Uber Packs Up and Drives Out of Nigeria
Twelve years after rolling into Lagos, Uber has packed up and left Nigeria — shutting down alongside Uganda on September 2, and marking its second African exit in eight months after Tanzania. Here's what Uber says happened, and what's next for the drivers and riders left holding the bag.
If Uber's Nigeria exit had a picture, it would look like a car loaded to the roof and idling at the border: twelve years of daily habit strapped down and driven off in the space of a single week.
Uber shut down ride-hailing operations in Nigeria and Uganda on September 2, 2026, ending a 12-year run in Nigeria that began in Lagos in 2014. The core service stopped immediately; Uber's Help Centre will stay open until September 23 to handle final account queries, refunds, and outstanding balances for riders and drivers.
In a statement to Techeconomy, Uber said the decision followed a review of its "evolving business priorities and investment focus across the continent," and stressed it applies only to Nigeria and Uganda — not a wider African pullback. Lorraine Onduru, the company's Head of Communications for East and West Africa, said Uber "remains deeply committed to Sub-Saharan Africa," pointing to continued operations elsewhere on the continent. Uber also explicitly denied that a recent dispute with the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria over e-hailing access at airports had anything to do with the exit.
Take Uber's framing on its own terms if you like. But this is not the first time in the past year that Uber has walked away from an African market it once treated as a growth priority. In January 2026, Uber shut down operations in Tanzania — Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Arusha, Mwanza and Zanzibar — after a long-running standoff with the transport regulator LATRA over commission caps, a fight the company had already lost once before, briefly suspending Tanzanian service in 2022 before a short-lived return in 2023.
Two exits in eight months, on opposite sides of the continent, both explained by Uber as routine business review rather than retreat. Whether that holds up as the fuller picture becomes clear is worth watching — but for now, the immediate story for Nigeria is what riders and drivers do next: roughly a dozen years of daily habit built around one app, gone in a day, with three weeks left on the clock to sort out anything still owed.
We'll be tracking how Bolt, inDrive, and Nigeria's own ride-hailing players respond in the days ahead.
