NO TIME FOR A GOVERNMENT AIRLINE
The idea of a national carrier is a misplaced priority
Nearly every other national airline has either folded up, gone bankrupt or been sold off. Air India, South African Airways, Alitalia, etc., the list is long. But the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika insists on foisting on the country a new national carrier without a logical convincing argument to justify this bid. When he first mooted the idea in January 2016, we warned the current administration against erecting another monument to waste in a period when it is borrowing even to pay salaries. Our position has not changed.
We live in a country in which government and its enterprises are doomed to failure from bad management and rank corruption. Moreover, this is a country in which a massive privatisation programme was initiated to salvage huge moribund public enterprises only a few years ago. The remaining public assets from refineries to stadia are either embarrassing eyesores or wasting monuments. To compound the problem, the nation’s aviation industry is currently going through financial stress and many of the airlines are not only highly indebted, but they are also hindered by inadequate fleet and capacity and thus cannot compete effectively. Therefore, given the operating environment, we feel that the idea of a national carrier is a misplaced priority. The current state of the aviation industry in Nigeria does not indicate a need for an airline that exists just to fly the national flag.
As we have highlighted in the past, at its peak, the then national carrier, Nigeria Airways had over 30 aircraft in its fleet. But by the time it was eventually liquidated in 2003 by the administration of President Obasanjo, it had become a huge liability, an object of national shame and international ridicule. Some of the aircraft were seized abroad at will because of indebtedness. Salaries were hardly paid. At one of the most ludicrous moments in 2002, after more than a 24-hour delay on a Lagos-bound flight from New York, a passenger had to lend the airline $5000 to buy fuel! Indeed, Nigeria Airways was synonymous with large scale inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption. Yet there is nothing to suggest that appreciable lesson has been learnt as evident in the debacle that followed the federal government arrangement with Virgin Airlines to run Virgin Nigeria as Public-Private Partnership (PPP), a similar model that the aviation minister is now proposing. Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the group complained of political intrigues, corruption, lack of adherence to agreements, and a regulatory body that didn’t know what to do “and persistently asking for bribes at any point.”
We agree that given the size of our nation and the mobility of our people, there are sufficient grounds to argue for a national carrier. At present the country loses so much money to foreign airliners because there is no national carrier with adequate network of routes or the capacity to operate extensively many of the highly lucrative routes. The few private airlines that attempt to do that do not have the wherewithal and capacity to finance extensive foreign operations. Yet, no matter how patriotic we may feel about the issue, this is nothing but a misplaced nostalgia.
Existing private domestic and international carriers are all groaning under huge debts and operational limitations because of an unfriendly policy and economic environment. A new national carrier is therefore an idea whose time has passed and whose justification belongs in the refuse dump of public enterprise. Nigeria’s economic situation is already bad enough. To saddle it with yet another massive loss-making public enterprise would be foolhardy. The minister of aviation should look in the direction of reforming our creaky aviation sector if he is desperate for a positive legacy.
