The Managing Director of Nigeria Air, Dayo Olumide, has disclosed that the plane that landed at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, on 26 May, 2023, was a chartered one from Ethiopia.
Development Diaries reports that Olumide disclosed this while answering questions from the Senate Committee on Aviation over the controversy surrounding Nigeria Air.
A video showing a plane with the ‘Nigeria Air’ inscription on it trended on social media on the last working day of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.
Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, also posted the video of the plane on his official Twitter page on Friday.
Beneath the video, he wrote, ‘We are here. To Almighty God be all the glory. It has been a very long, tedious, daunting and difficult path’.
However, the plane is nowhere to be found in Nigeria.
‘I was invited last February, my mandate is to secure an air operating certificate for the airline not necessarily to operate the airline but to secure a licence to fly. And that is entirely my responsibility’, Olumide told the committee.
He continued, ‘The aircraft that came in and left was a legitimate charter flight. Anyone of us here if we have a destination wedding in Senegal, we can charter an aircraft.
‘You don’t need to have a licence to do that, you just charter an aircraft, an aircraft you paid for, it will be brought here, take your passengers and off you go’.
‘And that is what we did. But in this case, it was to unveil. Ever since 2018, all you have ever seen about Nigeria Aircraft were pictures, and drawings, not the real aircraft, and we thought it was time to show what the real aircraft will look like and also to let shareholders know.
‘You see we have institutional investors, they are not in aviation, but they are putting their money for ten or 15 years and to exit may be at the premium. So they need to see what the actual aircraft will look like.
‘So we brought it in here to show them what the aircraft will look like. Then the social media dimension came into it’.
In April 2023, Nigerians were given assurances by the Minister of Aviation under the Buhari administration, Sirika, that the contentious Nigeria Air would begin operations before 29 May.
However, what the nation got after eight years of Buhari’s presidency was a chartered flight from Ethiopia and not a Nigeria Air plane.
The federal government had in the 2017 Appropriation Act budgeted the sum of N555 million for the establishment of a national carrier and N200 million for consultancy for the establishment.
Additionally, N50 million was set aside in 2018 for the carrier’s establishment, while N20 million went toward consulting.
Also, Sirika had in 2018 refuted claims that the ministry spent $600,000 to create a logo for the national carrier, after which the project was suspended.
Addressing journalists on 26 April, 2023, after a Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, Sirika said everything was in place for the airline.
‘We have everything in place, the aircrafts are in place, the offices, operational centres, the staffing and everything that we need to have in place. We’re doing the last-minute checks and waiting for the issuance of the AOC and it will fly’, he said.
These inconsistencies show a pattern of insincerity, and it is clear that the former minister and the ministry lied to Nigerians.
Development Diaries calls on the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to carry out thorough investigations into the entire Nigeria Air project.
