BY Tope Fasua
I must confess that years back when Minister Hadi Sirika first toyed with the idea of Nigeria Air – a sovereign airline for Nigeria – I wasn’t on board with him. I felt it was a wasteful idea and since we hadn’t run anything well, any such massive idea to be handled fully by Nigerians was likely to fail like the ones before.
I also had a few examples to show. In the dying days of Nigeria Airways, when President Obasanjo got Mrs Kema Chikwe to try and revive the airline – somewhere around 2000 and 2001 – I recall going to London with them from Lagos. It was a hilarious disaster. Of course, by then Nigeria probably had no aircraft of her own left so we actually boarded an unbranded white aeroplane. It had a white crew with a few Nigerian cabin crew (wet-lease it is called). It was our last-ditch effort. The fare was around N70,000. I recall that they served cold food and warm Coca-Cola, complaining that there was no electricity in Lagos to freeze their drinks or to warm the food. It was in the dead of winter, and as we climbed into the air and it got chilly, they apologized that they had no blankets. When I arrived in London, my luggage did not come with me. I filled out a form indicating my friend’s address at Hackney. Seven days later when I departed London for Lagos, I had to buy Ghana-must-go bags (I hate that term) for the stuff I had purchased in London.
The flight back was better for the in-flight catering, but they also lost my Ghana-must-go bags for over one week. My outbound luggage arrived in London days after I had departed too. I had to take a flight back to Lagos after one week to come to retrieve my bag. My friend’s brother had arrived in London on the Tuesday before I did, and he told a very hilarious story. He said when they took off from Lagos and the cabin crew started wheeling out the inflight services, someone jumped up from their seat screaming ‘Ejo! Ejo! Ejo!’ (Snake! Snake! Snake!). There was pandemonium on the flight. The cabin crew scrambled away as people jumped on their seats. Somehow, he said they killed the small snake – perhaps it had escaped from somebody’s hand luggage! Such was our experience with Nigeria Airways in its dying days. The poor company died in the hands of Nigerians who had used and abused it. Nigeria Airways died because of the many demands on her by Nigerian elites. We don’t know how not to take advantage of things. And at one point, it became a shambolic bedlam as everybody rushed in with their daggers. Those who could steal ticket sales did so with impunity. Those who could strip assets did. Others merely traveled for free with their harem and dozens of children. Who cares?
Even our latter dalliance with Richard Branson ended up a fiasco. Branson would later complain about the many untenable requests that were made on him – including ministers and DG’s who demanded shares or for the proceeds of a number of seats on every flight to be forwarded to them daily. Some say that Richard too meant to play a fast one, forgetting that Nigerians are smarter swindlers.
But this time it’s different. A lot of water has passed under the bridge. Circumstances have changed. A lot of time has elapsed. I support the idea of Nigeria Air as packaged, for the following reasons:
I think we should give Nigeria Air a chance. I think also that Nigerians should resolve to conduct ourselves more respectably all over the world going forward. Back in the day, it was a privilege to travel, and our people understood that if you were visiting someone else’s country, you needed to be somehow decently presented. These days, I see young Nigerians with little exposure showing up deliberately shabbily on another man’s border. What went wrong? Of course, the blowback is being suffered by all of us. But fix it we must. Nigeria Air is a step in the right direction.
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