The N300 billion-plus committed to Nigerian railways over the past two budgets have raised questions amid operational shortfall.
Across key transit corridors, passengers and interested Nigerians alike are asking a fundamental question: where is the impact?
Despite massive capital allocations intended to modernise the nation’s rail grid, turn tracks into economic engines, and ease pressure on overburdened highways, the reality on the ground paints a starkly different picture, reports Daily Independent.
Nigeria’s railways are, on paper, in the middle of a spending boom. Over the past two budget cycles, the federal government has committed hundreds of billions of naira to modernising the network – new locomotives, refurbished stations, signalling systems, and a flagship Lagos metro line.
Yet for the thousands of commuters who rely on the Lagos–Ibadan corridor each week, the lived experience remains one of limited departures, ageing infrastructure and unresolved complaints about reliability.
The gap between the figures on the page and the service on the tracks is now wide enough to warrant scrutiny.
The 2026 Appropriation Bill sets aside N29.04 billion for railway modernisation under a single project code, covering completion works on the Abuja–Kaduna line, upgrades to Lagos– Ibadan, and rehabilitation of the Itakpe–Ajaokuta corridor.
The allocation is earmarked for concrete deliverables: twelve new station buildings, track-laying at Agbor, new rolling stock, and signalling and telecommunications equipment, including an acoustic surveillance system for the Abuja–Kaduna route.
That sits alongside a far larger commitment – N102.3 billion in 2026 counterpart funding for the 68-kilometre Lagos Green Line, the metro project linking Marina to the Lekki Free Zone, which is being financed jointly with Lagos State and China Harbour Engineering Company through the Ministry of Finance Incorporated.
It follows an even bigger allocation the year before: the 2025 budget set aside N146.14 billion for the same project, on top of N41.49 billion committed to rail infrastructure more broadly that year.
Cumulatively, that is well over N300 billion committed to rail across two budget cycles – before accounting for the Ministry of Transport’s wider N256.73 billion 2025 allocation, of which N223.80 billion was capital expenditure and roughly N33 billion went on personnel and overheads.
The 2026 budget also earmarks a further N68.5 billion for transport consultancy services on separate high-priority road and rail corridors, and provides for transaction advisers to work on the proposed concession of the Abuja–Baro– Itakpe and Kano–Maradi lines – spending that precedes any construction at all. Set against that spending, the Nigerian Railway Corporation’s own performance data look modest.
According to National Bureau of Statistics figures compiled across all four quarters of 2025, NRC-managed lines carried 3,888,661 passengers for the year, generating N7.77 billion in ticket revenue.
Quarter-on-quarter growth was real – Q1 2025 ridership rose 37.65 percent and revenue 37.36 perent year-on-year, while Q2 saw a 43.60 percent rise in passengers and a 35.36 percent rise in revenue – but the base being grown from is small.
Last year’s entire passenger income from every federal rail corridor combined amounted to roughly a quarter of this year’s single railway-modernisation budget line alone.
On the ground, the flagship Lagos–Ibadan Train Service – commissioned in 2021 as the corporation’s showcase route – has for years operated on a schedule far short of what was promised.
NRC’s own literature has said frequency would eventually rise to sixteen daily trips once remaining stations were finished; in practice the service has run on as few as four trips a day, with the corporation periodically adding a handful of extra runs around holiday periods such as Easter, when it boosted the schedule to three departures each way and threw in a free special service to Osun State.
Reliability problems have compounded the frequency shortfall. In one widely reported incident, the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company disconnected the Obafemi Awolowo Train Station at Moniya over unpaid bills, halting services on part of the line.
Separately, the corporation has had to publicly deny reports that sections of the Lagos– Ibadan line were vandalised and unsafe for use – even as it later confirmed a different, serious vandalism problem elsewhere on the network.
The Abuja–Kaduna corridor, meanwhile, only expanded its timetable frequency from March 2026, a step the corporation has described as part of the line’s recovery from a 2022 terrorist attack that killed and abducted passengers and effectively suspended full services for months.
Money is not only slow to convert into service – some of it appears not to reach NRC coffers at all. A long-delayed electronic ticketing system for the Lagos–Ibadan and Warri–Itakpe services, originally projected under a 2021 Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission business case to generate a combined N22 billion in government revenue between 2021 and 2025, missed that target after repeated deployment delays.
In the interim, passengers and staff reported manual ticket sales without receipts; the NRC was forced to suspend and later dismiss staff filmed collecting fares without issuing tickets.
Separately, the corporation disclosed in July that its officials, working with the police, recovered stolen railway components worth an estimated N200 million and arrested three suspects – evidence, the corporation said, of an active vandalism problem it is now working with security agencies to contain, alongside newly graduated cohorts of locomotive pilots meant to support the network’s expansion.
Twenty-nine of these pilots completed more than a year of theoretical and practical training, according to the corporation, though it is not clear from public figures how that headcount compares with the pilot numbers needed to run an expanded sixteen-trip daily schedule, let alone the freight ambitions the corporation has repeatedly said it wants to pursue.
Passenger complaints dominate public commentary, but the more consequential gap may be in freight.
NRC’s leadership has for months spoken of stronger rail-port integration as a strategic priority, arguing that shifting containerised cargo from road to rail would ease congestion at the Lagos ports and cut haulage costs.
Yet freight volumes on the standard-gauge lines remain a fraction of what road transporters move, and there is no published NRC freight-revenue breakdown to set against the billions allocated for rolling stock and signalling upgrades explicitly intended to support cargo movement.
If freight capacity is being built but not used, that is arguably a bigger opportunity cost than late passenger trains.
The money question is complicated further by a recent structural change: rail now sits on the concurrent legislative list, opening the door for states to build and operate their own systems alongside the NRC. Lagos State has already been granted a permanent operating licence and track access from the NRC.
Kano State has separately announced plans for its own N1 trillion metropolitan rail system. Whether these stated projects will be additive to national capacity, or will simply draw political and financial attention away from fixing the existing federal network, is an open question worth tracking as more states weigh in.
The NRC Managing Director, Dr. Kayode Opeifa, has repeatedly framed the corporation’s direction as transformational, telling stakeholders the government is working towards “a new generation rail system” under a forthcoming national masterplan, and describing new locomotive pilots as “central to the ongoing transformation of Nigeria’s railway sector.”
What remains unpublished, however, is a clear public accounting of capital releases against project milestones – how much of each year’s allocated billions was actually disbursed, on which contracts, and against what completion targets.
A Freedom of Information request to the NRC, seeking quarterly capital expenditure releases, contractor payment schedules and project completion certificates for the Lagos– Ibadan and Green Line projects since 2024, would be the logical next step in establishing whether the shortfall lies in funding, disbursement, contractor performance – or all three.
Until that accounting exists in public form, the N300 billion-plus committed to Nigerian rail over the past two budgets will remain, for most commuters, a number with no visible train attached to it.
