Wole Shadare 
Nigeria’s aviation market is fast receding. The country’s airlines are feeling the pain. The lack of strong airlines has not helped them. The policies are also not helping as they find themselves in a big conundrum, writes WOLE SHADARE
Decline
Nigeria’s international and domestic passenger traffic after COVID has continued to show a remarkable decline. Other factors like low disposable income occasioned by economic recession in most countries of the world, particularly Nigeria and the predatory nature of foreign and continent’s airlines in the country’s domestic scene coupled with setting up of new airlines by Nigeria’s neighbours with the country’s traffic in mind have threatened the ability of Nigerian carriers to partake heavily in a market that ordinarily should be theirs.
Few people can afford to travel domestically these days because of high fares even at a period the domestic carriers admitted that the fare they charge is abysmally low; a fact supported by a few analysts.
But the airlines may have found themselves in a tight corner as the ‘little’ they claim to charge to assist many travellers has not been met with a corresponding traffic as many of them go nearly empty most times.
In reaction to the market, they collapse their schedules to ensure they pick more passengers going to some destinations.
Depleting aircraft
As the number of aircraft in operation by domestic airlines gets fewer, schedules shrink, airports have fewer flights, and the domestic air traveller’s option become limited (less or no options).
The carriers are battling so many challenges as they try to keep on operations. There are fewer aircraft operating scheduled commercial flights within Nigeria now than three years ago.
The reason the situation is not glaring is because the macro economic conditions has limited the ability of the domestic air travellers from taking trips by air.
Domestic airlines are losing customers to alternative modes and wondered how the industry would survive and rebound without a review of certain government policies. On the international stage, the story is the same.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the clearing house for over 300 glob – al airlines late last year said that air passenger traffic from Africa to most major destinations saw gains in Q1’24 with the exception of Nigeria which declined by a negative four percent (-4 %).
IATA outlook
The reason for this negative outlook from IATA mirrors the harsh economic reality. The continuous high rates of foreign currencies, especially the United States dollar, had made foreign travel very expensive for Nigerians, who usually embarked on overseas trips for holidays and weekend visits, which aviation stakeholders described as “frivolous or casual travels.”
Reduced traffic
As a result of low traffic, international airlines have equally cut frequencies to Nigeria. Airlines’ activities in Nigeria have significantly reduced. Many airlines like South African Airways, United Airlines, RwandAir, Lufthansa and until recently, Kenya Airways cut down their schedules drastically.
RwandAir until August last year operated five weekly frequencies to Lagos, The carrier now operates daily flight to Lagos from Kigali. United States based United Airlines offers three weekly services to Lagos from Washington.
South African Airways services Lagos route from Johannesburg four times a week. Lufthansa operates to Lagos from Frankfurt, Germany five times a week from the daily flights it used to have before COVID; Air France does six flights from Paris, France, underscoring the plummeting traffic both domestically and internationally.
Most of the foreign carriers that hitherto operated daily flights to Nigeria have cut them to three, four and five while one rarely hears of international airlines doing multiple flights to many destinations in the country any more.
The same cannot be said of these major legacy airlines that are doing far more flights to Johannesburg, Nairobi, Morocco, Dakar and Cairo, a strong indication that many of the airlines see a great prospect in those markets than Nigeria where the only thing keeping them is the huge yield the Nigerian market gives them.
Foreign airlines are spreading their wings to Africa, regarded as the last frontier for domination by many mega carriers. The setting up of new airlines by Nigeria’s neighbours and some other carriers in East Africa and other places could further erode the country’s aviation market.
Ethiopian Airlines plans to invest massively in South Sudan Airways, Niger’s plan to float two carriers; one for domestic and the other international could see them eat deep into the country’s aviation market from the East, West, and Nigeria’s borders.
Experts’ views
Chief Executive of Belujame Konsult, Mr. Chris Azu Aligbe, maintained that the lack of strong carriers from Nigeria could see the carriers take huge advantage of Nigeria’s aviation market.
He said: “Our friends, our brothers in the north, they go to Cairothat’s where they go for studies; not just Dubai or whatever, they go to Cairo for medicals and everything. There are close to two million Nigerians in Sudan. That’s the market.
Then our brothers in Niger, many of them are from Niger. They have ancestral home in Niger. “If Niger sets up two airlines, one for domestic, one for international, they are targeting our market first and foremost.
Sudan, South Sudan, is targeting another market. Ethiopian Airlines is establishing an airline, 49 per cent equity in Congo Air. TAAG Angola is increasing its flights to Nigeria and domestically, TAAG Angola has co-share arrangement with 12 airlines.
They’re emptying our passengers into the legacy airlines.” Aligbe further stated that if after four years the country doesn’t do anything about having a very strong airline, the nation’s aviation market will be vanished., stressing that any Nigerian airline coming up after that period will battle to get into the market.
He regretted that the country is nowhere in the global aviation industry, stressing that if the country goes nowhere if does not have an airline of note.
“Somebody says, okay, license one international, license one regional. You don’t license international and regional airlines. You designate. Once you designate, let them operate. Our airlines have been designated.
We have designation to the United States. We have two designations. We have designation even to Brazil. We have two designations. We have designation to UK. “We have designation to Dubai. Are we operating? We have designation to South Africa. We don’t need designation to South Africa.
For the simple fact that we are signatory to the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), we do not need designation. How many of us are operating? We have headlines in our news.
Have we even been able to meet our domestic requirements? We dominated the West African market before now. Where are we today?” He supported the call by the country’s carriers on giving all carriers level-playing field in terms of Forex allocation but noted that the shouting of level playing field had been on for so many years, lamenting that over 52 airlines had collapsed since the airline industry was liberalised.
A former Assistant SecretaryGeneral of Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON), Alhaji Mohammed Tukur explained that Nigeria is large enough that it can have about three formidable airlines in the global space, but lamented that a situation where “we don’t have an airline of note is something very much uncalled for.
To think that there are some people who still believe that we should not have a national carrier baffles me. “Nigerian air travellers cannot but fly other airlines that offer them a seamless travel experience.
Not that they don’t want to fly Nigerian carriers, but if they cannot get what they are looking for, they have to go to where they can get it. Today, Nigerians will fly to destinations via Kigali with RwandAir.
