Abdullahi: Closure of Abuja Airport will Not Exceed Six Weeks
Director of Consumer Protection, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, Adamu Abdullahi, has assured air travellers that the rehabilitation work on the Abuja airport runway will not exceed six weeks. He also spoke on high air fares and challenges facing N
How do you see the government directive to foreign airline to move their Abuja operations to Kaduna?
The airlines have to make a commercial decision whether to go to Kaduna or not, some which didn’t go like British Airways, issued a notice that they have cancelled their flights but they were not allowed to move those slots to Lagos to double their Lagos frequencies. And you know that there is no code-share between the foreign airlines and Nigerian operators so that the local airlines could help to their passengers farther. Ideally, if they doubled their Lagos flights then they would have a local carrier that will be moving their passengers from here to Kaduna.
Now how do you see the position of the passengers in this case?
We don’t envisage having problems with BA, they have been in the business for long and in such circumstances they know what to do. They know what the regulation says. The regulation is very clear. They have cancelled their flights on time, I am positive that by now they have started making refunds to passengers. So the passengers will be free to go and buy another ticket from another airline to keep their appointment. Because really going to Kaduna or not is a commercial decision, the government cannot force airlines to go to Kaduna. Because any aircraft that leaves any destination A, going to destination B always has an alternate airport, destination C, in case of any problem with destination B that it is going to, it can always land in C. So what the government did was to now provide Kaduna as alternate to Abuja that is airport C. so the decision is really on the airline, if it wants to go to that alternate airport fine and good. If not, the government cannot come out and say you must go to Kaduna; it is not something that the government can force them to do. Yes the passengers have a say in such circumstance, if the passengers insist with the airlines and agree with the airlines that they would carry them to whatever destination they are going to and no complains come to my desk, then I don’t have any quarrel with that. It is the decision of airlines versus passengers; they decide among themselves what they want to do. It is more or less a contract of carriage between the two of them; therefore, it is their decision.
People are feeling that the six weeks given for the completion of work on the runway might be exceeded; are you optimistic that it will just be six weeks?
I am solidly behind my Minister of State, Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika. The Minister said not a minute above six weeks and I am taking him for his words and I appeal to the public to also take him for his words and pray for him to succeed rather than start to cast doubts or to have doubts in their minds. Our prayer is that it will take six weeks and we believe that the six weeks that he has already mentioned is sacrosanct.
You know that Arik cancelled all its international flights and curbed their regional and local flights. I want you to look at the impact, what is the impact on the passengers of a Nigerian airline that has dominated the West Coast?
Seriously the Arik story is a tragedy; that is the only way you can look at it. This is a very, very promising airline. When it started all of us were happy that we are not going to miss a national carrier, they have the capacity. At a state they had up to 28 aircraft, so we believed then that all the routes were covered and they were. Because at a stage they were doing 120, 150 flights in Lagos alone. Then all of a sudden things started to go the way they were going.
We kept giving the warnings because the signals were there but once you kept maltreating passengers the way Arik did, the only way is down, because the passengers will no longer have the confidence in you. Air travel is about confidence, it is just like you and your banker, your doctor, you and your airline should be about the same thing. Promise should be sacrosanct, when they tell you that they will leave at 3 o’clock let it be 3 o’clock. And they didn’t try in that direction at all, more importantly even when they could prove that the delay or the cancellation was really beyond them they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. They didn’t go by the regulations, they leave the passenger on the airport even late in the night, they won’t take them to hotel as the regulations say they should.
They will be arguing left, right and centre. Even giving refreshment was a major problem with Arik and things like that. So what has happened has happened and as you asked the impact is really great. But the way we have tried to resolve it is when the passengers started agitating, we asked Arik to advertise and tell passengers that they have canceled this flight and that the passengers should come for refunds which the passengers did. They came and at a stage there was a really a stalemate because Arik could not keep to its promise, their accounts were garnished, we understood with them and we explain to the passengers that for the meantime they had to hold.
The Minister made entreaties with Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) (which garnished the airline accounts) and AMCON understood that they have commitment to their passengers and they have to refund those tickets.
Medview really tried in this instance because they agreed to pick most of the passengers especially to London Gatwick where they go to. So most Arik UK passengers joined Medview Airline and most of them have really left; unless, of course, you have booked in advance but those that were supposed to leave at the time at that time had left. And it is still an ongoing thing, even this morning (March 6, 2017) I had an alert on my phone that somebody is happy that his family that was stuck has finally left and they have now gone with Medview.
The other issue is the economy aspect that you are talking about. Arik used to sell its ticket in naira and even when the exchange rate became very high people were able to afford Arik tickets because they were buying in naira. Now that Arik has really scaled down its operations our only prayer is that things will look up. As of this morning Arik was promising that they were trying to see the possibility of bringing five more aircraft into their fleet. If they can do that, I know that the operations will go up more. And this issue of retrenchment of staff is something that really bugs my mind because sending 1,500 aviation staff into the market is not the best of times. People are already suffering with jobs and they know what will happen. So we pray that things will look up and these additional five aircraft and more will come back into their fleet so that their operations will continue; especially the wide