EARSHOT

If Donald Rumsfeld were a minister under Obasanjo...

In the United States where people’s votes count, President George W. Bush has been forced to eat the humble pie and fire Donald Rumsfeld, his erstwhile arrogant secretary of defence. In Nigeria, Obasanjo does not respond to such impudent public pressure because the kind of democracy here has nothing to do with people. If the US mid-term elections were to be in Nigeria, there is no way the Republican Party would have lost in the first place. The magical “incumbency power”, which in Nigeria means the “power to cheat”, would have done the trick. And if Rumsfeld were to be the minister of defence in Nigeria, he would simply have been redeployed to the culture and tourism ministry to continue his damage.

 

LAST WORD: Should we Stop flying?

By

Sam Nda-Isaiah

samndaisaiah@yahoo.com

 

 

Halima, my lovely sister-in-law, had a trip to make between Lagos and Kaduna last weekend. She said her prayers (which sounded more like her last prayers) and made for the airport. After boarding the only Chachangi flight available to Kaduna, she started ruminating about her life. Her only regret was that she had not had time to inform her husband of some of her liabilities, especially the list of her creditors and debtors. That was important to her then that she had just boarded an aircraft.

 

In Nigeria these days, boarding an aircraft has been likened to a terminal illness. It’s now serious business. When you watch people about to board a plane, they do so with sombre drooping faces like people being led to a slaughterhouse. Halima was not unreasonable in her thoughts. Less than 24 hours after she safely arrived Kaduna, a helicopter crashed in Aladja, near Warri in Delta State. That was less than two weeks after an ADC aircraft crashed in Abuja killing the Sultan, his son and grandson, together with some of the best Nigeria has produced.

 

When people board aircraft these days, they immediately start making peace with their God. Some people  do this even days before the flight. Many of those about to board an aircraft arm themselves with choice verses from the Bible or Qu’ran. A few others complement these efforts with all-night prayers and dry fasting.

 

Yet others have even become more finicky about their choice of airlines. I know of people who now patronise only Virgin or AeroContractors. Some have even gone further to rule out AeroContractors. When Shehu, Leadership’s managing editor, travelled to Lagos on an official trip last week, I instructed him to fly only Virgin – just to prove that some of us have also fallen into that trap. He did on the first leg of the trip. On his return flight to Abuja, two days later, he boarded the Bellview aircraft available. His alibi when he noticed I was upset about his decision to return via Bellview was that the pilot was a “white man”. He also made sure, like most others in the aircraft, that he avoided the front seats. If that sounded funny, Shehu didn’t laugh. He was serious. Those who survived the ADC crash two weeks ago, and the military plane crash in Benue State a month ago were seated at the back.

 

The reason why people prefer Virgin and AeroContractors is that the airlines are largely piloted and their aircraft maintained by expatriates. My reason though for staking on Virgin is vastly different. My own thinking is that since most of the air crashes are caused by obsolescent aircraft, lack of maintenance or the fact of “cutting corners,” by airline owners, Virgin and indeed Richard Branson, Virgin’s owner, cannot afford to be cavalier with the international brand name of Virgin. A Virgin plane crash in Nigeria would affect the Virgin name worldwide and this would be a calamity for the international entrepreneur.

There is something definitely wrong with the nation’s aviation industry. In the United States, more than 5,000 airplanes take off and land every day; how many times has anyone heard of plane crashes there in the last 10 years? In Nigeria, it is an average of 28 planes every day, but, in the last one year, we have had five disastrous and scandalous plane crashes. In most countries, once a plane crashes, even if it is due to no fault of the airline company, the airline and its owners are blacklisted especially by insurance companies. And we all know how pivotal the insurance industry is to airlines.

 

In Nigeria, people are not even aware that ADC airplanes have actually crashed four times in the last 10 years. The first was in 1996 between Port Harcourt and Lagos involving Captain Sama. As we talk, the carcass of the plane is still trapped in the Atlantic Ocean with the bodies of the more than 100 “souls on board”. Nobody has been able to retrieve the plane to recover the bodies. The fourth happened two weeks ago in Abuja. And, in between, there were two others in Monrovia, Liberia. One of them was going to pick ECOMOG soldiers in Liberia but, fortunately, it crashed before it had the opportunity of carrying the soldiers. The other was conveying the arms of ECOMOG. It is only in Nigeria that an airline that has been involved in four crashes in 10 years would still be in business.

 

But things must change if Nigeria is not to be consigned to the Stone Age. If investors, tourists and diplomats make up their minds that an aircraft in Nigeria is more likely than not to crash, they will avoid the country. Obasanjo can move his office to Washington, London or Beijing if he likes, nobody will heed his calls to come to Nigeria and die, especially as traveling by road is no less chancy. If the craters do not kill people like the late General Abdulkarim Adisa, they may go the route of Aminasoari Dikibo. Thank God for “armed robbers”. Even when assassins kill these days, it is blamed on armed robbery by the president, because they cannot defend themselves.

 

Last week, Leadership had a roundtable discussion with some experts of the aviation industry to assess the mess in the sector and design a way forward. It was quite a surprise to note the calibre of human resources at our disposal in the aviation industry and yet we are in this quandary. Air Commodore Bernard Banfa (rtd), managing director of Nigeria Airways and director of civil aviation at different times, brimmed with information. That should not surprise anyone as he has sat at the head of several international aviation bodies, some of which he has been the only black man; AVM Aliyu Rufai (rtd) has written several position papers on how to improve the aviation industry and the improvement of disaster management in general; and the very versatile Dan Omale, an aviation consultant and entrepreneur with more than 20 years flying experience and currently involved in the aviation industry worldwide, is an encyclopaedia of aviation knowledge. If the government is serious about getting Nigeria out of the current sorry state of affairs, there is no way such people with wide knowledge and cognate experience should not be part of the process of solving the problem.

 

Flying by air is bad enough even in the best of circumstances. Doing so in Nigeria is the equivalent of “walking through the valley of death”. I will always prefer travelling by road because I’d rather take my chances on land. No matter how gifted you are, you cannot “park” a plane in the air to fix a problem. But I cannot always travel by road by the very nature of the job I do. If I can travel by road to Sokoto or Calabar to attend meetings, I certainly cannot do so with meetings overseas. And if you ever contemplate travelling by sea, that would be because you have not watched the film, “TITANIC”.

 

So while we continue to insist that those in authority do their jobs diligently, we should also continue to trust in God as we continue our routine air travels within Nigeria and around the world.