By Taiwo Adisa
I listened to the Chief Executive of Air Peace, Mr. Allen Onyema talked about the hurdles his company went through in its bid to secure the Lagos-London route, which he recently launched, and the stories were heart-rendering. Speaking on Arise TV, Onyema mentioned words like “We were dealt with,” and “we were stopped.” “They stopped us,” as he narrated his seven-year journey through the crucible of international aero politics. It was sad, especially as he spoke of “local and international conspirators” that made spirited efforts to frustrate him.
The most worrisome aspect of it for me is the local involvement of some Nigerian agencies, which treated the Nigerian company worse than a foreigner. He talked about parking lots and the decision of some NCAA lords to allocate his company a space akin to Siberia, which would have taken almost six hours to offload passengers and cargo-all that in a bid to procure bad blood for the airline and stall the Lagos-London route he has just flagged off.
I do not know what informs the hatred some Nigerian technocrats and civil servants have for their jobs and the country. But many of our civil servants in the critical sectors harbour some form of hatred for the people they are to serve and even the jobs with which they feed their families.
I guess that President Olusegun Obasanjo noticed this trend while he was in office and that made him set up Service Compact with All Nigerians (SERVICOM), an initiative conceived to promote effective and efficient service delivery in the Ministries, Departments, and Agencies(MDAs).
The said SERVICOM was also designed to give the public the right to demand good services in line with what is contained in the charter of individual MDA. It was conceptualised to fight against service failure in such a way that would ensure that the MDAs deliver to citizens on their mandates. Years after it’s set up, and after the initial gra-gra, I guess the SERVICOM itself has become acculturated into the ineptitude and laid-back scenarios it was supposed to cure. That is the only reason the likes of Onyema’s Air Peace would face the challenges it went through and wait for seven years to actualise the London route.
I think a lot is wrong with us as a people about patriotism and nationalism. I also think that a lot is wrong with the recruitment process for the critical sectors of the economy. If we don’t want to mask the truth, we should say that many buy their employment papers to work in those places and are not bothered by anyone’s preachment on nationalism and patriotism. It should ordinarily be a thing of pride to see a Nigerian flag carrier landing in London and other international destinations with the Nigerian swagger. But the stories as narrated by Onyema about the politics he faced at home, including attempts to allocate his airline a disused parking lot for its international flights are demeaning of all the advertised Ease of Doing Business scores the Buhari administration celebrated some years back.
But the failure of Ease of Doing Business is not just killing business initiatives, it is killing the country slowly. Some years back, I once came across the story of a middle-aged Nigerian who was dealt with the Onyema way by the Nigerian system. He had risen to become the global Vice President of his multinational company. He was also made to take charge of Africa. Here is a man who rose to his position without the help of the Nigerian system but who still retained his patriotic zeal. He looked through the books of his company and discovered that at least 80 per cent of the products meant for Africa were consumed in Nigeria, his home country. But the company didn’t have a factory, no matter how small in Nigeria!
So he reasoned that he could talk to people in the Ministry of Trade and that they would help facilitate the establishment of his company in Nigeria. The first interactions he had went smoothly and that encouraged his conviction at the next Annual General Meeting of his company. He told the company he was going to pull off a huge breakthrough in his home country, Nigeria, and that the development was going to bring huge returns. The Oyinbos warned him and asked whether he knew Nigeria enough, he told them he had the confidence of the topmost hierarchy of the Trade Ministry on the matter.
He calculated that establishing the factory in Nigeria would not only lift the economy, it would provide direct and indirect jobs for the youth and elderly as well. He also thought that establishing the factory here would save the company millions of Euros going into freight, customs duties, and the cost of putting hundreds of trucks on the road every day of the year. Recall that the major warehouse of his company is located in one West African country, linked to Nigeria by road.
After he had nice discussions with the then minister, things were supposed to move quickly. But then the minister introduced two of his aides and mandated him to feel free to discuss with them. That was where the matter started. In the course of their interactions, one of the aides asked our friend, “So what’s in it for the Hon. Minister?” The Nigerian-Oyinbo man that our friend had become didn’t know where the question was coming from and what it was supposed to mean. ‘The minister’s special assistant cannot have the buy-in of the minister in this,’ he thought to himself and pronto, he called the minister. Still, there were no answers to his calls and then he sent messages to complain about the “audacity” of the young man to demand a bribe. ‘I am working with Oyinbos and they won’t do that,’ our friend complained aloud. Rather than provide answers to quell his curiosity and confusion, the said minister refused to answer his calls anymore. That was when he knew where the message from the aide came from. The lines went dead and the business idea too. Unfortunately, it was at the tail end of an administration when election fever was in the air. Not much was achieved by the time of the next AGM and the company eventually decided never to touch that idea with a long pole.
Maybe like our friend, Onyema too didn’t know the answer to the question: What is in it for those in the offices? And he had to endure a seven-year wait to actualise the Lagos-London route.
