Late Chief OluAboderin, the Founding Chairman of Punch Newspapers travelled quite a bit in his days and his preference was for the defunct Nigeria Airways whenever possible. I am a witness to this in a way. We had cause to travel out together a couple of times and he always leaned towards flying with the then national airline. I used to wonder why. There was no advantage that I could see.
This eye-opening experience was to come in the late 70s. I was in the Capitalof a North African country and my assignment over, I wanted to find out when the next flight out of town would be. These things were done largely in person in those days so I found myself with other would be passengers at a ticketing office. To my surprise, many of the Europeans I met preferred to wait, sometimes two, sometimes three days for their respective countries’ Airlines to come.
The airline business is one of those few businesses that are both capital and labour intensive. Unfortunately, the Airlines that are ripping us off have made very little investments in the Nigerian economy either in terms of capital or of labour. It is therefore a no brainer that we should give our local industries, especially our Airlines, all the support they need from us to make them compete on the international scene.