Airline operators, represented by the Chief Executive Officer, CEO of Air Peace, Mr. Allen Onyema, yesterday said the operators cannot continue to struggle while making effort to cope with the cost of aviation fuel.
This follows the failure of the aviation fuel marketers to convince the House of Representatives on why the prices of the product were hitting the rooftops on daily basis.
The airlines are now buying the fuel at N670 as against the normal rate of 190 official price.
According to Onyema, if they were to continue flying, an average Nigerian will spend N120,000 on an economy ticket.
He demanded that the operators be given the license to import the fuel to make life easy for Nigerians.
He said: “Mr. Deputy Speaker Sir, nobody on this side of the divide has answered your question. You have been asking them one particular question. Everybody is dancing around it. What the deputy speaker wanted to hear is how much did they buy this fuel, per litre. By now, you must have computed it. They are dancing around it and telling you stories. That is what you have been asking, sir. Before they came here, they were supposed to have computed their unit cost.
“I have the mandate of every airline in this country to announce to you that if they can’t come down from their rooftops, we have only three more days to be able to fly. We are not threatening this country. We have been subsiding what we have been doing.
“The rate as at today is N630, N640 and N605. We have an aircraft going to Kano, it has about 7,000 litres of fuel in it, multiply it, sir by N630. The unit cost per seat is about N70,000. You have not talked about insurance that is very static. Nigerians pay heavy insurance premiums because this country is stigmatized.
“You have to insure abroad. It is a must because all the insurance companies in Nigeria put together, cannot even pay for one aircraft. So, you have to go abroad to insure.
“Yet the fuel cost, which is supposed to be about 30 to 40 percent in every clime, in Nigeria it’s about 70 percent even before this time. So, you can now see the mortality rate of airlines in this country.
“They refused to answer your simple question. Whether you got money from CBN or red market, how much is the unit cost of your acquisition so that we know if the airlines are cheating you or you are cheating the airlines if you have formed a cartel to increase your prices overnight.
“From what is happening, sir, if it continues this way, the least ticket will be about N120,000 for economy and we don’t want to do that.
“We want to inform the house that we are demanding that we should be given license to import this fuel. If we can buy jets that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, we can afford to import this fuel. Let NNPC give us the right to import this fuel.”