Anambra not building second airport, but aerotropolis — Nwuba

By Vincent Ujumadu, Awka

AWKA — The President of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association of Nigeria, AOPAN, and Second Vice President of the Aviation Safety Round Table Initiative, ASRTI, Dr Alex Nwuba, has said the Anambra State Government is not building a second passenger airport, but a new economic city with an airport as its transport hub.

Nwuba, in a statement sent to Vanguard on Monday, said the project, known as the Anambra Aerotropolis Export Free Trade Zone in Orumba North Local Government Area, was being misconstrued in public discourse as a second airport.

He said the distinction was important because the project was designed as a planned economic city built around a cargo-led international airport, rather than simply another passenger gateway.

According to him, the project is intended to serve as a logistics and industrial hub connecting air, road, rail and inland water transport while supporting manufacturing, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, commerce and exports in the South-East.

Nwuba said: “Anambra is not building a second airport. The government itself said as much in its earlier statements, and on the evidence of the documents, it was telling the truth.

“What it did not go on to clarify is that it is building a new Anambra city with an airport within it.”

He explained that the project was formally designated the Anambra Aerotropolis Export Free Trade Zone, with Ndikelionwu serving as a reference point and one of several host communities within the project area.

Nwuba admitted that he had previously described the project as a second airport, saying the position was based on incomplete information.

“I am guilty of the second airport framing myself. That story was the product of partial information, and it was that publication which led government to share the details of its plans with me so that the record could be corrected,” he said.

The aviation expert argued that the economic value of an airport should not be assessed primarily by its proximity to existing airports, but by the economy within its catchment area and the specific function for which it was developed.

According to him, the proposed facility is designed primarily as a cargo and logistics gateway to support the industrial and commercial activities of Onitsha, Nnewi and other parts of the South-East.

He said the facility would potentially handle cargo from international destinations while providing a platform for the consolidation, processing, certification and export of agricultural produce, pharmaceuticals and manufactured goods from the region.

Nwuba noted that businesses in the South-East currently depend heavily on Lagos and Port Harcourt for imports and exports, resulting in additional transportation costs, delays and loss of competitiveness.

He listed Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing, Ibeto Group, Cutix Cables, the Nnewi auto parts and components cluster, Onitsha Main Market and the rice-producing areas of the Omambala plain among the economic activities the proposed gateway is expected to serve.

He said Nigeria’s air freight market was projected to grow significantly in the coming years, while increasing cross-border e-commerce and the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area, AfCFTA, were changing Africa’s logistics landscape.

Nwuba said the Orumba North location had an estimated 12.5 million people within a 100-kilometre radius, with major commercial centres including Onitsha, Nnewi, Awka, Enugu, Owerri, Asaba and Aba within varying road travel times.

He described the location as defensible for a cargo and industrial hub, particularly because of the availability of land and its proximity to major commercial centres.

On the existing Chinua Achebe International Airport at Umueri, Nwuba said the project would not diminish its importance, noting that states with more than one airport were not unusual.

He, however, said the availability of large, contiguous land was a major consideration in the development of a planned city.

According to him, the Orumba North project is planned on a large land bank already acquired by the state, while the Umueri area presents challenges because of its low-lying agricultural terrain and fragmented private land ownership.

Nwuba said the masterplan covers about 12,700 hectares and includes an airport city, Anambra Mixed-Use Industrial City, agro-industrial park, pharmaceutical hub, logistics, commercial, residential and leisure districts.

He said the development was also designed to integrate road, rail and inland water transportation.

“The logistics thinking in the documents is multimodal by design. The state’s rail masterplan runs a line beside the site, linking it toward Ekwulobia, Nnewi, Onitsha and Awka,” he said.

He added that the proximity of the Onitsha River Port and the Second Niger Bridge would provide an inland waterway component to the planned logistics network.

Nwuba, however, cautioned that the projections contained in the project documents, including estimated annual contributions of between N350 billion and N600 billion to the state’s gross domestic product and up to 750,000 direct and indirect jobs, remained projections that would depend on effective implementation.

He said public scrutiny should therefore focus on execution, including reliable power supply, proper phasing, transparent land administration, credible zone governance and the ability to attract industrial tenants.

“Projects of this kind are not self-executing,” he said, stressing that the success of the project would ultimately depend on disciplined implementation and credible investors.

Nwuba said the public debate should therefore move beyond whether Anambra needed another airport and focus on how effectively the proposed aerotropolis could be developed.

“Anambra is not building a second airport. It is building a new city, with an airport inside it, on land the state took the trouble to own, aimed at a cargo and e-commerce market that is growing whether or not the South-East shows up for it,” he said.

