BEVERLY HILLS, May 01, (THEWILL) – The failure of Nigerian airlines to successfully form mergers has been attributed to operators’ inability to agree on operational models to adopt.
A merger is an agreement that unites two existing companies into one new company, in order to expand a company’s reach, expand into new segments, or gain market share.
Capt. Ibrahim Mshelia, the Chairman, West Link Airlines, who made the observation recently while speaking with the excos of the League of Airport and Aviation Correspondents (LAAC), pointed out, that it had not been a culture in Nigeria that airlines would merge.
According to Capt Mshelia, Nigerian airlines would never be able to merge because everybody came with his own model and therefore, found it difficult to agree with that of others.
Citing an example with their unbrella body of airline operators, Mshelia said: “For instance, look at the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) today; we don’t have a body as far as I am concerned because some people think their ideas should be superior to others. In a group, you don’t think like that, you have to convince people to marry your idea.”
He insisted that if an airline was run professionally, first it must have the dream of the founding fathers because that played a big role in the merger plans.
Explaining further, he said: “However, the issue about merger in Nigeria is that people want to have ownership and die with it without transferring it to expatriate that can handle it.”
According to the pilot, the most important of the reasons airlines went under was due to the lack of government will to have a robust aviation industry.
Mshelia further stated that, “Government will is not there. If government is actually interested in developing aviation, it will be there in its policies. There will be deliberate policies to grow the industry and this General Aviation will be the solution to it.
“That is why for me, I advocate for complete autonomy of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) under the current administration. This will do a lot of good for the industry and some of these challenges will be checkmated.”
