The Chairman of Africa’s largest privately owned airline – Air Peace, Chief Allen Onyema, has claimed a “devilish conspiracy” by foreign airlines operating in the Nigeria-UK route to take out his airline from business.
In a TV program last night, Politics Today with Channels TV, Onyema said there was an “unspoken alliance” among the unnamed foreign airlines to oust Air Peace from international aviation by employing aggressive tactics of underpricing airfares, especially on the Lagos-London route.
Air Peace on Saturday, April 1, commenced direct Lagos-London flight, the first in many decades of an indigenous Nigerian airline. The Lagos-London route is considered one of the most lucrative, with British Airways and Virgin Atlantic between them doing 14 daily flights on the route, and BA another 7 daily flights to Abuja.
Until Air Peace joined the party, foreign airlines made a kill on the route charging as much as N3.5 million on economy class tickets on the route and as much as N15 million on business class.
Air Peace took only N1.2 million to fly to Gatwick on the economy and about N3.8 million on business class.
In response to Air Peace’s competitive pricing, some foreign airlines swiftly reduced their fares, with Ethiopian Airlines offering economy class tickets for as little as N600,000.
“If they take out Air Peace prematurely, this country will pay dearly for it”, Onyema warned Tuesday. “We are being deliberately frustrated in all ways,” he said, citing ground handling and space allocation challenges faced by his airline at Gatwick Airport in the last few days of its operations there.
“It’s a very devilish conspiracy. All of a sudden, (foreign) airlines are underpricing, below the cost”, and some of the current fares charged by the airlines are “not even enough to buy your fuel. So, why are they doing that? Their governments are supporting them because Nigeria has been a cash cow for everybody”
To break the monopoly held by foreign carriers over Nigeria for decades, Onyema is proposing more indigenous carriers to join the fray of international aviation. “I invite other Nigerian airlines to join the fray, let them come, let all of us do international operations. Yes, international aero politics is very dirty but somebody must pay the price,” he said.
The Chief Executive expressed immense appreciation for the support of President Bola Tinubu and his Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo for being “solidly behind” his airline so far.
Only on Monday, Keyamo announced that Emirates – the UAE carrier juggernaut is returning to its Nigeria operation in June, which it abandoned in 2022 claiming it had difficulty repatriating its funds from Nigeria.
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