The Presidency has called for the overhaul of staff at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos, over what it called the disdainful treatment of Air Peace by some airport officials.
Mr. Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser on Information and Strategy to President Bola Tinubu, reacted to a publication in which Chief Allen Onyema, the Chairman of Air Peace Airlines, recounted his ordeal of how “wicked civil servants” tried to force his plane carrying passengers on the return flight from London to park at a disused terminal near the bush.
Onanuga called on the Aviation Minister, Festus Keyamo, on Tuesday through his official X handle to sack the erring officials.
He said: “Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo needs some flushing to do at MMIA. Some workers there have failed to imbibe our renewed hope spirit. They should be shown the way out.”
Persecondnews recalls that Onyema had cried out over frustration from some officials who directed the London to Lagos plane to park in the bush.
Onyema, who was a guest on the Morning Show, a breakfast programme on Arise Television on Monday, said it took the intervention of the said aircraft’s operators to block planes from other airline operators from accessing Air Peace packing lots.
“They had to allocate Air Peace the right terminal to park and disembark its passengers.
“Let me tell you what happened yesterday at the international airport when our own aircraft landed. Thank God I was there.
“This thing had happened before, and we reported it to FAAN. Let me excuse the leadership of FAAN here. Mrs. Olubunmi Kuku is doing fantastically well.
“FAAN MD and the Director of Air Operations, Captain Abdullahi Mahmoud, are pained by the wickedness of the system operated by civil servants; the wickedness in the system is stinking.
“Your only carrier doing international operations in Nigeria would land, and you keep us somewhere in the bush, on the disused side of the airport, and you expect us to bring rickety buses to take international passengers to the new terminal, which these foreign airlines rejected when they opened.
“When they were analyzing the runway after lighting, they begged Air Peace Nigeria for the necessary funding.” They didn’t have money to fuel a triple seven.
“A triple seven consumes about 8,000 litres of fuel per hour. It was Air Peace they brought. We even told them to use our smaller planes because of the cost, but they said no, saying that it was a triple seven they would need. We did it free of charge.
“I don’t want to enumerate what we have done both for the government and the people of this country.
“Now, in the new airport, they would park us two kilometres away from the terminal, and you expect us to be doing bus whatever. That plane that landed yesterday would have taken about six hours for people to exit that airport.”
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