Aviation and Aerospace Development Minister Festus Keyamo has said the Tinubu administration is putting money freed by the removal of fuel and foreign-exchange subsidies into airport expansion, including more than N500 billion for a new international terminal at Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos and about N400 billion for a second runway at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja.
He made the remarks yesterday as special guest of honour at a ceremony marking 67 years of Aero Contractors, Nigeria’s oldest surviving airline, at the Lagos airport. Keyamo said past governments lacked the cash for such projects because oil earnings were largely absorbed by petrol subsidies and by efforts to hold up the naira through Bureau de Change allocations.
He linked the current spending to the fiscal shift after those subsidies were removed. Foreign reserves had grown, he said, allowing the government to raise large sums including $500 million to rebuild the Lagos airport gateway without leaning heavily on unsustainable foreign debt. Work on the Lagos terminal modernisation, he added, had already engaged more than 2,000 previously unemployed Nigerians, among them welders, plumbers and labourers contracted through CCECC.
The Abuja runway figure was the sharper illustration of delay. Keyamo recalled that the National Assembly stalled the project about 16 years ago when it was costed at N63.5 billion. In April 2010, the House Committee on Aviation rejected the budget for the runway, calling the price extravagant. “Sixteen years later, it’s now costing us nearly 400 billion,” he said. “That is the danger in delaying the building of infrastructure because the prices will go up every day.”
He also said the government was finalising designs to extend the Lagos Red Line through the General Aviation Terminal (MMA2), with a stop at an Air Force base, running underground to the new international terminal. The link is meant to connect the airport to the city and ease movement for passengers and logistics. He said the administration wanted aviation treated as a deliberate national priority alongside roads, rail and power.
Keyamo warned that without a strategic response, Nigerian airports risked becoming “ghost airports,” with hangars falling silent and jobs and investment moving across the border. He described Aero Contractors as a rare survivor in a sector where more than 100 indigenous carriers had collapsed over the decades, and argued that microeconomic relief depended on macro-level growth.
Aero’s managing director and chief executive, Captain Ado Sanusi, used the anniversary themed “Going the Extra Mile” and coinciding with International Customer Service Week to recount the airline’s near-collapse and recovery. “I did not come here today merely to cut a cake,” he told officials, regulators and staff. “I came to tell you a story of resilience.”
He said the carrier had grounded fleets, emptied hangars, gone months without an aircraft in the sky, buried colleagues and operated without pay, and still flown. He credited engineers who stayed past their shifts, pilots who kept certifications current with no aircraft to fly, and cabin and ground crews who remained through years of uncertainty.
Aero began in 1959 as a charter and crop-spraying firm serving Niger Delta oil fields, later moving into scheduled passenger services, rotary-wing work and training. On 4 January 2018, its engineers completed Nigeria’s first heavy C-check on a Boeing 737 inside the Lagos hangar, described as a first for West and Central Africa.
The Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria took a majority stake in 2016 when the airline was at its lowest. Group Head of AMCON’s Resolution Directorate, Usman Abubakar, representing the corporation’s managing director, said the intervention was beginning to show results: “We are happy to be associated with Aero, and the gamble we took on Aero is beginning to show the positive fruits that they expect.” Sanusi also acknowledged Receiver/Manager Senator Adeniyi Ayodele Adegbonmire.
Sanusi welcomed the federal works at Murtala Muhammed International Airport but urged the administration to treat aviation as a core economic catalyst, not only an infrastructure programme. Adebukola Teriba, regional manager of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, delivered a goodwill message on behalf of Director-General Captain Chris Ona Najomo.
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