Mr. Hadi Sirika, Minister of Aviation
Operations of airlines in Nigeria may be shut down in three days’ time should the price of aviation fuel, popularly known as Jet-A1, not brought down.
Airline operators made the threat at a stakeholders’ meeting with Ahmed Idris Wase, deputy speaker, House of Representatives, on Monday.
They called on the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Ltd to give them a licence to import the product in order to avert the shutdown.
The meeting, attended by Mele Kyari, Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Ltd. Group Managing Director, marketers and airline operators in the country, was a follow up to the earlier meeting held on the scarcity and high price of aviation fuel in the country.
Allen Onyema, Chairman, Air Peace, who spoke on behalf of the airline operators, said aviation fuel marketers were arbitrarily increasing the product’s price which led to the skyrocketing of air ticket prices and disruptions of flights.
He said that the marketers had refused to disclose the intricacies involved in the pricing and how they arrived at the hike, informing that the recent price hike to over N500 started in January 2022 from its initial price.
Onyema said though he was not threatening any further hike in the ticket price, an airline ticket might rise to N120,000 in no distant future, adding that, apart from the high cost of aviation fuel, airline operators were paying threefold of what other airlines pay as insurance in other climes.
Onyema stated that since they could buy aircraft that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they also had the money to import aviation fuel.
Earlier, the deputy speaker had expressed his disappointment over the failure of the NNPC and the marketers to bring down the price as agreed in the last meeting, just as he alleged that the two parties were using unnecessary technical terms to confuse the House over the issue.
On his part, the NNPC GMD said, as of present, 19 companies had stock of aviation fuel, but the pricing still remained a thing of contention between the companies and airline operators.
He added that they have engaged other companies to supply aviation fuel to airlines in order to increase its availability.
