Nigeria is building again, and investors are following the signals

Three sovereign upgrades, a return to the eurobond market and more than 2,700 km of federal roadworks mark the most ambitious African infrastructure push in a decade — but delivery risk, not ambition, will decide the outcome.

For most of the past decade, the phrase “Nigerian infrastructure project” functioned in financial circles as a synonym for stranded capital. Contracts awarded are abandoned; state-owned refineries absorb billions in turnaround costs without producing fuel at scale. Investors priced the country accordingly. By 2023, Nigeria carried a Caa1 rating from Moody’s – deep in distressed territory – and had been locked out of the international bond market.

Thirty-eight months later, the picture demands reassessment. Between April 2025 and May 2026, all three major rating agencies upgraded the sovereign: Fitch to B from B⁻ in April 2025, Moody’s to B3 from Caa1 that May, and S&P Global to B from B⁻ in May 2026 — the country’s first S&P upgrade in fourteen years. Nigeria had already re-entered the Eurobond market in December 2024 with a $2.2 bn dual-tranche issuance, its first since 2022; yields on its existing bonds compressed by more than 130 basis points after the Moody’s action. Foreign reserves, below $34bn in early 2024, stood near $41bn by mid-2025.

The macro story behind those numbers – the abrupt removal of a petrol subsidy costing roughly ₦4 trillion ($2.6 billion at current rates) a year, exchange-rate unification, and the end of central-bank deficit financing – has been extensively told, usually as a tale of household pain. Less examined is where a meaningful share of the recovered fiscal space has gone: into the largest coordinated infrastructure programme Nigeria has attempted since the oil boom of the 1970s.

Start with roads, the programme’s centre of gravity. The government reports more than 2,700km of federal highway under construction, reconstruction or rehabilitation. Four entirely new corridors — branded “legacy projects” — anchor the pipeline: a 700km coastal highway from Lagos to Calabar through nine littoral states; a 1,068km Sokoto–Badagry route bisecting the country north to south; a 700km Akwanga–Maiduguri corridor into the long-neglected north-east; and a fourth Calabar–Abuja axis whose approved alignment was expanded this year to roughly 1,100km. The first 30 km of the coastal highway, built in rigid concrete, was commissioned in May 2025; flag-offs for the north-eastern corridor’s first two sections followed in June and July of this year, alongside cabinet approval of 27 further road contracts worth ₦3.9 trillion across 15 states.

Rail tells a similar catch-up story. The Kaduna–Kano standard-gauge line, 15 percent complete in mid-2023, passed the halfway mark in 2025 and is scheduled for commissioning in December 2026; the 387km Kano–Maradi line to the Niger border rose from 5 percent to above 60 per cent over the same period. In May, the cabinet approved nearly $3bn for three urban systems — Lagos’s Green Line, a Kano metro and a Kaduna light rail — while the eastern narrow-gauge corridor from Port Harcourt towards Maiduguri is being rehabilitated in sections.

Power may prove the more durable legacy. The Electricity Act of June 2023 dismantled a federal monopoly dating to independence, allowing all 36 states to license their own generation and distribution. The measurable results so far are the 700MW Zungeru hydropower plant entering commercial operation under private concession in 2024; grid delivery crossing 6,000MW for the first time in March 2025; metering coverage up from 44 to 57 per cent; and a queue of concessioned hydro assets – Farin Ruwa (20MW), Ikere Gorge (6MW) and the 460MW Katsina Ala project. In hydrocarbons, the presidency’s own sector review claims some $60bn in investments and commitments since 2023, and independent tallies show Nigeria’s share of African upstream final investment decisions rising from 4 per cent before 2023 to 39 percent across 2024–25.

For financial readers, the more consequential change is structural. Nigeria has historically procured infrastructure through the annual budget, with predictable results when oil revenue fell. The current programme deliberately diversifies the funding stack. The coastal highway uses an EPC-plus-finance structure in which the contractor carries construction financing against future tolls. The 125 km Benin–Asaba motorway, flagged off in March 2025, is fully privately financed under a 25-year concession — the first corridor delivered under the Highway Development and Management Initiative, a programme that aims to bring private capital to 35,000 km of federal roads. A corporate tax-credit scheme has enlisted Dangote Industries and the state oil company to build concrete arks against future tax liability. Two international airports, Enugu and Port Harcourt, have been concessioned to private operators—the first such handovers consummated in years, alongside the resolution of a two-decade dispute over the Lagos MMA2 terminal concession that had long served as exhibit A for Nigerian contract risk.

The regulatory plumbing has moved too. In August 2025 the concessions regulator, under presidential directive, devolved PPP approval powers so that ministries can clear projects up to ₦20bn without full cabinet review; a standardised PPP agreement template followed in June 2026. More than seventeen PPP projects have cleared the federal cabinet since 2023. None of this is glamorous. All of it is precisely what infrastructure investors have spent two decades asking of Abuja.

Strip away both the government’s superlatives and the reflexive scepticism, and the investable facts are these: a genuine multi-modal build-out is under way; its financing has shifted materially toward private capital and user-pay structures; the credit market has rewarded the shift with three upgrades and cheaper debt; and the entire proposition still rests on execution through an election cycle in a single-B credit.

A fair nation keeps a fair ledger. And this ledger, from May 2023 to this July morning in 2026, records one of the most aggressive infrastructure programmes in Nigeria’s democratic history.

We will argue about the cost. We will argue about the names on the signboards. But our grandchildren will drive the arguments. That, in the end, is the point.

Abraham Durosawo is an infrastructure professional based in Abuja.