Middlemen operating at the Rigasa station in Kaduna have artificially raised the prices of tickets for the Kaduna-Abuja train.

According to reports, the e-ticketing website of the Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC) has been down since Friday and travellers have been forced to purchase their tickets at the station.

This has reportedly provided an avenue for some railway staff to liaise with middlemen to inflate the price of tickets. The staff of the NRC sell multiple tickets to the middlemen before the opening of the ticketing booth, causing the tickets to finish before the regular passengers can purchase them. This forces the passengers to buy from the middlemen at outrageous prices; economy class tickets which originally sold for ₦3,000 were being sold for between ₦5,000 and ₦7,000.

This development has left several people stranded seeing as the Abuja-Kaduna highway is currently not safe for a commute.