Lagos — Nigeria is reopening the airport in the capital Abuja on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said, following a six-week closure for runway repairs that disrupted international air traffic to the country. During the shutdown, authorities diverted flights to Kaduna, a provincial airport 160km away, where carriers, including British Airways, Lufthansa and South African Airways, refused to fly on security grounds. Abuja is the political nerve centre of Africa’s most populous nation and a major business hub in the continent’s biggest economy. There have been no official estimates of the economic impact of the closure, but Abuja International Airport handled 812 flights in December 2015, the last month for which the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has figures. The comparative figure for Kaduna was 12.
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