MMIA Arrival; is this what Nigeria is actually all about?

Airports have a way of setting your mind up for what to expect when you get to a new place. The popular expression is first impression. From that moment on, you subconsciously decide your disposition towards every experience you have in that place. Sometimes when you marry that primary engagement with what you were told before embarking on your journey, you just want to get what you have come to do over and done with in good time and get yourself back to your comfort zone. It is not all about pleasure; the aura around the arrival terminal of an airport forms the core of how people who have come to that destination to do business create their disposition to life in the new destination. An unpleasant experience could leave a lasting memory with unfathomable ripple effect.

If you have ever arrived into Murtala Mohammed International airport, Lagos, Nigeria especially at night time or you have been there at this time to meet an arriving friend or associate you know exactly what I am talking about. While I have no gloom to share or spare, I would not paint a dire picture of the experience for those who have not for the singular sake of patriotism. I would just start and end by saying it is very disorderly and rowdy.

I have wondered for some time now how this experience can be improved and I have an idea I wish to share. I would appreciate your sincere comments and ideas about this problem. I am saying as clear as possible that this is not a panacea.

Instead of having all the cars come to the front off the arrivals exit to pick up their family and friends, the front of the arrivals terminal can be made to be a bust terminal where all arriving passengers would come to board well regulated and customer focused airport operated buses that would convene passengers to the car parks where the real magic would occur. (Provided there is enough space at the car park or more space can be created as the car park which is at the moment referred to as a temporary one may be too small to fit all the traffic. The car parks can be in more than one location with buses leaving the arrival terminal adequately signifying destination car park and other details)

The car parks need to be remodeled

The car pack needs to be divided into sections denoted by alphabetic nomenclature and each parking lot needs to be marked by alphanumeric nomenclatures. This may be a bit expensive but it is sure better than the disorder that we currently have. 

The buses that will convene arriving passengers from the exit of the arrival terminals would then be marked by the Alphabetic naming that the car parks would have and there would be bus stands at the arrivals area for each alphabet.

Family, friends and associates of the arriving passengers would then inform them of their parked location, for instance if I have come to pick my friend and I have parked at parking lot 26 in the Parking Area C. I will just tell him I have parked at C26 and he will join bus C from the arrival area. Bus C would then drop all passengers who have boarded targeting the C area at a bus stand in the C area and my friend in this case would easily find lot 26, then we would drive out at our own pace and keep moving all the way without any reason to stop.

This would reduce the security and safety stress arriving passengers face arriving into Nigeria, greatly improving passenger experience. It would also take away traffic stress that has inundated the airport area at peak periods.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE INCOMING MINISTER OF AVIATION

My dear honourable minister, as I congratulate in advance of your appointment I want you to look away from those who may be debating whether or not you are the best man for the job and let us seriously get to work as there is a lot to be done.

Earlier this June we remembered families and victims of the last major accident in our airspace; pointing that our airspace has been safe to a large extent for the past three years and we passed IATA security audit of our airports. All these added to series of remodeling carried out by the last administration and the ability to retain our Category 1 FAA rating make a good foundation to build a lot of work you will need to do on.

I will like you to know that it will be very wise to make most of your policies around profitability of airlines without compromise on safety as airlines are the life-blood of any successful aviation system. Airlines support our economy by connecting people and ideas from one point to another in needed time, employing a lot of people and contributing a lot to the FG account in taxes and levies to mention a few.

Highly critical is to the operations of airlines is fuel price; airlines in Nigeria currently spend approximately 65% of their income on fueling leaving a meagre 35% to cover for all other expenditure including maintenance and overheads this is a far cry to around 35% of income airlines in the Arab gulf spend on fuelling improving airline profitability in that region and hence the great news of progress we always hear from that part of the world. While it is not wise for government to subsidise fuel price for airlines considering the state of the overall economy, my advice to you about this is to join forces with other key ministers to push for and support local refining of crude oil which will no doubt bring down the cost of Aviation fuel to our airlines, reducing their expenditure thereby helping them to do more for the better of everyone.

