Okonjo-Iweala wants Nigeria to champion Single African Air Transport Market creation

THE Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has called on Nigeria to champion the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) initiative.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Okonjo-Iweala made the call virtually at the maiden Nigeria Aircraft Acquisition and Investment Summit (NAAIS) 2026, on Wednesday in Lagos.

The summit had the theme: “Unlocking Capital, Confidence and Capacity in Nigeria Aviation Industry”.

Okonjo-Iweala noted that SAATM, unveiled in 2018 as a flagship project of the African Union Agenda 2063, sought to create a single, unified, liberalised aviation market across the entire continent.

She noted that SAATM sought to overcome bilateral arrangements and fragmented national policies and ensure that aviation played a transformative role in Africa’s development than it had played elsewhere.

“Boosting intra-Africa trade, deepening tourism, and giving the continent a connectivity infrastructure to meet its growth trajectory demands Nigeria has both an interest and a responsibility to lead that agenda from the front,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

She said that the opportunities in the aviation sector were abundant and the needs were huge while the rewards were massive.

Okonjo-Iweala called on the Federal Government to shift from viewing aviation as a revenue source to seeing it a strategic economic initiative.

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She said that Nigeria had to move into a high-value, export-oriented economy and stop viewing aviation primarily as a source of tax revenue.

According to her, the aviation sector should be treated as a critical infrastructure, underpinning the African Continental Free Trade Area.

She said: “Air connectivity in Africa is more time-consuming and costly, which can constrain trade.

“Very often, to fly between two African countries, passengers have to go through Europe to catch a connecting flight.

“This adds to the cost of trading or doing business. This is a structural constraint on growth, not a footnote to it.

“This partly explains why intra-Africa trade is still only about 16 per cent and Africa’s share of world trade is about three per cent.”

She noted that in 2025, air cargo accounted for nearly 30 per cent of global trade by value in spite of representing less than one per cent by goods.

“That asymmetry tells us that aviation does not move all commodities. It moves the highest value, most time-sensitive goods, pharmaceuticals, electronics, parachutes, air-related components, and the small parcels.

“That underpins that global e-commerce economy depends critically on air transport. When air cargo functions well, it does not merely complement trade, it enables it,” the director-general said.

Okonjo-Iweala said that the Nigerian aviation sector had grown in recent decades, with more private airlines along with new airports and related infrastructure.

“The safety record has also improved in the last 19 years, but there is still a long way to go.

“Existing airlines need to upgrade their fleet and scale up their operations to improve their competitiveness.”