RE BASA: THUMBS UP TO THE GOVT, BUT!!

What else can I say than to give thumbs up to the government for securing seven Abuja -London slots at the Heathrow Airport, the slots will be used by Arik Air.

The British authorities needed a bite, from a country that has been barking over the years, the bite was sudden and effective. to our surprise, the off-tone statement associating slots to an independent company in England was jettisoned, when we also jettisoned diplomatic language and dug deep with aerial arsenal that were deployed to sanctify the tenets of reciprocity as enshrined in the Bilateral Air Service Agreement (BASA).


Slots transfer, including auctioning is meant to help airlines with little or no service gain a competitive foothold at airports with limited space, the airlines are encouraged to operate either with their own aircraft or through a code-sharing agreement, in order to ensure that a purchaser will be able to provide meaningful new competition, which will bring down fares.

The British authorities and most EU countries have reversed this principle to protect legacy or flag carriers using factors such as fleet size, financial muscle, and nationality clause e.t.c, codified as grand father rights. This protection has given them the impetus to discriminate and increase fare arbitrarily

It's a new beginning and I hope the government will go ahead to review other lopsided BASA's. The NCAA has gone further with the issue of discriminatory fares on the London route, they have imposed fines on British Airways and Virgin Atlantic after a painstaking investigation, that's another plus for the country, while we wait for their responses, the NCAA should go further, by extending the investigations to other routes.

The beauty of this investigation is the proactive action of the regulator, who did not wait for the whistle blowing airline to come to them and were not fooled by the cheese-like bickering or is it rivalry that has been used to fool the public in the past, by these carriers. Their flamboyant chairman came, danced , wore our traditional cloths , got his airline the second designation with bogus promise of crashing fares on the London route, alas it's colluding to discriminate that we got from the dual designation. They have not been able to bring down fares; rather they bled Virgin Nigeria's London flight by sending them to Gatwick to feed the mother instead of vice versa and are presently angling for an open skies agreement with the federal government.

On our part we need to be cautious, the initial press release from the Ministry of Aviation, intimating the public of government decision to withdraw some BA flights was not properly handled, that must have accounted for huge criticism and negative commentaries from Nigerians that the government was trying to protect, this was later corrected by the ministry and Arik management.

Also, the Honourable Minister should begin to warm up to the unions and aviation correspondents to get the raw feelers in the industry rather than getting ambushed by self seeking experts or selected media guru. I also noticed that the government is now talking about a dual-hub policy, precisely the cities of Lagos and Abuja. This sounds more political than economic, considering we don't have carriers to implement the dual hub dream. If the government insists, implementation should be gradual with more emphasis on Lagos as his primary hub while Abuja becomes the secondary hub.

In furtherance, we need carriers to develop these hubs, these carriers will have an effective spoke policy to feed the domestic west coast routes, code share while also preparing to join any of the established alliance network. Virgin Nigeria was built on this platform before they were muscled out of MMA thereafter abandoned by the virgin empire with a mounting operational debt that hunts them till date. Therefore what can we do to get at least three strong airlines, that will attract credible investors?

We must as a necessity start a process of economic re-regulation of our domestic carriers with subtle regulatory mergers. We can go further by preparing a market for them, this market -is the public expenditure travel, it's a critical lifeline for the airlines and a stimulus for investment, should we be reminded that the first and business class seats on these foreign carriers are dominated by this category of travelers.

If the Honourable Minister's promise of ensuring that aviation adds value to the country's GDP, is to be taken seriously then we must step up our operational prowess by improving infrastructure, fine-tune existing and open up new concession programmes while also beefing up our carriers to participate rather than wait to collect toll (BASA FUND) at the bus stop like NURTW men. The BASA funds are collected directly from ticket fares by the foreign carriers and remitted to government at a later date. It's the Nigerian passengers we rob to build the funds.

Why are the foreign carriers operating profitably into Nigeria with 85% load factor on B747,777,A340 and we are reciprocating with B737 or with 40% load factor on bigger jets? We need to keep this new BASA spirit and victory alive by supporting our carriers not parroting the support. I align with DG NCAA, that our skies our open for exploration not exploitation