The Chief Executive Officer of Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), Alhaji Ahmed Kuru, has given insights on why no domestic airline in Nigeria has surpassed a decade of existence.
Explaining in a meeting with the National Assembly on the fate of Arik Air recently, he said though the Nigerian aviation market is huge and untapped, structural governance and inter-agency stress are discouraging running airline services business.
He said “Today if you want to travel to Lagos from Abuja and you did not book your ticket two or three days earlier, the chances are that you may not get a seat, which tells us that there is a serious gap. To address the gap means that operators such as Slok Airlines and the likes may have to come back to Nigeria air space. But for them to come back, there needs to be a lot of aviation reforms, so that it will be attractive.
According to him, “There is something the National Assembly should do to help the aviation industry. Why is it that there is no airline in Nigeria that has successfully existed for 10 years? We have successful businessmen in Nigeria, which tell you that what is happening in the aviation sector is a structural problem that needs to be address and I think the National Assembly has a role to play there.”
Continuing, Kuru averred that “Aviation in Nigeria is a business that lacks good corporate governance. It is usually a one-man show kind of business and that sort of business structure has all sorts of management challenges. But having said that, the current state of the sector is not helping the operators for instance the fees and charges they pay to different agencies regulating the industry are too high. There are quite a lot of issues that I think when we sit down to address; we should be able to help the industry because it is very strategic to the development of the economy of Nigeria.”
