Special adviser on ease of doing business to the president, Dr. Jumoke Oduwole, has fingered flight operator, Air Peace, over flight schedules it appears unable to fulfil.
Dr. Oduwole, who is also the secretary of the presidential enabling business environment council (PEBEC) called out the airline for its repeated failure to comply with announced flight schedules.
In a petition titled “Ease Of Doing Business Intervention: Request For Urgent Intervention Regarding Services Of Air Peace” addressed to Captain Musa Shuaibu Nuhu, the director general, Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, Oduwole decried the action of the airline.
While giving an account of an incident of shoddy flight rescheduling, Oduwole said:
“My personal experience today bears repeating as an example of what many air travelers in Nigeria, including other members of my team and I have experienced firsthand and on various occasions in the past months.
“On Saturday, April 22, 2023, two Air Peace tickets were purchased to return to Lagos from Akure with a departure time of 3:30PM to return from attending a programme in Omuo–Ekiti, Ekiti State, (near the border with Kogi State). On Tuesday, April 25, 2023, a schedule change notification was sent informing of an earlier departure time from 3:30PM to 12:40PM. A subsequent notification was sent at 2:37AM today, April 28, 2023 informing of a further time change from 12:40PM to 8:30AM.
“At 7:30AM, as soon as I became aware of the notification (one hour before the new departure time), I abandoned the event I had come to attend and proceeded to immediately start making my way down to the Akure Airport, a two-and-a-half-hour journey on the shortest route from Omuo-Ekiti.
“The PEBEC secretariat team also called the Air Peace duty manager in Akure, Mr Charles, and asked him to please reschedule the flight to a later time to allow more passengers time to see the notification and make the new flight time. He said there was nothing he could do.
“I arrived at the Akure airport at 9:13AM (for what was to be a 12:40pm flight). The Air Peace Lagos-bound flight had departed. Being the only flight of the day from Akure to Lagos, and with another important official engagement to attend at 5PM in Lagos this evening, I was forced to proceed on an unplanned 5-hour road trip to Lagos.
“This is only one of many such instances of unacceptable inefficiency of this airline operator in recent times, to which most frequent air travelers in Nigeria can testify.”
Oduwole said the implications of these unchecked actions by airline operators on the Nigerian economy, businesses and persons are wasted man hours, the high cost and time of doing business in Nigeria, lack of operational transparency of airline operators, difficult ticket refund processes, yet selling tickets and tying down funds with real and opportunity costs to air travelers.
She called for an investigation of recurrent situation and necessary actions to ensure that the issues are addressed with airline operators on pain of sanction in order to ensure that the growing monopolistic tendencies of poor service offerings by some air transport operators in Nigeria are curbed as a matter of great urgency.
Speaking to LEADERSHIP, the spokesman of Air Peace, Stanley Olisa, said the airline had unscheduled maintenance which affected its network.
He, however, regretted the inconveniences experienced by the passengers.
“We had unscheduled aircraft maintenance and a bird strike which resulted in several flight disruptions across our network. We deeply regret the inconveniences experienced by passengers affected by the disruptions and reiterate our commitment to established operational safety standards,” he said.
