Kola Karim's Shoreline Group signs a $300 million deal with Accor to build 10 hotels across 8 Nigerian cities by 2030

Kola Karim's Shoreline Group has signed a $300 million agreement with French hospitality company Accor to develop 10 hotels across 8 Nigerian cities by 2030, in what the 2 companies describe as Nigeria's first nationwide hotel platform and one of the largest single hospitality investments in the country's history.

The deal was announced at the Africa Forward 2026 summit in Nairobi. It will produce more than 1,200 rooms across the midscale, upscale and luxury segments, with Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt expected to anchor the early phases given their density of corporate activity and international travel demand. Secondary cities will also feature in the expansion as both parties seek growth beyond Nigeria's traditional commercial centres.

The agreement also includes a hospitality training academy designed to build local talent for the sector at scale, and the companies estimate the combined construction and operations programme will create approximately 1,000 direct jobs over the development period.

Karim, who built Shoreline into a major force across energy, oil and gas, infrastructure and industrial services, said the hospitality investment was designed to create a Nigerian-owned hotel platform capable of competing on its own terms with international operators rather than simply hosting foreign brands.

Nigeria's undersupply problem

The deal lands in a market that most industry observers describe as chronically undersupplied in quality branded accommodation relative to its economic weight. Nigeria is Africa's largest economy and one of its busiest business destinations, yet its branded hotel room count has historically lagged far behind South Africa, Morocco and Egypt. Data from W Hospitality Group showed Nigeria had more than 8,000 branded hotel rooms in the development pipeline in early 2026, placing it among the continent's leading hospitality markets by forward-looking supply, but the existing room stock in internationally branded properties remains thin for a country of its size.

That gap is the commercial logic behind the Shoreline-Accor partnership. Lagos ranked among Africa's top 3 cities for hotel development pipeline in 2026, trailing only Cairo and Sharm El Sheikh. The demand is real and growing, driven by business travel, urban expansion and a rising domestic middle class that increasingly expects branded accommodation. The reluctance of international chains to move faster has been mostly about execution risk: currency volatility, infrastructure gaps, rising building costs and concerns about operating margins in a high-cost environment.

The Shoreline partnership addresses several of those risks directly. Karim's group brings local financing capacity, market knowledge and relationships that international operators cannot replicate by parachuting in alone. Accor brings brand equity, management systems, global distribution and the operational track record to run hotels at a consistent standard across multiple Nigerian cities simultaneously.

Accor's existing Nigeria footprint

Accor is not new to Nigeria. The French group already operates 4 hotels in the country and has 5 more in active development, according to industry reports. Across Africa more broadly, the group operates more than 170 hotels and 34,000 rooms through brands including Pullman, Novotel, ibis and Sofitel. Its executives have consistently named West Africa as one of the company's global priority growth regions, and Nigeria specifically as the market in the region with the highest long-term upside.

The Shoreline agreement significantly accelerates that ambition. Moving from 4 operational hotels to a 14-hotel network through a single structured partnership with a well-capitalised local developer is a materially faster path than site-by-site acquisition and deal-making would produce.

Africa's hotel development pipeline reached a record 123,846 rooms in 2026 according to W Hospitality Group data, with Nigeria among the continent's top markets for planned projects. Marriott, Hilton and Radisson have all expanded their Nigerian development pipelines in recent years as the structural case for branded hotel supply in the country has become harder to ignore.

Karim's pivot into hospitality

The hotel push adds a new dimension to a Shoreline Group that Karim has built across decidedly heavier industries. His company's flagship asset is OML 30, the Niger Delta oil block acquired from Shell in 2010 with approximately 1.2 billion barrels of 2P reserves and current production of around 70,000 barrels per day. Shoreline also operates the Trans Forcados Pipeline, one of Nigeria's main export infrastructure arteries. Its engineering subsidiary DBN Energies provides EPC services to NLNG, Shell and TotalEnergies. Mota Nigeria, a joint venture with Portuguese construction group Mota Engil, is currently building the 700-kilometre Kano to Maradi railway.

This year has already seen Karim move aggressively beyond West Africa, with the $1 billion Algeria gas contract won through his Italian EPC acquisition Arkad Engineering alongside Egypt's PETROJET, and a new producing oil asset in the United States added to the portfolio in February 2026. The Accor hotel deal adds consumer infrastructure to a group that has until now been almost entirely concentrated on industrial and energy assets.

The African Continental Free Trade Area, which analysts expect to increase cross-border corporate travel steadily over the coming decade, provides a macro tailwind that makes the timing of a 10-hotel Nigerian platform less speculative than it might have seemed 5 years ago. Whether Shoreline and Accor can navigate construction and financing risks that have delayed numerous earlier hotel projects in the country will determine how quickly the 2030 target is reached. Attention is now turning to which cities and brands will be confirmed in the first development phase as both companies move from announcement to ground-breaking.