The Murtala Muhammed Airport Two (MMA2) domestic terminal in Lagos, built and operated by Bi-Courtney Aviation Services Limited (BASL) under a build-operate-transfer arrangement, continued in 2015 to be cited by industry analysts as the clearest domestic example of what private capital could do for Nigerian airport infrastructure. The terminal, financed without direct federal funding, had introduced self-service check-in kiosks, automated access gates and a baggage reconciliation system years ahead of government-run terminals elsewhere in the country.
The contrast fed directly into a federal push to concession the country's four busiest airports, in Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt, to private operators. Officials at the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) argued that state-run terminals lacked the capital and the commercial discipline to keep pace with rising passenger numbers, and pointed to MMA2's traffic figures, the highest of any terminal in the country, as evidence that a concessioned model could deliver both revenue and better passenger experience.
A Contested Template
The MMA2 arrangement was not without its critics. The concession had already drawn years of litigation between BASL and FAAN over its scope and duration, and sceptics warned that replicating an unresolved template at four larger, more complex airports risked importing the same disputes on a bigger scale. Industry analysts nonetheless argued that the underlying principle, that private operators divorced from the constraints of government bureaucracy could modernise Nigerian terminals faster than the state, remained sound even if the specific MMA2 agreement needed to be renegotiated.
Setting Up a Longer Fight
The 2015 debate did not resolve the question of how concession agreements should be structured, and the push to bring Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt under private management would stretch on for years afterward, entangled in the same kind of contractual disputes that had defined the MMA2 experience. It nonetheless marked an early and consistent articulation, echoed repeatedly by aviation ministers who followed, of concession as the federal government's preferred answer to chronic underinvestment in airport infrastructure.