He added that while the aspirations attached to the project belonged to the state government and would ultimately be judged by history, the economic model underlying the development was consistent with established global trends in aviation, logistics and industrial development.

Read the full statement bellow:

The argument raging in public is framed as the construction of a new airport versus the support and completion of an existing one, and that is not the choice actually on the table.

Government, for understandable competitive reasons, does not publish its strategic plans while they are still in motion, and so the public has been left to debate a caricature. I am under no such restriction. What follows is my attempt to clarify and demystify the project, to describe it for what it is and to explain its ambition, from my own reading of the feasibility study and the integrated masterplan and from the data of my industry. Where the aspiration belongs to the administration, I will say so. Where the judgment is mine, I will own it.

The first thing an honest reading establishes is that the popular framing is wrong. Anambra is not building a second airport. The government itself said as much in its earlier statements, and on the evidence of the documents, it was telling the truth. What it did not go on to clarify, because governments rarely unveil strategic plans midstream, is that it is building a new Anambra city with an airport within it.

I am guilty of the second airport framing myself. That story was the product of partial information, and it was that publication which led government to share the details of its plans with me so that the record could be corrected. The fuller documents have since corrected me, and if a professional in this industry could mislabel the project on the public record, the wider public can hardly be blamed for doing the
same.

“That is exactly why this clarification is worth making. What the documents describe is a new city at Orumba North, formally the Anambra Aerotropolis Export Free Trade Zone, within which an airport sits as the transport core. Ndikelionwu, whose name the critics have attached to the entire enterprise, is the reference point and one of several host communities across the site. The distinction matters more than it may appear.

“Judged as a second passenger airport, the project would deserve several of the questions now being asked of it, and I would be asking them too. Judged as what the plans actually set out, a planned economic city whose engine is a runway, most of those questions dissolve, and better ones take their place. Take the argument from proximity, the flight times of a few minutes between existing Southeast airports offered as proof that no new facility is justified.

“As a matter of aviation economics, this is simply not how airports are valued. The worth of an airport has never been measured by its distance to another airport, but by the economy in its catchment and the function it is built to perform.”

According to Nwuba, “Memphis and Louisville, the two great cargo hubs of North America, sit in a country with more than five thousand public airports, many of them minutes apart by air.

“Also, South Africa’s state airports company alone operates nine commercial airports, while Kenya runs international gateways at Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Eldoret, the last two barely a hundred kilometres apart, and nobody in Nairobi calls that a waste.

“Similarly, Lagos, whose single commercial gateway carried some 81 per cent of Nigeria’s air cargo as recently as 2019, is itself pursuing a second airport at Lekki precisely because one gateway becomes a chokepoint. Serious economies multiply their points of access.

“The function proposed at Orumba North is also specific, and it is one the region visibly lacks. The plans describe a cargo-led international gateway, a facility where freighters from Guangzhou, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Dubai, and Atlanta would land goods directly into the commercial heart of Eastern Nigeria, and where the produce, pharmaceuticals, and manufactures of the region would be consolidated, processed, certified, and flown out to the world. Anyone who trades from this region knows the present arrangement. The trader in Onitsha Main Market, the largest market in West Africa, and the manufacturer in Nnewi import through Lagos or Port Harcourt, then move goods hundreds of kilometres by road, paying for every extra day in demurrage, diesel and lost competitiveness. Nor is this an abstract catchment.

“The feasibility study identifies by name the industrial base the gateway would serve: Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing, the Ibeto Group, Cutix Cables and the wider Nnewi auto parts and components cluster, the wholesale distribution engine of Onitsha Main Market, and the rice belt of the Omambala plain, businesses that today reach their markets in spite of the region’s logistics rather than because of them. Whether or not one supports this project, the structural problem it addresses is real.

“The market it aims at is real as well, and here I am on my own professional ground. Nigeria’s air freight market is projected to rise from roughly three billion dollars in 2024 to over eleven billion by 2030.

Between 2017 and 2021, some 871 million kilogrammes of cargo passed through Nigerian airports, imports outweighing exports nearly five to one and virtually all of it through one congested gateway.

Africa, home to nearly a fifth of humanity, still handles barely two per cent of global air cargo, even as IATA reports African carriers posting the fastest cargo growth rates in the world. Layered on top is the single biggest force in aviation today, cross-border electronic commerce, which rose from about ten per cent of global air cargo volume in 2017 to twenty per cent by 2022 and is projected by industry analysts to settle near a third. Temu alone went from nothing to seven per cent of the world’s cross-border e-commerce orders in barely two years. Under the African Continental Free Trade Area and the Single African Air Transport Market, the logistics map of this continent is being redrawn now, and the hubs that exist when those flows mature are the hubs that will capture them. These are not government talking points. They are the published numbers of my industry.

