriers on landing in the months before the closure.
For the duration of the shutdown, all Abuja-bound air traffic was redirected to Kaduna International Airport, roughly 160 kilometres to the north, with passengers then travelling onward to the capital by road under a security escort arranged by the government along a route with a history of banditry. The diversion drew sustained criticism from the National Assembly and the Airline Operators of Nigeria, both of which argued that repairs could have been carried out at night in phases without shutting the airport down entirely, citing precedents elsewhere in the world.
International Carriers Split
Several international airlines, including British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa and South African Airways, opted to suspend their Abuja services for the six weeks rather than accept the Kaduna diversion, redirecting some capacity to Lagos instead. Ethiopian Airlines was the only major international carrier to maintain a presence at Kaduna throughout the closure, a decision Nigerian officials repeatedly credited during the shutdown.
An Early Win, With Costs Still to Tally
The airport reopened on 18 April 2017, a day ahead of the government's own extended timeline, and was quickly held up as a rare example of a Nigerian infrastructure project finishing broadly on schedule. Even so, aviation analysts cautioned that the disruption had cost the economy dearly in lost business travel and diverted airline capacity, and some of the international carriers that pulled out during the closure were slow to fully restore their pre-closure frequencies once the runway reopened.