From Farm to Freight: Ekiti’s Agro-allied Cargo Advance -By Abiodun KOMOLAFE

It was a privilege to witness the commissioning of the Ekiti Agro-Allied International Cargo Airport last week. It was a momentous, uplifting occasion – truly an experience of being part of history in the making, for reasons that go far beyond the tarmac. Key for me is that Ekiti is finally ready to become a logistical hub for the region.

What was witnessed on December 10, 2025, in Ekiti State, when Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji (BAO) inaugurated the N49.77 billion airport, was a reconfirmation. It reconfirmed that a deliberate economic programme is essential to achieving economic prosperity in the near term.

For historical accuracy, former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s foresight in initiating the project must be commended, but in a country riddled with childlike rivalries and repudiations, Oyebanji has shown great maturity and tactical élan by seeing this initiative to fruition. This should be a sobering lesson for all.

The cargo airport is not just another vanity of the type condemned by the French Agronomist and later politician, René Dumont, in his 1962 groundbreaking seminal work, False Start in Africa. The present Ekiti State Government has clearly heeded the advice (largely ignored by others) that the essence of development must be to achieve consistent, self-sustaining growth with development as opposed to ‘growth without development’.

Ekiti Cargo Airport is not a prestige project. It is the core of a plan to achieve sustainability in Ekiti. Its essence is to have a transformative impact as the state develops its agro-industrial potential. This will create a synergy that will shift its agriculture from large subsistence into commercial farming. The airport will then act as the fulcrum of its transformation into a much-needed, increasingly export-oriented ecosystem. The verdict of history, when economic historians will dispassionately write it in 50 or so years’ time, will give deserved plaudits to the foresighted governor’s efforts.

As an economic zone, the new airport will give the credit risk analyst used by potential investors the data needed to advise that Ekiti deserves an investment opportunity. It will also have a significant influence on inducing inward-bound investments into the state for a host of agricultural and agro-processing ventures.

In today’s economic world, logistics and data interwoven drive an economy. The new airport will combine both attributes into a critical mass for an advanced thrust for the Ekiti economy. The result will be reinvigorating. In the next five years, the anticipated inflow of investments will be massive, with the airport acting as a logistics base that will have a ripple effect across, at least, four states in the South West and, perhaps, as far as Edo and Delta States.

Ekiti State Government itself might be cautiously playing down the cargo airport’s effects. To maximize this impact, the administration should establish an Ekiti State Commodities Exchange, with the long-term goal of transitioning it into a publicly quoted entity. A public-private partnership (PPP), similar to the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) framework, provides the ideal blueprint for this transition.

A commodities exchange will act as the feeder, guaranteeing continuous and growing output into the cargo airport, thereby maximizing its potential. The commodities exchange will modernize agriculture by providing the much-needed guaranteed minimum farm gate prices, which will in turn lead to higher productivity output and a bourgeoning revenue base for the state. Guaranteed output levels will, as we have seen, in particular, India and Malaysia, induce investments in agro-processing and distribution, which will continuously feed activity in the cargo airport. Done properly, out of obscurity, the Ekiti cargo airport could – and should – become a foremost logistics base for much of the South West.

The Ekiti State Government must therefore exploit the synergy involved in this project. Adeptly handled, it will transform Federal allocations to the state into a reserve for the protection of future generations and strictly to develop the social and physical infrastructure. Within years, the state’s ever-increasing internally generated revenue (IGR), with the cargo airport acting as the engine room, will cater for all expenditures. It will still have a surplus to invest in the social and physical infrastructure, in conjunction with Federal allocations.

Oyebanji, in our considered opinion, is doing what development economists have been advocating for over seventy years, that economic development is not about ego-serving, vanity projects but about investing in a project such as the Ekiti State cargo airport which will act as the engine room for the overall, self-sustaining development. With presidential approval for the extension of the railway line from Osogbo to Ado Ekiti and the reconstruction of the Itawure Aramoko Iyin Ado Ekiti Road, it is evident that Ekiti, under BAO’s leadership, has only glimpsed the horizon.

May the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace in Nigeria!

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