President Bola Tinubu has suspended the cashless payment system at airport toll gates nationwide due to severe gridlock that led to passengers missing flights.
The announcement came from the Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, on Wednesday following the Federal Executive Council meeting at the State House in Abuja.
Keyamo stated that the President directed an immediate return to the previous arrangement while a better system is developed.
“Mr. President was very concerned about the welfare of Nigerians and the fact that most Nigerians were losing their flights, missing their flights.
“So Mr. President, out of empathy, directed today that we should suspend the present system because it creates a lot of gridlock, and Nigerians are suffering as a result of it,” Keyamo stated.
He stressed that the primary goal of the suspension was to clear the traffic jams, particularly at the Lagos and Abuja airport toll gates.
“The major reason why Mr. President took this decision is to eliminate the present gridlock that we are experiencing, especially at both the Lagos and Abuja toll gates leading to the airport.
“That’s the major reason, not that the President is happy with the cash system,” the minister clarified.
The cashless system had been introduced less than a week earlier to curb corruption and improve revenue collection at toll gates managed by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) nationwide.
For more than 50 years, FAAN had relied on cash collections at toll gates, parking lots, and other airport points.
The switch to cashless payments triggered heavy congestion on access roads, with reports of hours-long delays and missed flights from affected passengers.
Keyamo revealed that President Tinubu has instructed the ministry to revisit and refine the system promptly.
“In fact, the President directed me that this should not take too long. It should not take too long, and I should get back to him on this issue.
“We should go back and, if possible, even engage the private sector to ensure that we establish an electronic system by which we can collect these revenues for the federal government at the gates, to the extent that it will not create the gridlock that we are having right now,” the minister stated.
A temporary hybrid approach will now apply, permitting both cash payments and the use of pre-purchased FAAN cards.
“We are going to do a hybrid system whereby we can collect cash temporarily and, of course, use the cards that they have collected temporarily for now,” Keyamo said.
The government plans to collaborate with private sector players to create a more efficient cashless mechanism that avoids congestion while still removing cash handling at the gates.
“This is also a platform for me to announce that we will be engaging various private sector participants.
“Mr. President said if we have to pay commission, we have to pay commission, but we’ll bring in private sector participants to help us devise a much more efficient payment system that will still eliminate cash at the gate,” he stated.
The original cashless setup required motorists to acquire prepaid cards or use electronic platforms to pass through toll gates, but challenges with adoption and infrastructure caused significant bottlenecks.
Airport users took to social media to complain about extended traffic delays, with videos showing queues stretching several kilometres from the toll points.
The Lagos and Abuja airports, Nigeria’s busiest, saw the worst impact, forcing many travellers to arrive much earlier to catch their flights.
FAAN had defended the cashless policy as a measure to prevent revenue leakages, fraud, and underremittance that plagued the long-standing cash-based collection.
The system was designed to enable real-time tracking and reduce diversion risks by agents.
However, inadequate preparation and limited support for electronic payments resulted in widespread disruption.
Keyamo gave no exact timeline for reintroducing an improved cashless system but highlighted the President’s urgency to resolve the matter.
