After Spending N78bn On Repairs, Air Peace Carpets FAAN For Refusing To Approve Maintenance Hanger For Lagos Airport

Air Peace Limited has blamed the Federal Aviation Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) for the huge money it spent abroad on the maintenance, repair and service (MRO) of its aircraft in 2022.

Air Peace Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Allen Onyema said the indigenous airline spent N78bn in 2022 alone on MRO.

Onyema said the airline wouldn’t have spent such an amount on maintenance and repairs outside the country if FAAN had allocated it the land it paid for in 2015 to build an MRO hangar at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos.

The Air Peace boss decried unfair treatment by FAAN while speaking at the ongoing 63rd NBA Conference, monitored by THE WHISTLER.

Onyema said, “We are not serious in this country about encouraging indigenous investments. How do you grow your economy when the civil service in your country sees investors as rivals? How do you grow your economy when indigenous investors are being treated with levity and envy by their own ministers? How do you grow your economy when indigenous investments are over-taxed?

“Air Peace alone in 2022 we expended N78bn in maintainance. Air Peace alone and this went to foreign countries. How do you expect the growth of indigenous investments in this manner? It will never happen.

“I applied to have a maintenance hangar in 2015, I paid over N100m to lease land at the Lagos Airport to FAAN, that is about six, seven years ago. They even made us pay more money. As I speak to you, we are yet to get that land and this is the biggest carrier not only in West Africa but the largest growing airline in the whole of Africa yet it cannot boast of a hangar space not because it doesn’t have the funds to build one.

“If they had given it to us six years ago, maybe now Nigeria would have an MRO they will be proud of that will attract foreign investments because other airlines will come here to maintain their aircraft.”

Onyema said the country is polarised along religious, ethnic and tribal lines which he said would not allow the country to progress.

He said, “We are in a nation where the entire country more than ever has been polarised along, ethnic, religious, and regionalised. No country can make any headway in this kind of situation. Nigeria is the envy of many people, and we are sitting on wealth in this country.

” Nigerians have no reason to be involved in the japa syndrome that has been the order of the day to places that we think we should have been better than.

“But because of issues of polarisation of the nation along ethnic, religious, and some primordial lines, we have not been able to achieve our potential.”