Again, Minister of Aviation Hints at Resumption of Flights to Nigeria by Emirates Airlines

Chinedu Eze

The Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, has hinted that the Middle East mega carrier, Emirates Airlines would soon resume flights to Nigeria.

The Minister made this known in his verified X (twitter) account @fkeyamo, saying, “Yesterday, I paid a working visit to the Ambassador of the UAE to Nigeria, His Excellency, Salem saeed Al-Shamsi at the UAE Embassy in Abuja.

“He handed me a correspondence from the Emirates Airlines indicating a definite date of their resumption of flights to Nigeria. That date will be formally announced by Emirates Airlines in a matter of days,” the tweet said.

However, inquiries made by THISDAY from the Emirates Airlines source did not reflect the optimism of the Minister. In fact, there is no sign of preparedness by the airline ondicating that it would soon resume flights to Nigeria.

There have been assurances from the Federal Government in the past that the airline would resume flights to Nigeria and that the diplomatic relationship between Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) would soon be restored.

The latest of the promise few months ago, which was credited to the Minister of Aviation was that Emirates would resume flight to Nigeria in June.

If that would be so, the airline would have activated its personnel in Nigeria by now and would have started the process of scheduling and sensitizing potential travellers of its resumption of flights in June.

On October 29, 2022, Emirates stopped flight services to Nigeria indefinitely and gave reason that it stopped flights to the country because of its trapped funds in the country and over the failure of government to make dollars available to the foreign carriers to repatriate their revenues.

But since the Federal Government announced that it had released the trapped funds in the custody of the Central Banks of Nigeria to all the airlines and that the foreign carriers funds still in Nigeria might be in the deposit of commercial banks and the airlines would have to resolve that with the banks, Emirates and other foreign airlines and even the International Air Transport Association (IATA) were mum about that and the issue of trapped funds seems to have been resolved.

Emirates operated twice daily to Lagos and once daily to Abuja, recording 21 flights every weekly from Nigeria.
Industry opinion is of the view that that Emirates Airlines cannot resume operations without restoration of diplomatic relations between Nigeria and UAE and there is no indication that the process has started.