Why Accra Airport displaced Nigerian airports as regional hub—Air Peace boss
Fresh insights have been given by the chairman of leading indigenous investor in aviation industry, Air Peace Limited, Mr. Allen Onyema.
In an interview in a local TV Station monitored in Lagos, he said it is a struggle, but we deserve to be given kudos by the government and the governed for doing our best in the industry under the given circumstances.
According to him, “The Nigerian airlines are becoming stronger and stronger by the day. All we need is the support of the government and the general public.
“That is why I have to thank this regime of president Buhari for giving us VAT waiver, giving us duty Waivers on commercial aircrafts and others. The government has done well for us here.
“However, the implementation is another thing; one thing is for government to bring out the policy that is meant to help everyone another thing is for the civil servants who are implementing these policies. They should understand the wishes of the government. The first thing that we have to do in this country is to get our airport infrastructure very right.
I am sure that some of you have seen what have been trending in the past few days.
“The new world class airport in Ghana is currently attracting the hub. It is when you have a good airport that airlines will now come and start using that place as a hub, but for now we don’t have it.
“So the airport infrastructure has to be worked upon, it is very important. It is mandatory, that is the first thing we need to do before thinking of any other project at all.
If we get the airport infrastructure right, the airlines will also begin to get other things right. For goodness sake, it hurts me and it hurts some other operators there is a lot of business in the west coast.
“The West coast or whatever they call it is an emerging market that is why you cannot really do direct flight to some of them.
You have to stop here and there and as you are stopping, you are building cycles in your engines, building cycles in your airframes. Your aircraft will go quicker to the maintenance shop more than if you were doing direct flight.
“These countries want to discourage Nigerian aircrafts from coming into their countries.
Meanwhile in our own country, they are being given the red carpet. I am not going to Abidjan not because I don’t want to go to, but because they waited for us and gave us something discouraging.
“This is so because they don’t want me to compete with their own local airline which is Air Côte d’Ivoire.
Lome, togo even stopped us from coming in when we applied to go in there because they don’t want their airline to be in competition.
Meanwhile their airline comes into Nigeria more than three or four times, their airline in fact is about doing local flight here. These are the issues why we lost over a billion on the West coast.
“That means that whatever we are making here, we are losing it at the west coast, and they don’t want to know the charges that we are incurring in the West coast.
We decided to bring in our air craft which is our 50 sitter’s jet.
Like now, we have decided to remove Freetown from the Lagos to Freetown, Banjul, and others.
“We now go to Freetown direct. Without us, the economy of this country would go down without the airlines.
We are driving the economy within, we deserve to be helped.
Nigerians are complaining that services are poor, why won’t the services be poor?
“In the morning, you will have about 2,000 passengers queuing to pass through one security scanner.
“Your pilots have been at the airport for your boarding flights sitting inside the cockpit, waiting for passengers to come and board. Passengers are held up at the queue because there are so many people trying to pass through one security scanner at that peak time of the day.
For 6:50 flight, they end up getting to the flight at about 7:50. One hour they would have used for the landing at Abuja is already gone.
“That airline must announce delay in Abuja, so people don’t know why all these delays and a lot of things happen. And now the federal government came up with the ease of doing business programme.
That is a fantastic idea if only that could be observed to the maximum; this country would be a better place to be.