On location, the feasibility study by Sliding Towers places an estimated 12.5 million people within a hundred kilometres of the Orumba North site, spanning six states, with Onitsha, Nnewi, Awka, Enugu, Owerri, Asaba and Aba all reachable within roughly twenty minutes to two hours by road. I have checked those distances against the map and they hold. As siting logic for a cargo and industrial hub, the geometry is defensible, and I would say so whichever administration had chosen it.

A word on the Chinua Achebe International Airport at Umueri, because nothing in this analysis diminishes it. It serves the state today and will go on serving it, and more than one airport in a state is the norm rather than the exception in Nigeria and everywhere else. Delta runs both Asaba and Warri. Kaduna has both Kaduna International and Zaria.

The relevant limitation at Umueri is not pride but land.

A city needs land, large, contiguous, and assembled early, and Umueri’s setting is what it is: the low-lying Omambala basin, productive farmland, a living agricultural community whose farming economy deserves to be sustained rather than paved over, and surrounding land largely in private hands, much of it long since taken up by speculators. No planner could assemble a fifty-year city there without either displacing farmers or bidding against speculation. At Orumba North, by contrast, the state acquired and owns land well beyond the free zone and the Aerotropolis themselves. The Governor has spoken publicly of deliberately securing strategic land as a land bank for future development, against a population his administration projects to approach forty million by 2070 on a landmass already threatened by gully erosion. Those projections are the government’s, not mine, but the planning logic behind them is sound, and it is the same logic every planned city in history has followed. You do not build a city on land you must negotiate for parcel by parcel.

The scale of what is planned is set out in the masterplan documents. Under a single umbrella of roughly 12,700 hectares sit the airport city, the Anambra Mixed-Use Industrial City, an Agro-Industrial Park, a Pharmaceutical Hub, and logistics, commercial, residential and leisure districts, with a substantial part of the footprint already carrying free trade zone approval from the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority and construction underway. The logistics thinking in the documents is multimodal by design.

The state’s rail masterplan runs a line beside the site, linking it toward Ekwulobia, Nnewi, Onitsha and Awka; the site sits astride road corridors feeding the regional expressways; and the Onitsha river port on the Niger, alongside the Second Niger Bridge, gives the zone an inland waterway leg. Around the runway the plans set out bonded warehousing, cargo terminals, cold chain and distribution facilities intended to move goods between air, road, rail and river as one system, the same logic that made Memphis, with its air, rail, road and Mississippi barge connections, the logistics capital of North America. The administration frames all of this within its African Dubai, Taiwan and Silicon Valley ambition and its Vision 2070. That framing is the government’s own language, and I leave it to the government to defend. What I can say as an observer is that the underlying model is neither novel nor eccentric. It is the model that built Ekurhuleni around O.R. Tambo, and the airport districts of Atlanta and Memphis, where a hub in a metropolitan area smaller than the Onitsha, Nnewi and Awka corridor supports more than 220,000 jobs and contributes some 28.6 billion dollars a year to its regional economy. Liege, Leipzig and Ezhou were each built or repurposed as freighter-first hubs, and each pulled billions in logistics investment into regions the passenger map had overlooked. Firms cluster where they can put a finished product on the world market in hours rather than weeks.

An honest observer must also say what the brochures will not. Projects of this kind are not self-executing. The projections in the documents, between 350 and 600 billion naira in annual contribution to state GDP at maturity and up to 750,000 direct and indirect jobs, are standard agglomeration arithmetic, but they are projections, and they will stand or fall on things no rendering can supply: disciplined phasing, reliable power, credible zone governance, transparent land administration, and confirmed industrial tenants leading the build-out rather than following it. That is where public scrutiny should now be directed, and vigorous scrutiny of execution would serve the state far better than another round of argument about whether the project should exist.

The first question has, on the evidence, a clear answer. The second is the one that will decide everything. So my observation, offered from outside the government and without a brief for it, is this. The criticism now circulating misunderstands the thing it criticizes. It measures a city against the yardstick of an airport, counts the minutes between runways, and concludes that nothing new is needed. But Anambra is not building a second airport. It is building a new city, with an airport inside it, on land the state took the trouble to own, aimed at a cargo and e-commerce market that is growing whether or not the Southeast shows up for it.

The aspirations attached to that city belong to the administration, and history will grade them. The economics underneath it, however, are the ordinary economics of my industry, and they are sound. The useful public conversation is no longer about why the project exists. It is about how well it will be executed, and that is a conversation I would encourage every concerned citizen, including the author of the piece that prompted this one, to join on the merits.

Dr. Alex Nwuba is a consultant working across many sectors. He writes here in a personal capacity.

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