Nigeria Air was programmed to fail from day one due to no structure—Banjo
Former Director of Human Resources at the defunct Virgin Nigeria, Mr. Victor Banjo, has opened up on the Nigeria Air project which failed even before landing due to what he described as lack of requisite structure for success.
Banjo dropped a bombshell, arguing that the national carrier idea was not to launch an airline but might have been for some other purposes not disclosed to the public.
In his presentation weekend at the quarterly business breakfast meeting of the Aviation Safety Roundtable Initiative (ASRI) in Lagos on the theme, ‘Short life span of Nigerian airlines, the importance of corporate governance,’ Banjo made it clear that apart from carrying along the private sector, “The proposed national carrier lacked accountability, fairness, transparency and independence”.
“From the outset, Nigeria Air was doomed to fail because the four pillars of corporate governance were missing. In terms of transparency, too much was shrouded in secrecy for a project that a huge chunk of taxpayers’ money was about to be committed, and time will tell if it will move from being premature to a stillborn.
Business Hilights recalls that the embattled Minister of State for Aviation, Hadi Sirika, had in September announced the suspension of the planned national carrier which the Federal Government had said would begin flight operations in December.
Before the suspension tweet by the minister, he had, according to industry experts, violated the prevailing federal government’s Executive Order 003, which centered on local content by giving out the contract for the design of the logo to a Bahraini firm, Form6 Communications LLC at a whooping cost of $600,000 paid upfront without recourse to tender procedures.
Because the logo design is driven by technology, checks at the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) by Business Hilights revealed that it was not even contacted before the contract was given out so as to consider first, local designers in line with the agency’s policy of IT development and related official responsibilities.
