Airlines, agencies, others jostle for ‘meagre’ 20 million yearly traffic

• Figure underscores aviation in Nigeria as small, weak
• Economy responsible for low travel propensity

Nigeria’s annual passenger traffic which oscillates between 18 and 20 million underscores how small, weak and fragmented the country’s aviation is currently.

This story is a paradox of sorts, given that the geography, as well as the demographic profile in Nigeria, favours air travel.

This huge gap is further made worse by the recent hike in fares by airlines who themselves are battling to stay afloat as a result of what they claim is an unfriendly business climate.

The lowest airfare to any route in Nigeria today costs as high as between N80 and N100,000 depending on the time of ticket purchase. This could further deplete traffic as many more people could take the option of road travel which is not only tedious but comes with its attendant risks.

Although, the 2023 total passenger traffic volume is yet to be made available by both the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people with a projected 20 million traffic for last year further exposed the harsh economic reality of the people to take to air travel.

Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates with a population of 3.1 million people saw a staggering 88.2 million passenger volume.

The airport expects its annual passenger traffic to reach 93.8 million in 2025, surpassing its busiest year in 2018 when it recorded 89.1 million travellers, and “hopefully we’ll get the magic 100 million number not long after,” Paul Griffiths, chief executive of Dubai Airports, said during the Dubai Airshow.

Changi Airport is the world’s 9th busiest, with a total of 31.9 million travellers passing through in 2022. It is a country of 5.5 million people.

In all, over 40 domestic and international scheduled, non-scheduled airlines, aviation regulatory body which deducts 5% per cent Passenger Service Charge (PSC), aviation ground handling companies and others rely on heavily for growth and that probably account for the low contribution of aviation to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Even the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) is also a partaker of the fallout of the 20 million traffic even though the airspace management agency makes more from overflier charges.

What NAMA charges airlines overflying Nigeria’s airspace is not made public, but in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) charges over-flight fees to aircraft operators that fly its airspace but neither take off nor land in its airports.

As at 2019, for en-route over flier, the FAA charges $38.44 per 100 nautical miles for Great Circle Distance (GCD), from point of entry to point of exit from U.S. airspace while Oceanic goes for $17.22 per 100 nautical miles.

NAMA is self-sustaining. It generates its resources and funds most of its projects from internally generated revenue and only gets assistance from the Federal Government when the projects are beyond its capacity.

Managing Director of NAMA, Umar Farouk Ahmed Capt. said the equipment the agency needs is in billions of dollars, stressing aspects of NAMA’s job as communications, navigation and surveillance.

Let us look at communications. Many years ago, I think the European Union gave us a satellite communication system. That was many years ago. We didn’t do anything about it. We did not expand it but traffic expanded, equipment degenerated”.

So, what should we do? The question you need to ask is, do we need satellite communication? The answer is yes. The means of communication today that is considered reliable in terms of clarity is VHF but VHF has its limitations. It is restricted in a nutshell by what we call line of sight. Line of sight will have obstacles like buildings, mountains natural and man-made obstructions. For us, we were able to propagate them with VSAT and what we were given by the European Union is not enough for our business today”.

The Managing Director of Nigerian Aviation Handling Company Plc, Indranil Gupta echoed the same sentiment at the weekend when he spoke to Aviation Metric.

He said both the purchasing power of the people which would help to improve the volume of aviation business and the coming of more airlines are the two things he looks forward to in the new year.

His words, “These are the two things I am looking forward to this year. Unless those two things happen; I keep saying to people, that in all of Nigeria, the total number of passenger traffic is roughly about 19 to 20 million yearly. There are individual airports in many parts of the world that handle between four and five times the traffic in some countries.

“Nigeria is not a poor country. We should have a lot more people travelling. I look forward to entrepreneurs; Nigerian home-grown entrepreneurs to try and cover up these gaps so that we can get more and more Nigerians to fly. The more people that we get to fly the more the economy will grow and there will be enough for all of us.”

The low Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita probably provides some explanation for the low propensity to fly.

Pakistan has a lower GDP per capita and still manages to record a higher flight propensity than Nigeria. The number of active domestic airlines is also lower in Nigeria than in other countries, again indicating the low level of demand for air travel.

A former Assistant Secretary-General of Airline Operators of Nigeria (AO), Mohammed Tukur said air travel is one of the barometers to gauge the health of a nation.

“Whenever a country is doing well, it will reflect on the number of people that travel by air. Nigerian aviation is not a stand-alone. It is part of the bigger economy of Nigeria and contributes to the GDP. It is obvious that aviation is the quickest barometer to check any economy.”

Wole Shadare