By Dipo Kehinde
When Air Peace Chairman and CEO, Allen Onyema, recently appeared on Arise TV and declared that “Nigerians are paying the cheapest domestic air fares in the world… a one-hour flight costs over $400 abroad, but in Nigeria, we still have tickets for N125,000 (less than $60)”, the statement landed like a thunderbolt. Not because it was liberating, but because it fundamentally clashes with lived reality.
For millions of Nigerians who have become reluctant travellers due to cost, it is a claim that seems to deny what their pockets already testify: domestic air travel today is a luxury, one increasingly out of reach.
Onyema’s comparison sounds bold, even patriotic on the surface, but it quickly weakens under scrutiny. A one-hour domestic flight in most advanced aviation markets does not cost $400 on average. In the United States, many one-hour trips, like New York to Washington D.C., Los Angeles to San Diego, often fall between $90 and $150 on low-cost carriers. Budget airlines in Europe, Asia, and Latin America frequently offer short-haul flights even cheaper, sometimes below $60 when booked in advance. Using an extreme figure from a handful of peak-demand international business routes, then projecting it as a global benchmark, is not only misleading, it masks the harsh truth about air travel affordability here at home.
Meanwhile, what is the true experience in Nigeria? It is not N125,000. For the average Nigerian who opens a travel app or walks up to a ticket counter, Lagos-Abuja, Nigeria’s busiest one-hour route, routinely costs N250,000 to N400,000, sometimes hitting N500,000 and above during festive seasons, emergencies or policy shocks.
The Senate recently summoned aviation officials after reports showed fares soaring beyond N650,000 on certain dates. These are not fringe cases. They are the normal headlines Nigerians have come to expect.
And if cost is the measure of whether air travel is “cheap”, then context matters. Nigeria’s minimum wage is N70,000 monthly, barely enough for a one-way fare even at Onyema’s quoted N125,000. Less than five per cent of Nigerians fly domestically. A market that excludes 95 per cent of its citizens cannot in good conscience be described as “the cheapest in the world”.
The reality is that Nigerian aviation is trapped between two punishing forces: high operating costs and poor consumer affordability. Airlines struggle through a suffocating ecosystem: forex shortages, multiple regulatory charges, aviation fuel priced in dollars, high insurance premiums, and ageing infrastructure. These pressures force upward ticket pricing, leaving travellers squeezed at both ends.
But acknowledging these pressures must not become a justification for rewriting the facts about affordability. Gas is expensive, inflation is biting, and the aviation industry needs support. But telling citizens they enjoy the world’s cheapest fares, when they can barely afford to fly, alienates the very people whose support airlines need to survive.
More important than defending a narrative should be asking the necessary questions: how do we make domestic flying affordable to more Nigerians? How do we lower fuel costs, rationalise aviation taxes, and attract infrastructure investment? How do we fix airports that drain airlines with delays and operational inefficiencies? And how do we deepen competition, so pricing is driven by market efficiency, not survival panic?
Nigerians don’t need comforting claims. They need reforms; reforms that will make flying a part of everyday life, not an elite privilege. The skies must open for workers, families, SMEs, students rushing home, and entrepreneurs closing deals, not remaining a runway reserved for the few.
Cheap tickets should not exist only in TV interviews. They must exist at the check-in counter. Until then, Nigerian airfares will remain what they truly are: not the cheapest, but the most punishing.
Dipo Kehinde, a journalist, writes from Lagos.
