Barrister Allen Onyema, the Chairman of Air Peace Airline, has blamed the Nigerian government for failure to protect domestic airlines from dominance of Foreign airline operators.
Onyema said that the Government has failed in protecting the industry with its security blanket there by contributing immensely to foreign Airlines robbing the Nigerian market.
According to him, allowing foreign carriers to originate their flights from Nigeria is a rape on the economy which requires urgent review of multiple entry points for foreign carriers, insisting that interline agreement with local operators is the way to go.
Onyema, who spoke at the 22nd League of Airport and Aviation Correspondence (LACC) Annual seminar and Award/ Gala night themed “Financing Aviation Development Through Private Sector Partnerships”, in Lagos, blamed aviation experts for being responsible for the ill fate of the sector with their faulty advice to government.
He described the experts as one of the problems faced in the industry, faulting some of their advice to the Federal government, noting that they misled government and the industry operators with their self-serving proposals/recommendations.
Onyema, who was the chairman of the occasion said the proposal of size of fleet an operator should have before going into operations as proposed by some industry experts, is contradictory to the growth and development of the industry.
He said: “Then there was a concoction that for airlines to survive they have to be forced to merge or have twenty aircraft, I say and pardon my words, that is balderdash.
“You cannot force airlines to merge, like the previous speaker said, you need to try to create synergy by interline not force them to merge or say they need to have 20 aircraft.
All over the world there are airlines with two , sometimes one aircraft and they operate within their capacity.
