The minister of aviation and aerospace development, Mr Festus Keyamo, has vowed to ensure the coming on stream of the Fly Nigeria Act.
Keyamo made the pledge in his speech at a one-day “Stakeholders’ engagement on the legal framework for the Fly Nigeria Bill and related enabling legislation’ held in Abuja at the weekend.
He said he would rally all the major stakeholders to push for the bill to be sign into law.
He alleged that an external cabal that “seeks to destroy your own indigenous markets so that they can come and feed on that market” had infiltrated the ministry of aviation.
He said a similar scenario was playing out on the continent where foreign airlines enjoy unfair competition.
“It’s a global conspiracy but you have to be smart to see it. Look at the entire African continent. All the foreign airlines in the world feed on the African markets without the competition of African airlines, without fair competition from African airlines. And they will ensure that aviation markets in Africa remains stunted. Especially in a big country like Nigeria, they will ensure that it remains taunted so that they will continue to feed on your markets.”
“Air France is coming here full, going back full. Both sides are Nigerians inside. You expect that when they are leaving their country, they would have foreigners coming in and Nigerians going out.
“But both sides are Nigerians coming in and going out. Delta, the United from America, Lufthansa, British Airways, name all the foreign airlines; we thank them for their partnership and all that but I’m not condemning them.
I’m saying that we must also develop our own to compete fairly. We just want to compete fairly, Qatar, Emirates, all of them,” Keyamo said.
“So the global conspiracy, it is in aviation…aero politics. They do it in such a very clever way that they don’t want your local market, your local indigenous airlines to grow so that they keep feeding on that market. So it is for us to be wise enough to see this and to come up with policies…to empower our own local operators to match them on the negotiation table.
“And this is one of the latest in this series of actions we lined up. More are coming to empower them and to make sure they survive.”
Keyamo explained that the act is expected to make it mandatory for government financed air transportation of government personnel, contractors, grantees and properties to be carried by Nigerian flag carriers.
He lamented that the legislation was yet to materialise more than 15 years since it was first proposed.
“This has been on the cards for some time, for many years, more than 15 years. So you can imagine that this bill was taken to council more than 15 years ago and yet it did not see the light of day. Under my tenure it will happen.
“We just want to get things done. When I came into office I saw a couple of these things, like the Cape Town Convention, Aviation Working Group and all the proposals made to former governments to develop especially a local industry. And what we did was to revive all of the dead things on my table that would help to develop our local industry,” he said.
He compared the Fly Nigeria Act to the Cabotage Act in the blue economy sector.
“So if the Cabotage Act had been passed to favour ships that fly Nigerian flag and this had been passed long ago, what is the problem with aviation?”
“We are saying the summary of the Fly Nigeria Act is that every government funded trip, whether by ministry or agency if there is a Nigerian flag carrier flying that route, even locally, regionally, internationally, continentally, you must patronise the Nigerian flag carrier first before any foreign carrier.
“Even in connecting flights, if on the first leg you are going to the U.S. and you want to pass through London and a Nigerian flag carrier is traveling the first leg of that trip, but not flying the second leg, you must also fly the first leg with a Nigerian flag carrier.
“You see what is happening with Hajj. Half of the airlines that operate Hajj are foreign airlines. So with this bill, all our Hajj pilgrims…must first satisfy the slots given to the Nigerian carriers first,” Keyamo said.
