Lagos Signs MoU with Summa Group as Lekki–Epe International Airport Moves to the Top of the Priority List

The Lekki–Epe International Airport has stopped being a line on a planning map. The Lagos State Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the international Summa Group, placing the project on the public-private partnership track and naming it a top-priority infrastructure file for the state.

The airport sits on over 3,500 to 4,000 hectares in the Epe and Ibeju-Lekki axis, immediately adjacent to Alaro City. Officials describe the position as deliberate: the site already has the free zone, the Lekki Deep Sea Port and the Dangote Refinery complex within a short haul, and the airport is designed to stitch those three assets into one freight and passenger system.

In its initial phase the facility is being designed to handle up to five million passengers a year. It is specified as Code F-compliant — runway, taxiway, stand and terminal geometry sized for the largest commercial aircraft in service, including the Airbus A380 — a standard no Nigerian airport currently meets.

The strategic case is congestion. Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Ikeja has run past its design capacity for years, and the state's position is that a second, purpose-built hub on the coast is the only way to relieve it while giving cargo a home next to the port rather than in the middle of the city.

Before any steel goes up, the ground has to be protected. The state has stepped up site protection measures around the corridor of the airport, working with traditional rulers including the Oloja of Epe to hold the boundary against encroachment, unauthorized construction and illegal mining. Perimeter fencing of the designated land has been approved, and officials say the fence line will define exactly which parcels are inside the project and which are not.

The MoU is the opening instrument, not the final one. It sets out the framework under which Summa Group and the state will progress to due diligence, a concession agreement and financial close — the sequence that earlier corridor projects have followed from memorandum to groundbreaking.

For Epe, the pull is already visible. Logistics parks and warehousing estates along the axis have been filling since the free zone's spillover began, and an airport of this class adds passenger terminals, catering, laundry, ground handling, hotels and a maintenance village to that demand. Contractors' camps, engineering teams and service companies arrive years before the first flight, and the town's guesthouses, transport unions and traders are already repositioning around them.

That demand has a regulatory edge buyers should not ignore. Parcels inside the published approach corridors carry building height and land-use restrictions, prices along the axis are now governed by the regulated band for documented lands, and plot owners in the released villages face the ₦400,000 development levy before building. Land inside the fenced airport site is not for sale at any price, and anyone transacting near the boundary is advised to confirm the fence line and the title position before paying.

For investors weighing the corridor, the airport is the single reason the two-year outlook looks different from the last decade: a five-million-passenger hub, a deep sea port, a refinery, a free trade zone and a planned town all inside twenty minutes of each other. The state's message to the market is that the land is now protected, the partner is signed, and the works are coming.