Nigeria’s aviation sector lurched toward a full-scale operational crisis as a high-level meeting between the federal government, airline operators, and aviation fuel marketers ended without resolution, with the Minister of Aviation warning that airlines could not sustain operations beyond seven days at current jet fuel prices, even as President Bola Tinubu moved to ease the burden by approving a 30 percent discount on airline debts owed to aviation agencies.
The meeting, convened with presidential approval for stakeholders to engage frankly and find a path out of the crisis, broke into four working groups with designated focal persons from the marketers, regulators, airlines, and government given 72 hours to report back with actionable recommendations.
Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo was direct about the severity of the situation, telling journalists shortly after the first face-to-face interaction between airlines and marketers that carriers had effectively been pushed to breaking point by jet fuel prices that had made continued operations economically unsustainable.
“The airlines cannot continue for the next several days at the recent prices, so let us be clear to the public. They have been stretched to limits. We are looking at the next 48 to 72 hours for the focal persons to meet and see whether we can get some fair and reasonable pricing for the product,” he said.
Keyamo warned that while the country operated a free market, that freedom did not constitute a licence for price behaviour that punished the Nigerian public, and indicated that the regulator would act if evidence of market manipulation emerged. He also confirmed that Tinubu had approved a 30 percent discount on all airline debts owed to the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, and the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, describing it as a direct presidential intervention to relieve financial pressure on carriers at a critical moment.
Airlines Operators of Nigeria Chairman and Air Peace Chief Executive Allen Onyema said the fuel price spike following the outbreak of the US-Iran conflict had produced consequences in Nigeria that were disproportionate to increases seen elsewhere on the continent. While international aviation markets and other African countries had experienced approximately 70 percent fuel price increases, Nigerian airlines had absorbed increases of between 200 and 270 percent, a disparity he described as inexplicable and commercially devastating.
“No airline is going to be flying in the next seven days if something is not done, not because they do not want to fly, but because the pricing of the fuel that we need to fly may not be available to us because we do not have the money to continue paying only fuel marketers to fly,” Onyema said, while welcoming the president’s willingness to engage directly with the crisis as an encouraging sign.