 According to channels television, Route development is the life-blood of the airlines, a means of promoting growth, securing profits and satisfying various constituencies. Nigeria is said to be losing over 200 billion Naira annually to international airlines that have been generously given more than enough flight rights into Nigeria at the detriment of Nigerian carriers which are left with just three per cent of the international market share.

The inability of Nigerian airlines to ply most of the routes has led to an imbalance in the over 80 Bilateral Air Services Agreement (BASA) between Nigerian and most countries. We need to start harnessing this potential and fast. My suggestions on that would be to either create incentives to assist private airlines to cover the other part of these agreements or create a national carrier for this purpose. Recently Rwandair started to operate a Lagos Dubai service dropped by Arik. I read the news and became so disturbed. People would speak to you about a national carrier all the time, please make sure it starts for the right reasons and it is run with a lot of strategy, we do not want a repeat story.

I have to let you realize if you already do not know that just before your appointment there was an ugly development; customs decided to start charging airlines duty for importing aircraft parts. Let me highlight that this duty was previously removed to help reduce the running cost of airlines as 99% of these parts are not available locally anyway and to charge them duty on these items that usually cost thousands of dollars monthly was to in fact plunge them into further debt. Honorable minister, this move will shorten the average life span of our airlines and is not good for a lot of our people, please look into this urgently.

Aviation industries develop through intentional efforts made with specific goals in mind, but I am sure you know this anyway. I want you to make intentional efforts to make aircraft parts available locally, it will require you and your office putting together a very rigorously prepared program but the good news is that it is possible; many countries in the world have done it, local Parts availability would improve the profitability of airlines and help our system. The venture is capital intensive and that is why it requires intentional support.

Finally we need MROs locally; my direct suggestion on this is for the Federal government to start one. It is a lucrative business that will create a lot of jobs and generate a lot of patronage from within Africa, most Aircrafts in Africa currently go abroad to get services that require us bringing down expertise and machinery to be able to perform here. If the federal government cannot start one, we can create incentives for private businesses to start one or enter into agreements with world class MROs to come to Nigeria.

I would be glad to see you succeed and I am very sure a lot of Nigerians want that view too.

Best Wishes.

Temitope Bolarinwa

June 25, 2015

OUR NATIONAL CARRIER

While the idea of a National Carrier is a thing of pride, some sort of legacy and a national brand, technically speaking (which is the sense in most ideas) it is not a viable venture for Nigeria, well at least not for now. So the next time someone talks about a national carrier for Nigeria, don’t just look away like it’s something related to landing on the moon or it is some far away idea. I entreat you to look closer and arm yourself with something to say.

I would seize this opportunity to give you the ABC what makes civil aviation succeed then I would pick which part of this puts a capital no as the answer to the question of a national carrier.

Airport access vis-à-vis the potency of the competition of other means of transportation is very crucial to the survival and growth of a civil aviation system. For instance if there’s rail transport between Abuja, it takes 2 hours and it costs 30% of the cost of an air ticket. Majority of passengers would definitely connect Abuja from Lagos via rail transport especially if it is easier to get to the train station than it is to get to the airport. This however is not the situation in Nigeria, there is no other means of connecting major economic hubs of the country apart from road transport which is although cheap but not comfortable and takes far too much time. Hence the Nigerian civil aviation sector seems to have an advantage, this said with emphasis on ‘seems’.

The other crucial factor that determines whether or not a civil aviation sector would fly or stay flying is the propensity to fly of the population. Yes Nigeria has 170 million plus people but the question someone planning a successful civil aviation sector should ask is ‘just how many of this people can afford to pay for a plane ticket?’ Let me help you, UN say that 70% of those 170 million lots cannot afford a dollar a day, so that leaves only 51 million people above the poverty line, this does not mean all of this people have business flying or can afford to fly. So propensity to fly really talks about how many people in Nigeria have reasons to fly and can afford it. To break it down it is not a lot.

