Poor service delivery in our aviation industry has for long been a daily occurrence that no one does anything about. The level of discomfort that passengers face in our airports gives an impression that Nigeria’s aviation industry has no regulator. It is against this backdrop that the reported uproar last Wednesday at the Lagos airport between the Air Peace airline and the Senator representing Edo North in the National Assembly, Senator Adams Oshiomhole should attract considerable interest. It is not uncharitable to imagine that if more and more of such conflicts do not occur more regularly and with greater intensity, the industry is not likely to change. The point to be made is that last week’s uproar is not about a particular senator or a particular airline; instead, it is an inevitable reaction to an exasperating ethos.

The airline’s argument that it had to lock out Oshiomhole in line with its own supposed policy of keeping to time is laughable. In the entire week of the incident, how many times did the airline in question or any other airline for that matter keep to time? The truth is that lateness of flights if not complete cancellation is the order of the day in our aviation industry making it exceedingly irritating for any airline to occasionally sanction lateness of passengers who are never in a position to similarly sanction the incessant lateness of airlines. In other climes where service delivery is not temperamental, anyone who raises uproar simply because he is locked out for lateness would look strange to anyone who gets to know about it, but not so in our clime that can be described as a jungle.

It is only in Nigeria that a passenger with no luggage and who has already checked in on-line still has to be subjected to an additional visit to the checking counter. What imaginary defects do such passengers need to redress at the checking counter? Why pretend to have an on-line check-in system that is not credible? In another country it is at the boarding gate and not at the checking counter that Oshiomhole would have realized that he was late if indeed he truly was. Those who travel often know that last minute purchase of tickets at exorbitant costs is our airlines’ emergency strategy of exploiting passengers. I used to think that such smart moves were the handiwork of young operators and that their supervisors had no hand in that until I heard that it was an across-the-board practice which those on top also subscribe to.

It is difficult to fault Oshiomhole’s story about the lucrative business around the counters after certain passengers had been declared late and their seats given up and resold for huge amounts in compartments behind the counters. The other day, a friend who was to fly business class in a particular airline was told that the seats were exhausted but that if he paid a particular additional sum, another passenger could be persuaded to give up his seat for the big man. My friend did, only to find after boarding, that he was the only passenger in the business cabin of the flight.  Of the 8 seats in the cabin, 7 were empty.  If by chance some of the airline proprietors are unaware of such sharp practices, perhaps they need to look more closely because it happens daily in line with Oshiomhole’s story. 

Already, several versions of what happened last week are now in the public domain. The airline has not only alleged that the senator disrupted their services, they have also put a lie to Oshiomhole’s defence. The two parties are great unionists and their supporters are currently actively seeking to undo each other. On the side of the airline, there is the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) which has since described the conduct of the former Edo state governor ‘as unacceptable and another example of the growing trend of unruly passenger behaviour towards domestic airlines.’ For two reasons, the AON’s reaction cannot be easily dismissed. First, it was personally issued by its respected AON spokesperson, Professor Obiora Okonkwo. Second, the AON is shocked that days after the incident, the relevant agencies ‘were yet to provide clarity on what transpired.’

On its part, the South-South zonal chapter of the All-Progressives Congress (APC) has decried what it called the alleged maltreatment of Senator Adams Oshiomhole, by operators of Air Peace airline. For the same clarity that the AON is demanding, Blessing Agbomhere, the zonal organizing secretary of the party wants the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) to wake up from its long slumber, as the world has gone beyond Nigeria’s poorly regulated airline industry. Agbomhere insists that it is the NCAA which had given “local operators, the leeway to delay, cancel, and roundtrip tickets purchased by unsuspecting customers, thereby denying them the opportunity to travel on schedule without any sort of sanction on erring airlines.”

The above allegations are quite strong and they are capable of creating a situation where the result of the investigations demanded by both sides may not be acceptable to any of them. Ordinarily, one would have asked both sides to sheathe their swords as Festus Keyamo the energetic Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development has already intervened. To start with, if the same NCAA that is to conduct the investigation is already condemned by one of the parties, will the same party accept a negative report from the agency?  On the other hand, although Keyamo has done commendably well especially on the international scene to reposition our aviation sector, will he be able to release a result that is against Oshiomhole who is his political associate?

Well, Keyamo knows what it looks like to offend a federal legislator. It is not only the aviation budget of the sector that would suffer, Keyamo himself would ‘hear hot’ as we say in our part of Nigeria. As Minister of state for Labour and Employment during the Buhari administration, Keyamo cannot forget with ease the heated debates between him and the law makers over the recruitment of some casual workers in the 774 local government areas to perform tasks in roads rehabilitation, social housing construction, urban and rural sanitation etc. Keyamo enumerated all the legal provisions concerning the jobs but because N52 billion was involved, the fight never ended. When President Tinubu submitted Keyamo’s name for clearance as Minister in 2023, he would not have passed through if he didn’t pacify the Senate.

What the above suggests is that the current uproar between Air Peace Airline and Senator Oshiomhole is not as simple as it looks. The airline made a tactical error when it sought to present the Senator as a hooligan. It was also too quick with the statements it issued as well as its provocative diction. From his days as President of the Nigerian Labour Congress NLC, Oshiomhole established himself as a leader who fights for the rights of others. It is too late in the day to change the perception because even as governor of Edo state, Oshiomhole led protests in Benin against political opponents and even INEC. When asked if it would not have been neater for others to arrange a protest to call on him as governor to redress the relevant grievances Oshiomhole insisted that no one could change his life style. 

On the other hand, Allen Onyema the owner of Air Peace airline is loved by many Nigerians for his high degree of patriotism. To that extent, the claim that he runs an airline that relishes the exploitation of Nigerians appears contradictory. In between these claims lies the undercurrent of last week’s uproar at the Lagos airport. The way forward is to separate the personalities involved in this instant case. It is also important to recognize that the real malaise in Nigeria’s aviation industry is beyond a particular airline. All Nigerian airlines have the same disposition to the concept of aviation in the country. For example, anyone who buys a ticket on-line must wait for a minimum of 3 months to get back his refund concerning a trip that was cancelled by the airline to the discomfort of the passenger.

Having cultivated the freedom to indiscriminately change flight times “due operational reasons” something drastic must be put in place to curtail such impunity by our airlines. For this reason, Minister Keyamo must constitute a responsive regulatory body that can immediately stop the exploitation of Nigerians in the aviation industry. His efforts at compelling other countries to respect us and our airlines would be in vain if he cannot similarly compel our airlines to operate according to professional standards and also respect our citizens.