Nigerian airline operators may be notorious for their ill-treatment of passengers; yet, there is a lot to condemn in the letter of complaint by the Chief Protocol Officer to the Emir of Kano, Isa Bayero, a Kano prince, to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), as not only reflecting poorly on the writer’s understanding of the sensitivity of his job, but also his duty of safeguarding the image of the revered monarch.
In the letter now widely circulated, the emir’s protocol chief accused the airline of “disrespect” over its refusal to delay a flight for the monarch. The airline, he said, had delayed their Banjul to Lagos flight by over one hour only to refuse to allow them to board their connecting flight to Kano because they arrived in Lagos 30 minutes before departure time. Saying he personally called Allen Onyema, chief executive officer of Air Peace, to inform him of the situation requesting the delay of the departing flight to Kano as a mark of respect to the “revered” Emir of Kano, he stated that “he (Onyema) flatly refused and avowed that he will not do that. I personally took this as an insult and a flagrant show of disrespect to his highness and the Kano people at large.”
The airline would later give reasons it could not accede to the request: By the time his call came through, boarding had been concluded, doors shut and the plane was already taxiing on the runway, about to take off. At this time, it said, the Banjul flight had just landed at the international wing of the airport and hence would still have to observe the mandatory Immigration, Customs and other arrival protocols – meaning that passengers in the plane ready to depart would have had to wait on the plane for nothing less than an hour. It claimed this situation was duly communicated to the royal entourage. As a way out, it claimed to have offered to put the Emir and his nine-man entourage on the 7 am flight to Abuja and from there to Kano at the airline’s expense – which was rejected.
Rather than accept the airline’s explanation, Bayero, who later addressed journalists in an air of regal hauteur in Kano would double down: it is either Air Peace apologises to the monarch within 72 hours or it risks losing passengers in the state.
We see the entire kerfuffle as a royal disgrace and contempt for the regular citizen in a democratic society. It was an example of gratuitous cockiness.
To begin with, it is hard to see any of the steps taken by the airline as being tinged with malice, let alone disrespect to warrant the extraordinary calls taken by the emir’s aide. It was Bayero who disrespected Nigerians and should tender an apology on behalf of the throne. We are running a republic, not a monarchy.
Would it have mattered if there were valid operational reasons for the delay at the Banjul end of the trip? And to imagine the length that the royal aide went to request for intervention in purely technical/operational issues. He wanted to bend rules as though he was in a palace. Isn’t that the same culture of impunity that killed the former national carrier – Nigeria Airways?
Even if there were grounds to believe that the airline acted improperly, there are ample provisions in the NCAA regulations through which errant operators could be called to order without the resort to vulgar threats of blackmail. In any case, it does not help the case of the complainer that the airline is already adjudged guilty even before the NCAA has had the chance to look into the merit of the case. Bringing the good people of Kano into the picture is simply in bad taste.
Nothing in the above however implicates the airline. The point here is that such brazen resort to self-help by the mighty and powerful has no place where the rule of law subsists.