I said in my previous article called ‘adding real value to our aviation sector’ that the average cost of a 1 hour flight in Nigeria is around N13, 000. This flight is only one way and you have to book in advance to find a ticket at this price. So comparing that with minimum wage which is currently at N18,000 we can begin to estimate how many of our population can actually afford N26,000 (cost of an advance booked return ticket), and how many times in a year they will be able to afford it. The real problem here in airline terms is traffic. The economic factors airlines have to jostle to arrive at the price of their ticket is just too dire to have the ticket price within catchment for a wide audience of passengers so we have airlines that exist carrying very weak Pax load on their flights but guess what the key to continual operation is continual operation, either its leading to a positive balance or red.

This leads me to the destination of this particular article; I struggle to understand the factors considered before allowing a new entrance by an airline into the Nigerian domestic air transport scene. So that we can all be on the same page, a national carrier is simply put an airline that is state owned and either state managed or managed privately under some agreements. This means to launch a national carrier we would have another airline join the existing ones, to compete for the passengers that they already cry aren’t enough to balance books, I do not see how smart that is. The national carrier would operate under the same economic conditions but may enjoy some subsidy from the government especially in the form of waivers on some government levies which would no doubt mean that their own ticket cost would be arrived at cheaper which gives them competitive advantage. This is a direct threat to the wellbeing of other airlines and it is so unfortunate. The idea is simple; the suppliers in any market in the world would have a short lifespan if where supply is more than demand and this is the case in the Nigerian Domestic Civil Aviation.

The only model of national carrier that seems practicable would be the one whose objective would be to be an answer to our bilateral deficiency to international routes. Usually when international airlines start to fly into a new country, the two countries by bilateral agreements arrange for an airline from country A to service the route while Country A would allow an airline from country B to service the route as well, so u can start to ask which Nigerian Airline goes to France in place of Air France or which one goes to Germany as against Lufthansa or which one goes to Holland just like KLM, yes none. So all these airlines make a lot of money that should be shared with Nigerian airlines and this really means more than airlines to Nigeria if we have an answer to this. It would mean a hub here in Nigeria, it would mean thousands of jobs, and it would mean MROs moving into the country (more jobs) as an airline that would answer such questions would have considerable fleet size. And yes, the reason Nigerian airlines cannot be this answer is that it requires a lot of funding that is not practicable for a lot of them. Arik air has tried, for many of our African routes, JFK in America, Heathrow and Dubai until recently (this is May 2015 and Rwanda air currently operates a Lagos to Dubai service, for the records that is abnormal).

We welcome a well thought properly structured and adequately managed national carrier that would be given to experienced people who have and intend to keep their integrity. Our civil aviation sector can fly to new heights if the issue of national carrier is not looked at as the solution to the real problems of this sector and is not created for the purpose of national brand or national identity alone.

Temitope Bolarinwa

May 21, 2015

ADDING REAL VALUE TO OUR AVIATION SECTOR

Without taking right for left we need to talk about what it means to add real value to an aviation system. Without doubt remodeling of airport buildings and terminals is fantastic but thinking of it as a real solution is the same as a plastic surgery, if the person has a dysfunctional nervous system, looking good would not fix it.

Airline operations are no doubt the nervous system of any functional aviation system and this makes the wellbeing of airline operators crucial to the success of the aviation system at large.

The percentage of the population that has access to aviation services is one of the most crucial measures of the potential and actual success of a civil aviation system. This access includes both financial access and surface access.

The level of confidence the population has on the aviation system is also important. This confidence level needs to be driven up to a level that most of the population would rather fly if they have to consider their options provided all other conditions including financial considerations are the same. This article is being written in 2015 when we are 3 years (tens of thousands of take offs and landings) from the last plane crash and a lot of confidence has been built in those 3 years. The monitoring effort of the NCAA that has produced high level of compliance which has produced our safe sky track record needs to be sustained, staffed where weak and developed when necessary.

We are doing bad enough with surface access as many of the distance covered by road to access airports should be a reason for more airports but with the wellbeing of airlines and policies to aid profitable airline operations not yet available, it opens the way for us to see how much work we have left to do. In the southwest for example people still travel for 3-4 hours from Ogun, Oyo and Osun states to access the Lagos airport for both domestic and International flights and others in Ondo and Ekiti States would just travel by road for their local journeys because of how long they would need to travel for to get to the nearest airport.

