THE SUN
By Chinelo Obogo
Four years after the immediate past Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, unveiled the name and logo of the proposed national carrier at the Farnborough International Airshow, London, Nigeria Air, was eventually unveiled last week to much controversy, outrage and ridicule.
In disobedience of a Federal High Court ruling which ordered the Federal Government to stay action on the setting up of Nigeria Air, a Boeing 737 800 Max with “Nigeria Air” inscribed on it, registration number, ET-APL, Mode S Q4005C and serial number 40965/4075, flew into the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja on May 26, and was received with much flourish by Sirika and his team.
This launch was supposed to herald the much touted national carrier which has gulped billions in over seven years and the entire country’s media were present to witness the historic event. Hardly had the aircraft touched the runway when the registration number showed that it belonged to a foreign airline. It later emerged that the aircraft belongs to Ethiopian Airlines (ET) but was previously operated by Malawian Airlines, one of ET’s other subsidiaries. Apparently, Sirika had contacted ET and asked them to provide an aircraft which would be presented as Nigeria Air in order to beat the deadline he gave. The aircraft itself which became part of Malawi Airlines on 16th February 2014 was released to ET on August 12, 2015. It is about 11 years old and carried out its first flight with the ET logo on June 22, 2012. When the aircraft landed at the Abuja airport on Friday, May 26, 2023, it was greeted with a water salute, an action which is usually used to mark the first flight of an aircraft to an airport.
By Saturday evening, flight radar24 showed the aircraft had left Abuja airport and was enroute Addis Ababa from Central African Republic. On Sunday morning, the flight tracker showed the plane had landed at Ethiopia and on Wednesday, May 31, the aircraft was fully back with ET and had commenced its usual Addis Ababa –Mogadishu route.
The outrage that greeted this discovery was swift. A former Managing Director of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, Roland Iyayi, described it as a monumental fraud. “I think it is a monumental fraud to assume that by conniving with Ethiopian Airlines, having an aircraft that was on commercial flight for ET on May 21 or maybe a week ago, flying into Tel Aviv on an ET405 flight to fly into Abuja only for static display and then taken out, would mean to birth an airline. I can tell you that the deck house of Nigeria Air stuck on it has been removed and rebranded for ET to be put back in service. So, all that we saw a few days ago was a charade by the outgoing Minister of Aviation, possibly to sort of block out, considering the fact that in the last seven to eight years, we have had about N85.42bn in allocation to Nigeria Air, which is supposedly a private enterprise,” he said.
Where it went wrong
When Sirika came on board as minister seven years ago, one of the projects he promised to deliver is a national carrier which would be the envy of the African continent. To achieve this, he said the government would be seeking foreign investors to enter into a private partnership with the Federal Government. Industry stakeholders were optimistic about his ambitious plans while domestic airlines were cautious.
At a media event held on September 24, 2022, in Abuja, Sirika informed the public that after searching for investors, the Federal Government had selected 76-year-old ET Consortium as the preferred bidder for Nigeria Air. He told the gathering that ET scored 89 percent as regards the technical bid and 15 out of 20 in respect of the financial bid. The minister said the Request for Proposal (RFP) under the Public Private Partnership (Act), governed by Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) regarding Nigeria Air was not yet completed.
Saturday Sun gathered that former President Muhammadu Buhari gave the approval for the deal to be finalised after he was said to have been convinced by Sirika that the Federal Government would not be making any monetary investments. But there was strong pushback from industry stakeholders when Sirika announced some of the modalities for the deal: Carrier would be driven by the private sector and the Nigerian government would retain only 5 per cent stake in it, while ET will have a 49 per cent stake and 46 per cent of the airline would be owned by Nigerian investors (MRS and SACHOL). The government also said it would raise $250 million from the private sector and that 20 aircraft with petrol engines had been ordered for training purposes, nine of which had been delivered.
Reports show that at least N85.42 billion was budgeted for the national carrier project in seven years. The Federal Government had in 2019 budgeted N47 billion and between 2020 and 2022 an additional N14.6 billion was budgeted, while yet another N24 billion was captured in the 2023 budget for the carrier but with nothing to show for it.
Pushback
After it was revealed that ET will have 49 per cent stake, making it the largest shareholder, industry experts pushed back strongly, expressing their discontent with the model, saying that having a competitor as a major shareholder in the country’s national carrier would completely annihilate Nigerian airlines from the onset. They also argued that the partnership would only help ET achieve its target to dominate the African market as it had formed similar agreements in eight other African countries. Experts say the deal will create cabotage and destroy the industry, citing the case of Virgin Nigeria which had a similar model that eventually fizzled out.
The Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) were the first to take a definitive action against Sirika, as eight domestic airlines dragged the Federal Government to court late last year, listing Nigerian Air, Ethiopian Airlines, Sirika, and Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, as defendants.
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