- Staggering failure rate suggests a fundamental problem
The statistics of failure is staggering — 141 airlines have failed in the past 17 years (2000 -2017), making it an average of eight failures in a year!
The West African coast was dubbed the white man’s grave, no thanks to tropical mosquitoes and the consequent malaria. Might Nigeria now be branded the grave of aviation, with so many airline businesses going under?
According to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), between 2000 when it birthed and this year, 141 airlines had gone under, among them many market leaders in their days. These include Bellview, which was a market leader for quite some time, Virgin Nigeria (which birthed from the Obasanjo Presidency’s aviation reforms), Chanchangi, Sosoliso, EAS, Okada Air, Space World and others.
According to Sam Adurogboye, NCAA’s general manager, public affairs, the reduction in airlines was due to operational and safety “sanity”, which the regulator imposed. From 141 in 2000, therefore, the number is down to nine.
That is quite a crash, and we could just imagine the high level of investment blood that sector has shed. Yet, you cannot blame NCAA for taking its regulatory duties very seriously.
Indeed, better to bleed in cash (no matter how painful and distressful for individual pockets), than for airplanes to drop off the skies like poisoned birds, leaving utmost anguish and misery; and a gash in the national psyche. With more operational rectitude, those tragedies are avoidable.
Indeed, in the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) code, NCAA has a global operational constitution. That has no space for the so-called “Nigerian factor”, euphemism for tweaking the rules for short-term gains, but long-term ruin. Though with this sharp failure of operating airlines, many an investor must have faced ruin, safeguarding air passengers’ safety is hardly a subject for sentiments.
If the regulator does its job well, ICAO-sanctioned checks would be carried out, home and abroad; rigid and robust maintenance checks would be done; minimum manpower requirement would be maintained, especially but not limited to certified pilots, among others. As NCAA rightly said, the ICAO rules are clear: whoever can’t cope with its rigour drops out. It is so all over the world, so it can’t be different for Nigeria.
In fact, lax regulations accounted for much of the air disasters in Nigeria. As NCAA admitted, any vain but rich Nigerian could just walk into the aviation sector and pick up a licence, simply because he has loads of cash and even more — tons of ego. That never should have been. Aside from fatal air crashes, such practices trivialise passengers’ rights; and de-market local aviation.
Still, even NCAA, and by extension the Federal Government, must admit the harsh operational environment for aviation in this country. Players groan at gruelling costs, the most basic of which is the low parity of the naira to foreign currencies.
For starters, airlines fund their costs in dollars. But they make their revenue in naira — and it takes no less than raking in N400, to make back every dollar spent. Yet, the market is not big enough for each airline to charge the market price. So most times, there are caps on fares. Otherwise, volume would drop, investments would go to seed and jobs would be lost.
Local civil aviators also complain of high taxes, not enough hangers for aircraft checks and routine maintenance, periodic glitches in a basic component as aviation fuel in a country that produces crude oil, and suspect corporate governance in NCAA and allied agencies the airlines have to deal with in their day-to-day line of work.
Although the government had in the past intervened in aviation with special funds (all to little avail), the sector should be viewed as strategic to a modern economy; and given the crucial attention it craves.
This high rate of business attrition in aviation suggests a fundamental wrong, apart from the notorious Nigerian penchant of not playing by the rules. Those skewed fundamentals must be found and fixed, to change the present sorry tale.