The major talking point would however be the financial access. With minimum wage in Nigeria at ₦18,000 and average ticket price for a 1 hour flight being ₦13,000, we can imagine just how much of our 170 000 000 people can genuinely afford to fly. The most compelling analysis perhaps would be from the fact that 70% of our population live below the poverty line and can barely afford a dollar a day talk more of savings less talk of having anywhere to fly to. This statistics shows that the overall performance of the aviation system is not independent of the economy of the nation as a whole.

But our aviation decision makers must immediately begin to answer the question of what aviation in Nigeria can do to adjust in order to make the best of the remaining 30% while we wait and work with the government to increase that percentage where we can.

One of the ways we can do this is by working with the average price of ticket for a 1 hour flight. I we set the benchmark at ₦8500 for example, we must then make policies that would ensure that selling tickets at plus or minus ₦1000 of this benchmark is profitable for airline operators.

One of the actions the government needs to take is to ensure compliance with some of the policies we currently have on ground. An example of such is the zero duty of importation of aircraft parts; this policy needs to be monitored to make sure it is effectively practiced. This policy should also be extended to every importation made by airlines to directly support aviation operations especially for items that are genuinely not locally produced.

According to many records, airlines in Nigeria spend around 70% of their income on fueling. This leaves only 30% of the operator’s income to cope with its other expenses and you can be sure this is great danger to profitability. Government can solve this problem directly by ensuring local production of aviation fuel or making an arrangement to subsidize the commodity for airlines with the later not being a lasting solution if the rest of the economy is to be considered.

Without doubt the choice of the aviation minister in the next administration is crucial and needs to be taken for technical and not political reasons. The job of that aviation minister would also be beyond establishing a national carrier as the challenges in this write up are real and attending to them would add real value to our aviation system.

Temitope Bolarinwa

April 2015

STOP

The story was once told to me about a Man falling from a 46 storey building and was asked halfway through how it was going he replied fine. We all know he really is not fine.

Again a young boy saw his favorite uncle from the window and ran out the door without his shoes, he soon ran into a piece of broken bottle he had thrown out the previous night, he was forced to stop and it was obviously painful.
Either it is going fine for now or we have run into one of those broken bottles on the track of life like
that young boy, we all need to at one point or the other apply a stop.

I would like to explain using the concept of a well-known sport which is car racing; formula 1 is one of the competitions in that sport. In a pit stop competitors make grounds beyond the driver that stops. However, the car that made the additional pit stop will run faster on the race track than cars that did not make the stop, both because it can carry a smaller amount (and thus lower weight) of fuel, and will also have less wear on its tires, providing more traction and allowing higher speeds in the corners. Not to mention that failure to have a pit stop may eventually lead to a forced
stop.

So Stopping can be applied to things as little as crossing the road and something as big as a processing a thought. Life is a race, a struggle to stay in track among other things, there would forever be a debate on who you are racing against, the best I have found is your previous best effort. It’s a fact that life is 30% what happens to us and 70% how we respond to it, so if you currently have a forced stop in life the best reaction to it would be to convert it into a pit stop. If you are still wondering what I am talking about, we all need to at one time or the other retreat, rethink and re-strategize. Really it should be often.


WHAT YOU GAIN FROM STOPPING.
Avoid collision: gives u chance to outline your principles and create some if you don't have one and this helps you avoid confusion from another person's principle or lack of it. Increase Speed: to achieve goals many times is about being at the right place at the right time and it takes a slow person to arrive later. Pit stops give us the time to learn vital skills, gather information and meditate on them. You also get to drop the unneeded.


And Finally
Tackle the Reason for problem and not the cause of it: So if your stop is a forced one converted into a
pit stop, you should learn not to be like the young man I mentioned earlier who thinks he was stopped
by a piece of broken, the truth is he was stopped by the action he took previously, somebody else
would say he was stopped because he had no shoes
on. A Stop makes gives you the chance to think of
the reason you have problems and not the cause of
the problem.


Remember to stop, rethink and restrategize.
Remember to do it frequently.