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EgyptAir’s Disregard for Naira Sparks Outrage: APC-IGG Calls for Immediate Government Intervention

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This is a direct insult to Nigeria’s financial system. It is unacceptable that a foreign airline, benefiting from Nigerian passengers and resources, would refuse to transact in our national currency,”

Dr. Rev. David Kayode

By Abdulrahman Aliagan

The APC Initiative for Good Governance (APC-IGG) has raised serious concerns over the reported refusal of EgyptAir to accept the Nigerian Naira as a legal means of payment at its Murtala Muhammed Airport Terminal 2 counter in Lagos. The shocking revelation, brought to public attention by Rev. Dr. David Kayode, has sparked widespread outrage, with calls for immediate government action to address what has been described as an affront to Nigeria’s sovereignty and economic stability.

In a petition addressed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Amb. Musa Muhammed Tsoken, National President of APC-IGG, condemned EgyptAir’s actions, emphasizing that no foreign business operating in Nigeria has the right to disregard the nation’s legal tender. He stressed that such an act undermines the country’s economic policies, disrespects its sovereignty, and could set a dangerous precedent for other foreign entities operating within Nigeria.

According to Rev. Dr. Kayode, a former Chairman of the Voice for the Voiceless in New York City and Clergy Advisor to the Queens Borough District Attorney’s Office in the USA, EgyptAir’s conduct is not only unethical but also constitutes a clear violation of Nigerian law. “This is a direct insult to Nigeria’s financial system. It is unacceptable that a foreign airline, benefiting from Nigerian passengers and resources, would refuse to transact in our national currency,” he stated.

Amb. Tsoken, in his reaction, urged President Tinubu to take decisive action against EgyptAir and ensure that all foreign businesses operating in Nigeria respect the Naira. He warned that failure to address this matter urgently could embolden other foreign firms to flout Nigeria’s financial laws.

“This is not just about EgyptAir; it is about Nigeria’s dignity as a sovereign nation. No country allows its currency to be disregarded within its borders, and Nigeria must not be an exception. We call on relevant government authorities, including the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Ministry of Aviation, and regulatory agencies, to intervene immediately and sanction EgyptAir for this blatant violation,” Tsoken declared.

He further emphasized that foreign businesses operating in Nigeria must be held accountable and made to comply with the nation’s financial regulations. “The Nigerian economy cannot afford to be undermined by foreign entities that operate within our jurisdiction but refuse to acknowledge our laws. This must be the last time such an incident occurs,” he added.

As tensions rise over this issue, Nigerians are eagerly watching to see how the Tinubu-led administration will respond to this challenge. Will the government take swift action to defend Nigeria’s economic sovereignty, or will foreign businesses continue to dictate the terms of engagement in the country?

The ball is now in the court of the Nigerian government to make a firm statement—Nigeria’s currency and sovereignty must be respected, without exception.

   

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Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
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The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

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  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. 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The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. 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