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Emirates Airlines has announced that it will resume flight services to Nigeria from October 2024 after over a year it suspended operations in the country due to difficulties encountered in repatriating trapped funds. The airline announced that it would resume daily service between Lagos and Dubai, offering customers more choice and connectivity from Nigeria’s largest city to and through Dubai.
The service will be operated using a Boeing 777-300ER. EK783 will depart Dubai at 0945hrs, arriving in Lagos at 1520hrs; the return flight EK784 will leave Lagos at 1730hrs and arrive in Dubai at 0510hrs the next day, the statement said. The tickets can now be booked on the airline’s website or via travel agents.
The announcement by the airline came after Nigeria’s Aviation Minister, Festus Keyamo, paid a working visit to the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to Nigeria in Abuja. During the visit, the ambassador handed a correspondence from the Emirates Airline indicating a definite date of resumption of flights to Nigeria.
Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ Deputy President and Chief Commercial Officer said the airline is excited to resume services to Nigeria, the Lagos-Dubai service has traditionally been popular with customers in Nigeria and that the airline hopes to reconnect leisure and business travellers to Dubai and onwards to its network of over 140 destinations.
In November 2022, Emirates suspended flights to Nigeria. It said the measure started on 29 October 2022 and blamed it on its inability to repatriate its revenue from the country. At the time, the airline said it had communicated its position to the Federal Government and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). At the time, Emirates lamented that it had not repatriated its blocked funds from the country amidst lingering scarcity of forex in the country. In March, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced that the government had cleared all ‘valid’ foreign exchange backlogs.
With the resumption of operations to Nigeria, Emirates said it would operate to 19 gateways in Africa with 157 flights per week from Dubai, with further reach to an additional 130 regional points in Africa through its codeshare and interline partnerships with South African Airways, Airlink, Royal Air Maroc, Tunis Air, among others.
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As a major economic hub in Africa, Nigeria, and the UAE have built strong bilateral trade relations over the years, headlined by Lagos as the nation’s commercial center.
With the resumption of daily passenger flights, Emirates said the airline’s cargo arm, Emirates SkyCargo, will further bolster the trade relationship by offering more than 300 tonnes of belly-hold cargo capacity, in and out of Lagos every week. It said the Emirates Boeing 777-300ER serving Lagos will operate with eight First Class suites, 42 Business Class seats, and 304 seats in Economy Class.
