BREAKING: Airlines To Shut Down Operations In Nigeria In 3-Days Over Hike, Scarcity Of Aviation Fuel -

Coastal News

Nigerian airline companies have threatened to suspend operations in three days unless the price of aviation fuel, often known as Jet-A1, is reduced.

In order to avoid the shutdown, they asked the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Ltd to provide them a license to import the commodity.
Allen Onyema, chairman of Air Peace, made the announcement at a stakeholder meeting with Ahmed Idris Wase, deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, on Monday.

The meeting, which was attended by the NNPC Group Managing Director, Mele Kyari, as well as marketers and aircraft operators from around the nation, was a follow-up to a previous discussion on the country’s aviation fuel scarcity and high prices.

Onyema, speaking on behalf of the airline operators, claimed that aviation fuel marketers are arbitrarily raising the price of the commodity, resulting in ballooning plane ticket costs and flight interruptions.

The marketers, he claims, have failed to reveal the complexities of the price and how they arrived at the increase.
He stated that the recent price increase to over N500 began in January 2022, as opposed to the initial pricing.

Though Onyema did not threaten any more increases in ticket prices, he did say that an airline ticket could grow to N120,000 in the not-too-distant future.

He went on to say that, aside from the high cost of aviation fuel, airline operators are paying three times the amount of insurance that other airlines pay in other countries.

Onyema went on to say that because they can afford to buy airplanes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, they can also afford to import aviation fuel.

The deputy speaker had previously expressed his unhappiness over the NNPC’s and marketers’ refusal to lower the price as agreed in the previous meeting.
He claimed that the two parties were employing overly technical language to perplex the House on the subject.

According to the NNPC GMD, 19 businesses currently have aviation gasoline on hand, but pricing remains a point of dispute between the companies and aircraft operators.

He went on to say that in order to boost aviation fuel availability, they’ve enlisted the help of other companies to supply it to aircraft.