Nearly five years after Nigeria’s showpiece standard-gauge railway began carrying passengers, the gap between what was promised and what has been delivered remains as wide as the funding gap keeping the network afloat.
When the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) sought capital from the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) in 2012, it forecast hauling 4.3 million tonnes of freight and 12 million passengers in 2013, rising the following year.
The outcome fell dramatically short, as the corporation earned barely a tenth of its projected railway revenue, while it moved just 100,000 tonnes of freight, roughly 3 per cent of forecast, and 4.5 million passengers, about 37 per cent of forecast, in 2013.
The Lagos-Ibadan line itself, built by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and opened in June 2021, has fared better on ridership than that earlier episode but still moves a fraction of what planners once envisaged for Nigeria’s rail corridors generally.
By March 2024, after roughly 1,000 days of operation, the 157km route had carried more than two million passengers.
Nationally, the standard-gauge network – Lagos-Ibadan and Abuja-Kaduna chief among them – transported 3.89 million passengers in the whole of 2025, generating N7.77 billion in fare revenue, with 929,553 of those journeys and N1.95 billion of that revenue coming in the first quarter alone.
That works out to under 11,000 rail passengers a day across the entire country’s standard-gauge system – modest for a corridor connecting Nigeria’s commercial capital to its third-largest city.
By contrast, criticism has also focused on service frequency: the line runs only three trips daily in each direction, and tickets are cash-only rather than available online, though the NRC has periodically added trips during festive surges such as this year’s Eid-el-Kabir travel rush.
Where The Fares Go?
The more striking figure is not ridership but the revenue shortfall once fares are weighed against running costs.
Historical data shows the corporation’s fare income covered only about 40 per cent of operating expenses as far back as 1978, a figure that had fallen to roughly 14 per cent by 2004. Even after the standard-gauge investment, revenue recovery has stayed well below sustainable levels.
That pattern persists today. The NRC’s managing director, Dr Kayode Opeifa, has publicly acknowledged that the corporation is operating at a loss and has had to borrow money to keep trains running, blaming the high cost of diesel for making efficient operation almost impossible.
Passenger fares, in other words, are not funding the railway’s upkeep; government transfers and debt are. Direct federal funding to the NRC totalled roughly N300 billion between 2016 and 2026, while federal borrowing for rail infrastructure over the same period exceeded N5 trillion – covering the Abuja-Kaduna, Lagos-Ibadan, Itakpe-Warri and other lines.
The 2025 federal budget alone allocated N41.49 billion specifically to rail projects, out of a wider N256.73 billion transport ministry envelope. Fare revenue, by comparison, is a rounding error against that capital outlay – closer to funding a portion of day-to-day diesel and staffing costs than repaying the railway’s construction debt or expanding capacity.
Facing rising diesel, security and maintenance costs, the NRC is now weighing a significant fare increase, even as it has offered temporary discounts during festive periods – a tension officials acknowledge makes any rise politically sensitive.
A structural, not Nigeria-specific, problem
Rail economists caution against reading this purely as mismanagement. Analysts have observed that publicly owned railways worldwide are typically built as a social service rather than a commercial one, and that profitability, while desirable, is not usually their founding purpose.
They argue that Nigeria’s railway remains lopsided towards passenger haulage while neglecting freight – the segment that subsidises passenger services in most profitable rail systems abroad, from vast underused trackside land to untapped mining and agricultural cargo.
According to an insider source, the NRC last recorded a profit in 1964.
Separately, Lagos State’s own light-rail Blue Line – a state, not federal, project – has posted stronger relative growth, carrying about 3.5 million passengers in 2025 with daily ridership reaching 15,000, illustrating that urban commuter rail and the intercity Lagos-Ibadan line face very different demand profiles and should not be conflated in ridership comparisons.
COYRTESY: Independent
