Meet Wale Babalakin: the lawyer who built Nigeria's best airport with private money and then spent years fighting the government to keep it

The day Wale Babalakin walked into the office of then-Aviation Minister Kema Chikwe, he had just returned from South Africa, where he had seen what a proper domestic airport terminal looked like. He was stunned, and then he was furious. Nigeria, one of Africa's largest economies with one of its biggest aviation markets, was planning to replace the old domestic terminal that had burnt down with what Babalakin describes simply as a shed.

He told Chikwe what he saw in South Africa. She told him to make a presentation. He did. The design was approved, and what emerged from that conversation was MMA2, the Murtala Mohammed Airport Terminal 2, which opened in Lagos in 2007 as the first airport terminal in Africa built entirely with private funds and without a naira of government support. It remains, by common consensus among aviation professionals and frequent flyers, the best airport terminal in Nigeria today, nearly two decades after it opened.

Babalakin did not build it because he was an airport developer. He built it because he is a man who sees a gap and cannot leave it alone.

The house he came from

Wale Babalakin was born on July 1, 1960, in Ibadan, the ancient Yoruba city in Oyo State that has produced more than its share of the country's most distinguished professionals. He arrived into serious company. His father, the Honourable Justice Bolarinwa Oyegoke Babalakin, was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. His mother, Ramotu Ibironke Babalakin, was a pioneer female hospital proprietress in Ibadan, a woman who ran her own institution at a time when few women did either of those things.

He went to Sacred Heart Private School, then to Government College Ibadan, one of the most competitive secondary schools in the country, where he won the Banjo prize in Grier House. He proceeded to The Polytechnic, Ibadan for his A-Levels, and then to the University of Lagos in 1978, where he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1981 as one of the best 3 students in his class.

The Nigerian Law School followed, and in 1982 he was called to the bar. That same year, he was one of only 3 Africans admitted into Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University for the pioneer Master of Laws degree. He earned his LLM in 1983, received a Commonwealth Scholarship in 1984 for outstanding academic performance, and completed his PhD the day before his 26th birthday in 1986. The thesis was not a vanity exercise; it was the intellectual infrastructure that would shape how he thought about law, contracts and public-private deals for the rest of his career.

Learning from the master

He came back to Nigeria in 1986, did his National Youth Service Corps programme, and walked into the chambers of the man widely regarded as Nigeria's greatest lawyer: Chief Frederick Rotimi Williams. He stayed exactly one year. He was learning, not settling in. In July 1988, he established Babalakin and Co., from an office in the heart of Lagos.

The firm grew into something substantial. Today it has over 70 lawyers spread across Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, 13 partners, 3 Senior Advocates of Nigeria, and a reputation built on commercial litigation, arbitration, real estate and infrastructure. In 2002, Babalakin was elevated to Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the highest rank in the country's legal profession, becoming only the 2nd Government College Ibadan alumnus to reach that standing. In 2009, his firm acquired the rights to Optimum Law Publishers, the oldest privately published law reports in Nigeria, dating back to 1964. The intellectual commitment was not accidental.

He also published opinions when others stayed quiet and took cases that put him in direct confrontation with government agencies, regulatory bodies and established interests. He has described his own philosophy as "justice according to law, not according to the whims and caprices of the administrators of the law."

The airport that nobody thought would work

Before MMA2, Babalakin had been quietly building a real estate portfolio. High-rise buildings in Abuja and Lagos. A deal for the old Federal Secretariat in Ikoyi that he bid N7 billion for and signed a 99-year development lease on in 2006, with plans to convert it into 480 luxury apartments. Lagos State stopped that project before it got started, claiming the Federal Government should have sold the complex to the state instead. Babalakin went to arbitration and won. The building still sits there, waiting.

The airport was different. When the old domestic terminal at Murtala Muhammed Airport burned down, the government was looking for bids. The preferred bidder won and then failed to deliver. Babalakin's Bi-Courtney Limited was the reserved bidder and was called in when the preferred bidder dropped out. Everyone in aviation circles thought it would fail. Too complicated. Too expensive. Too much for a private company to carry without government money.

He brought in South African architects, supported by Nigerian ones. He designed not a shed but a terminal. Within 3 years, MMA2 was open. It had a flow, a scale, and a sense of design that no other Nigerian terminal has matched since. "There is no airport terminal in Nigeria that has the flow of MMA2 because it was well thought out and designed," he has said, without a trace of false modesty, because the statement is simply true.

Then the government decided it wanted it back.

The concession battle

Babalakin's position is that the concession was for 36 years, approved in a stakeholder meeting presided over by the late President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria says it was 12 years. That dispute has now run for years through the courts and the media, with FAAN periodically announcing it is taking back the terminal and Babalakin periodically securing injunctions to stop it. He has described how the controversy cost him airport development deals in 3 other countries, because foreign governments watching the stand-off decided they did not want the same kind of argument with a Nigerian firm on their soil.

The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway was a similar story. In 2009, under Yar'Adua, Babalakin's Bi-Courtney Highway Services Limited won the concession for the reconstruction and modernisation of Nigeria's busiest road. The design was ambitious: 7 overhead bridges, proper lay-bys off the highway, petrol stations, restaurants, small hotels. The project would have been done by 2014, he says, if the government had stayed out of it. In 2012, the Goodluck Jonathan administration revoked the concession, citing lack of performance. Babalakin's version is that the government held his company down for 22 months and then blamed it for not moving. "If the ill-advised move that led Jonathan's administration to interfere with the Lagos-Ibadan road project had not happened, the road would have been completed on or before 2014," he told a JAMB policy meeting in 2018.

What stands on that road today does not include 7 overhead bridges.

The other side

Beyond the fights with government, Babalakin has built quietly in other directions. The Bi-Courtney Group includes Stabilini Visinoni, a construction firm; Resort International Limited, his hospitality and real estate vehicle; and several other subsidiaries. His net worth is estimated by industry observers at between $150 million and $260 million, a range that reflects the difficulty of valuing assets tied up in concession agreements, property and ongoing litigation.

He has served as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council at the University of Lagos and held the same role at the University of Maiduguri, where he says he redeveloped the institution substantially in 4 years. He chaired the Committee of Pro-Chancellors of Nigerian Federal Universities and led the government committees that renegotiated the Federal Government's agreements with university unions, including ASUU.

His philanthropy is less public than many of his peers. He runs scholarship programmes covering more than 200 students inside Nigeria and 40 abroad. He donated a hostel to the University of Ilorin in his father's name, another in his mother's name in Ogun State, and a 500-seat auditorium to the Moshood Abiola Polytechnic. He has funded eye care for over 5,000 patients in Oyo and Ondo states through a foundation set up in his mother's memory.

He was conferred with the national honour of the Officer of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2007.

What he says he is

In a country where the line between law and business is often blurry, Babalakin has insisted on defining himself with unusual precision. "I am not a businessman," he said during a media briefing on MMA2. "I am a lawyer and an infrastructure developer. I don't trade. I don't import and export."

That line tells you something about how he understands what he has built. It is not a trading company or a commodity business. It is a practice, extended into the physical world, where the tools are contracts, designs and concession agreements rather than stock and invoices. The government has not always made that practice easy. The airport is still there, still the best terminal in Nigeria, still caught in legal argument about who has the right to run it.

At 65, Wale Babalakin is still fighting. That, too, feels like part of the practice.