Between Aba and Onitsha, a bus is stopped an average of twenty times in three hours, paying ₦100 at each checkpoint, and the officers make change. It is a tax on Nigerian commerce that shows up in no invoice, and it quietly reshapes the true cost of moving goods.
On a recent supplier-mapping trip, one of our supply chain officers travelled the road between Aba and Onitsha. Along the 150-kilometre drive, the bus driver passed a scrunched red ₦200 note through the window to one of the many security officers who stop vehicles along that road. He took it, reached into a fold of notes, and returned ₦100. No argument, no menace. Just a transaction, performed with the unbothered fluency of something done a thousand times before.
That is the part worth sitting with. A roadblock that makes change is not a shakedown. It is an institution. It has a fixed price, a settled routine, and enough permanence that the people working it carry a float to keep the line moving.
Recognising it as an institution turns the question from a moral one into a practical one: what does it cost the people who move goods past it, every single day? Answering that is the kind of work this trip existed for. This was supplier mapping, the unglamorous fieldwork of documenting the on-the-ground processes of making and moving goods between Nigeria's commercial centres, and what it actually costs, from raw materials to final delivery. Aba and Onitsha are two of the busiest in the South-East. Aba is a manufacturing hub; Onitsha is home to one of the largest markets in West Africa. So we counted.
We made the run four times. The tally varied: a high of 23 checkpoints, a low of 18, and an average of about 20 across the roughly 150 kilometres and three hours between the two cities. At every stop, the bus paid ₦100.
On the run we logged stop by stop, the mix skewed hard toward the military:
The money follows the count. At ₦100 a stop, an average run costs the bus around ₦2,000, ranging from ₦1,800 on a light day to ₦2,300 on a heavy one. Spread across 150 kilometres, that is a checkpoint roughly every 7 to 8 kilometres and about ₦13 in tolls for every kilometre travelled. Measured in time, it is a stop about every nine minutes, for three hours straight.
That ₦100 is paid once per stop by the bus, not by each passenger. Taken alone, an average toll of around ₦2,000 sounds trivial, which is exactly why it works: small enough that no driver fights it and no passenger complains. The driver settles at the window and folds it into the fare. But multiply it across every vehicle on that road, every trip, every day, and it becomes a substantial, untracked levy on South-Eastern commerce. A haulier moving goods along the corridor pays at every post, on every truck, on every trip, and prices it into the freight rate. The trader receiving cartons in Onitsha or Lagos never sees a checkpoint on an invoice. They simply pay more to move goods, and rarely learn why. It appears in no customs schedule and no supplier's price list, and none of it is recorded, deductible, or recoverable.
It would be comforting to think this corridor is an outlier. It isn't. The Observatoire des Pratiques Anormales, a West African road-governance monitor that ran until it lost funding, recorded a regional average of 1.84 illegal checkpoints per 100 kilometres in 2017, the last rigorous count of its kind. At roughly thirteen per 100 kilometres, the Aba to Onitsha road runs at nearly seven times that. And the South-East is widely reported as the country's worst stretch. In early 2024 the Guardian counted more than 120 extortion points on the region's roads, some barely 500 metres apart, turning the Lagos to Aba trip from eight hours into as many as sixteen. Goodluck Ibem, President of the Coalition of Southeast Youth Leaders, a regional advocacy group, told the paper that trucks are forced to pay up to ₦3,000 at each stop. By late 2025, Premium Times was tracing those same tolls into the price of food, as drivers paid at a dozen checkpoints on a single run and passed the cost to the market.
A few things stand out about this stretch specifically. Neither city is anywhere near an international border; both sit deep inside Nigeria, in Abia and Anambra states. So it is fair to ask what Customs is doing levying tolls on a purely domestic interstate road. It is fair to ask why five separate security agencies each need a post on the same 150-kilometre stretch. And it is worth noticing which way the friction runs. It falls hardest not on the large importer who can absorb it, but on the small trader moving a few cartons on a thin margin, for whom every naira of freight comes straight off the spread.
This is the cost that sourcing decisions routinely miss. A supplier quotes a competitive ex-works price in Aba, the cost at the factory gate. But the price to get those goods to a buyer in Onitsha, or Lagos, or Kano, carries a layer of friction nobody writes down: the checkpoints, the change-making, the hours lost idling at the eighth Army post of the afternoon. The gap between a supplier's quoted price and the all-in delivered cost is where margins quietly disappear, and most of that gap stays invisible until someone drives it.
That is why we count. Mapping a supply chain isn't only about who can make the product and at what price. It is about everything that happens between the factory gate and the buyer's door.
The people working this road have built something efficient, in its way. The task for everyone else moving goods through Nigeria is to see it clearly, price it honestly, and build the route, the partners, and the timing that move goods around the friction rather than paying it blind.
