Nigeria May Review Foreign Airlines’ Multiple Designation Policy

• Operators Seek Help To Tackle Aviation Sector Woes

Nigerian airlines can now heave a sigh of relief as the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation has begun an inquest into multiple designations of foreign airlines into many airports in the country.

To become effective, Nigeria may have to renegotiate its Bilateral Air Services Agreement (BASA) with over 80 nations.

The legislators stated that the new civil aviation bills before the National Assembly would tackle the ‘anomalies’.

Many of the local carriers had expressed displeasure that granting foreign carriers many landing points have eroded the gains of the carriers and led to huge capital flights amounting to over $300 million annually.

Over 85 per cent of air travellers on international destinations are airlifted by foreign airlines in Nigeria and these foreign airlines are multi-designated to different major airports in the country; that one international carrier could operate to five airports.

According to aviation experts, multiple designations have pros and cons. Nigeria has BASA that is skewed in favour of foreign airlines because of lack of capacity by local carriers to service many of the routes served by foreign carriers.

Chairman of the Committee, Nnolim Nnaji in responding to the complaints by airlines and participants at second day of the public hearing on amendment Bills on civil aviation Acts regarding the policies of government that tend to undermine the survival of indigenous airline operators agreed that such arrangement was detrimental to the growth of the industry.

He stated that the committee has taken note of the challenges such policy was posing to the local airlines and would see how the new laws could address the matter.

It was the opinion of the participants that all foreign airlines operating into the country should be given approval to operate to only one destination in Nigeria and any point beyond should be through code share with an indigenous operators.

It would be recalled that Nnaji had earlier even before the inauguration of the committee voiced his opposition to this same policy.

The airlines also made strong case over their inability to access foreign exchange officially from the Central Bank while foreign are given special windows to access foreign exchange and repatriate their ticket s’ proceeds seamlessly.

There was a consensus of the speakers that similar window should be created for local airlines by the Central Bank of Nigeria to enable the operators access enough foreign exchange to fund their aircraft maintenance and acquisition.

The issue of high interest rate on loans was equally raised by the airlines which according to them sometimes would go higher than 25 per cent against the single digit interest rate in some other climes.

He however suggested that the airlines, the agencies would need to meet with the Committee to iron out areas of conflicts so that the new laws could stand the test of time by the time they are passed.

Wole Shadare