A Nigerian transport figure, Agbebi, has called for the country to adopt an integrated road and rail policy, arguing that coordinated planning across the two modes is a precondition for sustained economic growth.

The argument, reported by Vanguard News, centres on a longstanding structural weakness in Nigerian freight and passenger movement: roads and railways currently operate under separate policy frameworks, with little mechanism for aligning investment, tariffs or service design. Heavy haulage that could move by rail continues to travel by road, inflating logistics costs and accelerating damage to the federal highway network.

The case for integration is familiar from Nigerian network data. The national rail system, anchored by the standard gauge Lagos–Ibadan line and the Abuja–Kaduna corridor, carries a small fraction of the country's freight compared with the road network. Goods moving between the ports of Lagos and the northern states travel predominantly by truck, a pattern that raises transport costs for shippers and concentrates wear on corridors such as the Lagos–Ibadan expressway.

An integrated policy, on Agbebi's reasoning, would tie rail investment decisions to road corridor planning, so that each mode carries the traffic it handles at lowest cost. That would mean scheduling rail capacity to serve port evacuation, connecting freight terminals to road feeder networks, and pricing road use in a way that reflects the infrastructure damage caused by heavy vehicles.

The outcome such coordination aims to produce is measurable: lower average logistics costs as a share of landed product cost, reduced freight transit times, and longer service life for the highway asset base. Nigerian shippers currently face logistics costs well above global benchmarks, a burden that flows directly into consumer prices and the competitiveness of domestic manufacturers.

The proposal comes as Nigeria continues to grapple with the economics of its rail revival programme. New standard gauge lines have been delivered with Chinese financing and construction partners, but traffic and revenue on the completed corridors remain below the levels projected in feasibility studies. Connecting those assets to an effective national freight system, rather than operating them in isolation, is the policy gap Agbebi identifies.

No timeline, funding figure or implementing agency accompanied the call, which at this stage remains an advocacy position rather than a drafted policy. Whether the incoming transport agenda takes up multimodal coordination will be tested against the next cycle of budget allocations for the federal road network and the national railway operator.