Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has announced that Emirates Airlines will resume immediate flight schedules to Nigeria and lift a visa ban on Nigerian travelers.
This follows a meeting between Tinubu and the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, on Monday in Abu Dhabi to lift the visa ban and agree on new investments into Africa's largest economy.
Nigeria’s Head of State stopped in Abu Dhabi from the G20 summit in India, where he wooed investors to the coin try.
Tinubu declared last month that he desired a speedy settlement to the disputes with Emirates Airlines and the Arab nation's immigration policies.
When Dubai's Emirates paused flights because it could not repatriate money from Nigeria, the UAE stopped giving visas to Nigerians. Flights to Nigeria had also been canceled by Etihad Airlines.
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"As negotiated between the two Heads of State, this immediate restoration of flight activity, through these two airlines and between the two countries, does not involve any immediate payment by the Nigerian government," the president's spokesperson Ajuri Ngelale said in a statement.
Nigeria faces dollar shortages, making it difficult for some foreign airlines that sold tickets in the Nigerian naira currency to get money out of the country.
Investors have praised Tinubu's biggest reform initiatives, the nation's first in decades.
The Nigerian president removed a popular but expensive petrol subsidy and relaxed exchange rate regulations to weaken the naira.
However, despite the naira being quoted at a premium on the black market, liquidity has not yet returned to the legal market.
Details of a new foreign exchange liquidity program that Tinubu negotiated between the two governments, according to Ngelale, will be made public in the upcoming weeks.
The UAE's investment arms would make fresh investments totaling several billions of dollars in the Nigerian economy across various industries, including defense, agriculture, and others, according to Ngelale.
