THE capital of Nigeria is a picture of order compared with Lagos, the chaotic commercial hub. But whereas Abuja’s sweeping avenues are well maintained, the runway of its airport is potholed. Several aircraft have damaged their landing gear on the rutted tarmac. Facing the risk of a serious crash, the government is closing the whole place for six weeks from March 8th. “The entire architecture of the runway, it has failed,” says the minister of aviation.
The government hopes airlines will fly instead to Kaduna, a mere 230km (140 miles) north of Abuja, while the runway’s central portion is rebuilt, with other repairs taking six months in all. But a new terminal at Kaduna is still being built; right now it handles just 300 passengers a day, compared with 5,000 in Abuja. The foreign carriers that fly to the capital, including British Airways, Air France and Lufthansa, are queasy. “None of the European airlines will fly to Kaduna,” says an airline official.
Nigeria has a history of airport closures. In 2005 an Air France flight ploughed into a herd of cows on the runway at Port Harcourt, the country’s oil capital. Later that year a domestic flight crashed there, killing 108 people. The airport was shut for over a year in 2006-07. In 2015 it was voted the world’s worst by a travel website. Its arrivals terminal is a tent.
The current government, in power since 2015, is partly to blame for the sorry state of aviation. It has propped up the naira, leading to a shortage of hard currency and therefore of aviation fuel. That, plus the economy’s dip and the government’s unwillingness to let foreign firms repatriate their profits, has led many international airlines to cut routes or pull out of Nigeria entirely. Delays and cancellations are legion on domestic airlines. A private flag carrier, Arik Air, has asked passengers to stop attacking its staff. Diverting flights from Abuja to Kaduna won’t help.
