The federal government has commenced investigation into the recent increase in air fare by local airlines in Nigeria without recourse to laid-down procedures.
Nigerians have been criticising the sudden spike in the prices of airline tickets as most domestic airlines pegged their minimum fare at N50,000 for an hour flight.
Two government agencies, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), on Friday, inaugurated a joint technical committee to immediately commence investigation on the matter.
At the meeting convened at the instance of the FCCPC at its headquarters in Abuja, executive vice chairman and chief executive officer of the Commission, Mr Babatunde Irukera, said any coordinated conduct or agreement with respect to price-fixing among airlines is a violation of the law and the FCCPC will strongly reject and reverse it.
Irukera, who also noted that in the absence of an effective regulation, both fare wars and price collusion can be pervasive in the airline markets with the consumers being at the receiving end, assured that the regulatory process on the matter is going to be evidenced-based.
“As regulators from a consumer protection standpoint, from a competition stand point, while we believe that businesses want to operate in a way that shares prosperity, we know that their priority is bottom-line and that in the absence of keen and robust regulations, without intention things typically usually will go wrong.
“Any type of understanding and arrangement between competitors can only work in one direction, that is hardship and loss of value to consumers.
“It is the only direction it works, and any practice and pattern that allows incessant delays and cancellation of flights only results in one thing; hardship and loss of value to consumers.
“But an announcement in itself will not be sufficient evidence of the cartel. You need to investigate and discover if there is such a cartel. Now the articles we’ve read seem to suggest that they agreed as an airline association. But we haven’t seen evidence of that.
“And because the cartel is criminal and will involve monetary penalties, it requires evidence to clear every doubt. So, we need to find the evidence.
“However, that all airlines seem to have adopted N50,000 is curious and evidence requiring further interrogation which is what we are doing,” he said.
On his part, the director-general of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Capt Musa Nuhu, explained that the NCAA would this Friday commence a meeting with stakeholders in the industry starting with the airlines to get proper information.
According to him, “Airfares are deregulated but there are certain processes of increasing those airfares and those processes have to be followed and airlines are supposed to submit any proposed increment in airfare to the civil aviation authority within seven days.”
He said in the coming days, the joint investigation will reveal whether the airlines complied with the processes or not.
“Airlines are there to make money but not exploitatively of the traveling public. What we want is to ensure that all the processes were complied with,” he added.
After a meeting in Lagos, domestic airline operators resolved to increase airfares by 100 per cent with effect from March 1. The increment will be across the board.
There are indications that some of the airlines have already fixed some of the fares that will come into effect on March 1, 2022.
