By Tiko Okoye

For a very long period after the dissolution of Virgin Nigerian Airways, no domestic carrier flew the Lagos-London route. Enter Air Peace. The company has become a game changer with its recent maiden flight on the lucrative London route. The names in the manifesto included top-flight politicians, captains of commerce and industry, government officials and Nollywood celebrities. Air Peace not only ended the impasse with its maiden flight to Heathrow Airport, but it also triggered a downward-spiralling domino effect on ticket prices, significantly making air travel more accessible to Nigerians.

For example, a round-trip economy class ticket sells for a jaw-dropping N1.2 million as against the average astronomical of N4 million charged by other foreign airlines. The savings gets even bigger with the business class where a ticket goes for N4 million as against a staggering N17 million! Its highly competitive pricing promises to be a boon for the Nigerian economy. It’s expected to boost travel and tourism, fostering a stronger connection between Nigeria and Great Britain, and equally enhance the preservation of our scarce foreign exchange reserves.

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With such accruing benefits, one would think that practically every Nigerian will be thrilled to bits by the indigenous airline’s landmark achievement. But news of what attended the flight have cast a pall over the event. First is the shameless efforts by hirelings to de-market the airline with their preposterous condemnation of the isi-agu (lion’s head) traditional attire won by senior female officials on social media platforms.

For crying out loud, the isi-agu dress is the attire of choice by Ndigbo for very important occasions. Are such traducers refusing to accept that the Igbo ethnic nationality constitutes one of the three major legs that foster the stability of the Nigerian Project? By opting for isi-agu, the airline’s chairman, Allen Onyema, was making a very robust cultural statement with respect to his own roots in particular and the kaleidoscopic reality of the Nigerian society in general.

The second – and far more serious attempt – to frustrate the operation of the return flight was the very unpatriotic and heinous plot hatched by elements within the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA) in Lagos to strangulate Air Peace out of business. You can hear excerpts of Chief Onyeama’s jeremiad while speaking as a guest on Arise TV’s The Morning Show:

(The frustration) started more than seven years ago with several stumbling blocks deliberately put on the road to the operation, which eventually came to fruition on Saturday, March 30, as wicked civil servants tried to force the plane carrying passengers on the return flight from London the next day, Sunday, to park at a disused terminal near the bush…the wickedness in the system is stinking.

Your only carrier doing international operations in Nigeria would land and you keep us somewhere in the bush and you keep us somewhere in the bush, disused side of the airport and you then expect us to use rickety buses to take the international passengers to the new terminal, where these foreign airlines rejected when they opened. A similar incident had played out before; because it was Air Peace, and because it was my country, we went in there when they begged Air Peace to do that.

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But I said ‘No!’ this time around. You cannot treat us like second class citizens in our own country. When they wanted to do the runway analysis after the lighting, they didn’t have money to fuel a triple-seven (Boeing 777). A triple-seven consumes about 8,000 litres of fuel per hour. It was Air Peace they brought. We even told them to allow us use our smaller planes because of the cost, but they said No; they insisted on a triple-seven, and we did it free of charge. I don’t even want to enumerate what we have done both for the government and people of this country.

Now, on the new airport, they would park us two kilometres from the terminal and expect us to be shepherding our passengers in rickety, uncomfortable buses. Nobody else is using that end. No aircraft, not even foreign or local. That was where they asked my pilot to park. Meanwhile, C-23 was open where we could just park the aircraft and avio-bridge will key in. And when my pilot called, they said they were reserving it for a foreign airline at the expense of a Nigerian airline. They did it before.

It has now happened again. Remember that this woman (FAAN MD, Mrs. Kuku) had earlier said on television that a place had been dedicated to Air Peace as the home airline. When you go to Britain, you have the entire Terminal 5 solely reserved for BA (British Airways) but the reverse is the case in my own country.

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The DG of the NCAA (Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority) was on board my aircraft. About four senior staff of NCAA were also on board. After standing in one place for 30 minutes, the NCAA DG entered the cockpit to ask the captain what was happening. When the captain told those in the control tower that even the DG of NCAA was inside the aircraft he collected a clap back of “And so what?”

Thank God I was present at the airport awaiting the arrival of the aircraft. I called my operations control centre who could reach the pilot. I told him to tell the pilot to block the taxiway. It was when BA landed that they started making moves to tell us to go to where we rightly belonged.

Imagine the time it would take to convey all the passengers with their luggages from that bush to the terminal building. Imagine the attendant discomfort and stress to the passengers and the time it would take to offload. It would have taken not less than six hours for passengers to finally exit the airport, and travelling passengers ignorant about what is at play would have hated Air Peace. That was the game plan! So, we are not only contending with external conspiracies, but also with internal conspiracies within Nigeria.

Chief Onyema’s lamentation raises several critical issues. What stopped the planned dedication of a special area to Air Peace as the ‘home airline’? I’ll keep my suspicions to myself for now pending the outcome of a full investigation of the saga. Suffice to say that it would be unthinkable for British Airways to be accorded the kind of crude, humiliating maltreatment Air Peace is being subjected to at MMIA.

What is the nature of the relationship between the various federal government agencies superintending the aviation industry that would make someone in the air traffic control tower grow the liver to snipe “And so what?” when informed that a whole NCAA DG was in the plane being needlessly delayed and sidelined? Something is definitely wrong!

President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda puts him in a very delicate situation. He can ill-afford to condone crass ineptitude and indiscipline in the federal civil service. He can also ill-afford to preside over an administration that appears rife with contradictions and internal divisions and incapable of reining in pandemic corruption. It’s true that he has demonstrated a sense of purpose by unsparingly relieving those who have involved themselves in untoward conduct of their appointments. But he certainly needs to do more to clean up a polity marked by great accumulation of filth of the highest order.

Reacting to the Air Peace Chairman’s lamentation, via X – formerly known as Twitter – the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, urged the Aviation Minister, Festus Keyamo, to sack some officials at the MMIA in a bid to restore sanity at the place. But if Keyamo, who himself was one of the VIP passengers on the flight to London (can’t tell if he returned with the plane) needed Onanuga’s prompting to know what exactly he ought to have done, then he should be summarily dismissed from his ministerial post to serve as an example to other cabinet members that it’s no longer business as usual with this administration.

Still, the constitutional right of any Nigeria cannot be breached willy-nilly. The affected airport officials should be suspended and given an opportunity to present their case before an investigative panel prior to any disciplinary actions being taken. The investigative panel must ascertain the true nature of working relationship between sister aviation agencies and how to make the recent of all aviation authorities truly enhance the performance of the aviation sector. And while they are at it, the investigative panel should ascertain whether any aviation official(s) fraudulently submitted phony claims for the pro bono runaway analysis Air Peace had done.

On its part, the federal government must be prepared to provide Air Peace with all the support needed in terms of financing and diplomacy to withstand the chicanery of powerful foreign airlines that are, to say the least, not pleased with how the home airline has proverbially begun to pour sand in their garri. These foreign airlines have far-reaching tentacles and it’s only logical to expect that several Nigerian airline workers and officials are already in their payroll with the sole KPI of sabotaging any government aviation policy they consider inimical to their interest.