The Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, has announced that Emirates Airlines will resume flights to Nigeria “shortly,” with the precise commencement date to be revealed in the coming days.
Keyamo met with Salem Saeed Al-Shamsi, the UAE ambassador to Nigeria, on Tuesday and shared this news on his official X (formerly Twitter) account on Wednesday. The Minister stated that Ambassador Al-Shamsi presented a letter from Emirates Airline at this meeting, which confirmed the airline’s impending return to Nigeria and the impending announcement of the start date.
“Yesterday, I paid a working visit to the Ambassador of the UAE to Nigeria, His Excellency, Salem Saeed Al-Shamsi at the UAE Embassy in Abuja. He handed me a correspondence from the Emirates Airline indicating a definite date of their resumption of flights to Nigeria. That date will be formally announced by Emirates Airlines in a matter of days,” he tweeted.
Keyamo confirmed in a TV interview that Emirates Airlines is expected to resume flights to Nigeria by June 2024. This comes after an agreement reached by President Bola Tinubu and the President of the United Arab Emirates during President Tinubu’s diplomatic visit to the UAE in October 2023. The agreement was to remove the visa requirement for Nigerians and resume air travel between the two countries.
Emirates Airlines ceased its operations in Nigeria in October 2022 due to the Central Bank’s failure to provide the promised foreign exchange allocation. Several airlines stopped offering cheap tickets on Nigerian routes and suspended flights to Nigeria in 2022 as a result of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s tardiness in answering requests from international airlines to repatriate funds.
The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) established a committee in February to address the high cost of international flights in response to multiple foreign airlines discontinuing to sell inexpensive tickets on Nigerian routes. The committee’s work, tasked with examining the variables impacting flight rates and coming up with ways to lower them, resulted in a noteworthy development. Following the committee’s recommendations and the ensuing talks, the NCAA declared in March that the majority of foreign airlines had consented to reduce the cost of tickets for Nigerian passengers.