N180bn aircraft maintenance drain puts Nigeria’s MRO ambitions to test

The Nigerian aviation industry is losing a significant share of its aircraft maintenance spending to overseas facilities, with local airlines still forced to send aircraft and components abroad for maintenance work that domestic capacity cannot yet fully support.

The dependence is creating a double cost for Nigerian carriers including foreign exchange outflows for maintenance services and the temporary loss of aircraft from already lean operating fleets.

Allen Onyema, chairman of Air Peace, said at the groundbreaking of the airline’s new maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility in Lagos in September 2025 that Nigerian airlines were spending more than N180 billion annually on offshore aircraft maintenance.

The scale of the spending highlights an underdeveloped segment of Nigeria’s aviation value chain, even as the country has approved local maintenance organisations capable of carrying out some maintenance, overhaul, modification, repair and inspection work.

The bigger economic question is therefore not whether Nigeria has aircraft maintenance facilities, but how much of the work currently performed abroad can be brought home as local MRO capacity expands.

Foreign maintenance comes with hidden airline costs

For airlines operating relatively small fleets, sending an aircraft overseas for heavy maintenance can have consequences beyond the cost of the engineering work.

An aircraft undergoing major maintenance is unavailable for commercial operations for the duration of the work. Where a carrier has only a limited number of aircraft, removing one from service can put additional pressure on the rest of the fleet and complicate efforts to maintain schedules. This makes local MRO capacity strategically important for Nigerian airlines.

A maintenance facility located in Nigeria could potentially reduce the…