Nigeria Unveils First National Land Transport Policy, Casting Rail as the Trunk Network

Nigeria unveiled its first National Land Transport Policy on 3 September at the close of the 19th National Council on Transportation in Abuja, a four-day gathering held from 31 August under the theme "Developing an Effective Transport System for Nigeria: The Role of Integrated Transportation". Vice-President Kashim Shettima, represented by Aliyu Modibbo Umar, Director-General of General Duties at the Presidency, presented the document as the first comprehensive policy of its kind for the sector since independence.

The policy had already been approved by the Federal Executive Council: the Ministry of Transportation described that approval as arriving "after decades of struggle since 1993" at an international railway conference in September 2025, so the Abuja event marks the formal launch rather than the adoption. Its stated aim is to move federal planning away from isolated projects toward a single national network in which roads, railways, ports, inland waterways and urban systems are treated as components of one system, with private investment and public-private partnerships as the intended delivery route.

For rail the hierarchy is explicit. "Rail must connect to roads. Rail to production centres and markets, while roads provide first- and last-mile access," Shettima's representative told the council — a formulation that assigns rail the trunk-haul role and roads the distribution role, the reverse of how Nigerian freight moves today.

Permanent Secretary Olufunso Adebiyi used the council to set out where the network stands. The Lagos-Ibadan, Abuja-Kaduna, Port Harcourt-Aba and Warri-Itakpe corridors are operational; the Kaduna-Zaria-Kano segment of the Lagos-Kano modernisation is expected to open by December; and the Katsina-Jibia-Maradi link toward Niger is targeted for next year. On freight, he pointed to a single train moving 33 forty-foot containers from Apapa port to the Ibadan dry port.

Adebiyi separately told the council that plans were under way for a high-speed line from Lagos to Maiduguri running at up to 360 km/h. No contractor, financing structure, route length or construction date accompanied the statement. Two Nigerian outlets, BusinessDay and Construction Review Online, attached a figure of GBP 12bn to the corridor; that number appears neither in the government's own account of the council nor in ThisDay's report of the same remarks, and a year earlier the ministry's high-speed ambition was described as covering Abuja-Lagos, Abuja-Kano and Abuja-Port Harcourt.

For suppliers the policy is the more consequential of the two announcements. Nigeria's rail programme has been assembled project by project on bilateral contracts and Chinese export finance; a standing framework defining how intermodal links are planned, procured and funded is the precondition for the scale of network the government keeps describing.