Tayo Amusan: A New Landmark in Sports and Entertainment Emerges 

Full-sized trucks will drive straight onto the floor of the Lagos Arena through a marshalling yard, so that concert equipment can go up and come down quickly. The feature separates the building from halls in Africa that were designed for other uses and later fitted out for music.

Billed as Africa’s first purpose-built indoor arena of international standard, the $100 million project is led by Tayo Amusan, the billionaire chairman of Persianas Group, with the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), which holds 40.5 per cent.

Live Nation and Oak View Group, two global live entertainment companies, are partners. As commentators have pointed out, Lagos has never lacked artists or audiences; the shortage has been of venues built for their scale. But Amusan’s arena will seat 12,000, which makes it the largest indoor arena in Nigeria, and has 32 VIP boxes. Its seating tiers are designed to give every seat an unobstructed view.

The Turkish firm Yazgan Design Architecture drew a yacht-inspired building with cascading terraces and LED screens on all four exterior sides. It is going up in the coastal zone of Victoria Island and Lekki, beside The Palms Shopping Mall, which Persianas developed and opened in 2004, 20 years before the arena’s groundbreaking. The mall brought a modern shopping format to Lagos.

The venue is built for more than 200 events a year, from Afrobeats and global concerts to basketball, UFC, WWE, boxing, tennis, and futsal, the indoor five-a-side football game. 

The master plan also includes an adjoining hotel and parking. Hospitality, transport, event production, merchandising, security, and technical services stand to gain from the crowds, along with jobs, and the benefits could reach well beyond the arena’s immediate surroundings.

Readers might recall that groundbreaking took place on February 24, 2024, with completion first set for December 2025. Delays at the foundation stage, which covers piling and soil testing, moved the expected opening to between late 2027 and the second quarter of 2028. Soon and very soon, Amusan will show Lagos’ brilliance to the world.