June 14, (THEWILL) – The Chief Executive Officer of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, has advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to scrap the controversial ‘Nigeria Air’, launched at the twilight of the administration of former President, Muhammadu Buhari.
Nigeria’s national carrier has an ownership structure of 49 percent, held by Ethiopian Airlines, 46 percent by Nigerian private investors (SAHCO, MRS and other institutional investors), and five percent by the federal government.
Onyema, who spoke on Wednesday, when he featured on Arise New programme, The Morning Show, said the entire Airline project was shrouded in secrecy and skewed to favour Ethiopian Airlines with a majority share of 49 percent.
He spoke in response to an interview granted by Hadi Sirika (immediate past Minister of Aviation), on Arise News.
On Sunday, Sirika claimed Air Peace suspended its Dubai flights due to lack of capacity, adding that the airline had lost $19m after leasing two Boeing 777 aircraft on a monthly lease fee of $250,000.
“Air Peace leased ‘two’ Boeing 777 aircraft on a monthly lease fee of $250,000, parked the aircraft for several months and incurred losses of $19 million, while all the aircraft engines and landing gears became due for replacement when the airline was ready to fly”, Sirika claimed on Arise News.
Sirika, who said the two aircraft were leased before Air Peace was ready to fly, also claimed that Air Peace stopped flying to Dubai because it lacks capacity.
According to the former minister, he spent close to N3bn on the Nigeria Air project.
Although Air Peace had in an earlier statement described Sirika’s claim as “blatant lies”, Onyema on Wednesday, faulted Sirika’s claim about Air Peace Airlines.
Onyema, who accused Sirika of spreading lies and playing the ethnic card, refuted and insisted that domestic carriers have the capacity to be flag carriers if the Federal Government would create a more conducive environment for them to thrive.
He urged President Bola Tinubu to immediately scrap Nigeria Air, a project he described as a charade.
He said, “It is very shameful for an ex-minister of government, somebody who like he said 20 years ago has been at the Representatives a Senator and in the last eight years has been a minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria being paid from my tax to supervise the ministry, you expect him to be my chief marketer so to say, but that hasn’t happened in the last eight years. I’m not going to sit down here to expose a lot of things for the sake of the love of the nation.
“When you look at the Nigerian Air thing, look at the shareholdings agreement I have it here, without SAHCO, Nigeria would have been in trouble.
“The leadership of the entire management, the CFO, the CEO, all the management heads, the headship are Ethiopians, and the deputies are Nigerians.
“Then look at the shareholding Ethiopia 49 percent There is a company called Fairfax, who is this Fairfax? It is owned by Ethiopian, they are transaction advisers, they are going to get 3 percent, and they are going to get 1.45 percent of the shareholding capital, which is put at $250m. Ethiopia will bring $150m but not as cash.
“What Ethiopia is bringing is rentals. It is only the Nigerian companies that are going to bring money. SAHCO and MRS. I have it here; the document is with me here. Ethiopia is not bringing a penny to Nigeria. They will bring rentals for their own planes for five years. So even if they pay the $122,000 Air Peace alone is worth over $2bn.
“As I speak to you, Boeing is in my office now for the delivery of our 737 Max which is costing over $1bn. The E2s from Embraer that we have started receiving are costing about $1bn- five of them have entered Nigeria.
“Ethiopia is bringing nothing and they are going to earn 49 percent of your country’s wealth. I call on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to immediately reverse this sham called Nigeria Air and start his own thing.
“We should be thankful to SAHCOL for refusing to put its signature on something that will subvert Nigeria’s economy, which is the Nigeria Air – Ethiopian Airlines deal.
“The court order barring Nigeria Air has not been vacated, so the unveiling they did was contemptuous. Inviting a foreign airline to disrespect our judiciary is very unbecoming of our government officials. The case has not been vacated, it’s still subsisting, you don’t vacate by word of mouth. Application to vacate does not mean vacation, it could go either way.
“This is a former minister trying to fool the entire nation in his desperate bid to fool everybody to win the nation. He was peddling falsehood on Air Peace. So, how do we as a nation believe every other thing he was saying out there?
“The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority is there. You can contact them, they are the regulators. He was in charge. He signed the import permit for those aircraft. You cannot import any aircraft into the country without the minister of aviation’s approval. He did all that and he knew that those airplanes were not leased. They were not rented. They were fully paid for and he told the entire world that we leased those aeroplanes just to make us look bad and at the same time, praise his Ethiopian partners.”
