Mrs Patricia Igwebuike is the Commissioner for Transport in Anambra state. In this interview with SHOLA ADEKOLA, she speaks on sundry issues regarding the state’s Chinua Achebe International Airport and the ongoing efforts at transforming the cargo airport. Excerpt:
HOW does the state government intend to transform the Chinua Achebe International Airport in Umueri to attract traffic to the airport?
The essence of our airport, the conception, is on cargo. At the moment, the cargo is a work in progress. We are beautifully situated because we are in Anambra. Anambra is the gateway to the Southeast and right down the street from us is the Onitsha main market. And everywhere in Anambra State is a commercial site. Every village is now a town. Some states are one-city towns or one-city states. But in Anambra, every city, every town is viable and that viability is what necessitated the building of the airport.
The building of this airport is not just something that came out of the blue. As far back as 1979, the idea of having an airport in that region was muted by the then governor of Anambra State, Jim Nwobodo. If you check the Hansard of that era, you will see where it was mentioned that Umueri, then it was Umuleri, was the best suited place for having the airport. And that ideology continued to the Peter Obi era and with Orient Petroleum. It was the immediate past governor, Chief Willie Obiano that started to implement it. Because the land of the Umueri people, although it was acquired, was not paid for in terms of compensation. It was that governor that paid the compensation, then implemented the construction of the airport.
The airport’s conception was mainly for cargo and passengers. The cargo aspect of it was because we are a commercial state, we build and we sell. All the statistics will tell you that most of the imports that come to the southern part of Nigeria, a great percentage of it, more than 50 per cent of it, ends in Anambra State. So, that is the concept behind the airport.
Not only that we have an airport, we have a seaport now, the Onitsha River Port. We are in the process of finishing our feasibility study for the railway. So, the idea of Anambra is that we are keying into the national policy of transportation. We are not just doing our own thing, we are keying in. We have an airport that is ongoing now, we have a seaport. Then the railways are around the corner, then the ground transportation. So, we are talking about multi-modal transportation.
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How do you intend to attract airlines and other players and investors to the airport?
We are doing quite a lot. We are talking to investors as we speak. We have more than 30 proposals for concessions and management agreements and all that. On what are we doing to attract more airlines, we have seen that there is a lot of demand for people in Anambra, or people flying from Anambra, or intend to fly into Anambra and we are talking to other airlines; we are talking to Ibom Air, we are talking to ValueJet.
The idea, looking at the numbers, is to know whether we need as a state to float an airline, or do we need to partner with an airline because the demand is there. Statistics wise, we are going to be three this December wnd we have already done over 343,000 passengers. We have done over 5,700 flights. So the demand is there. Anytime you want to travel, if you don’t book your ticket on time, you will be looking at more than N200,000 simply because there is the demand. And that is what we will be interfacing with the other airlines to tell them that we are open for business. At the moment we have United Nigeria and Air Peace. But we are open to other airlines coming into our space.
We are open to people building hotels, like yesterday the Managing Director of FAAN rightfully said that we can’t just fold our hands and wait for the government because aviation is an international business. MMA2 is a private company and there is one terminal in London, England that is privately owned by our own product. So, this is the type of ideas that we need to begin to share with the public that, yes, we are going to be transparent. Yes, the Anambra Airport is state-owned but the fact that it is state-owned does not mean that we are not open for business. Yes, we are young, we have a website and all that. It is work in progress.
The interaction I had with Imo State and Enugu State Airports and soon to be a Ebonyi State is that we need to even come back to the region and do this type of interaction because I don’t see ourselves as being in competition; I see us in complementary services. I don’t see Anambra as competition to Lagos; it is complementary services that we all share the same space. Nigeria has over 200 million people and all of them are potential flight passengers. I am sure Lagos is not doing 200 million passengers and even if it does, it will be overwhelmed. Therefore, anybody else can come into that space.
In the UK, if you want to fly to Birmingham, you fly into Heathrow. Then you take a connecting flight. But to you, leaving this space to go there, you will be saying to yourself, you are flying directly to Birmingham. Meanwhile, you stopped over somewhere and you connected. Therefore, this Chinua Achebe Airport in Umueri can say that we are flying to London because when we fly to Lagos or Abuja, we connect and we get to London. So we are there. And I am told, not that I am new to the aviation space, but the people that know the airspace will tell you that Umueri Airport in Miami, the airport in Florida, is eight hours direct. So, by the time that is developed, you can imagine that we are open to the world. We are now in a global village. So the future is very bright and it is complementary to everybody. So it is not that when you open your airport, my own will close.
I am also told that the city of Dallas alone, city, not state, has 10 airports and they are all viable. So, the fact that we have in Enugu, we have in Anambra and we have in Delta should not stop anybody because of the volume and people are now getting wise to taking flights. In the UK, people might have the opportunity to use the train. And they have now realised that with EasyJet and all those things, it is cheaper to fly. So a train might say, you pay 150 one way. And EasyJet is giving you 50 pounds. Which one will you do? So we will get there. That is where we are going. The more we have in the space, the more the prices will come down. And it is because we don’t have many airlines that the prices are exorbitant. So, eventually we will get there.
Talking about viability, what incentives do you have for airlines that will make the airport viable?
We have at the moment more than 30 concessionaires. They are the people that want to build hotels; the people that want to build even our cargo related things. There are quite a lot of things that people want to do – restaurants, sightseeing areas, tank farms. You know we are also an oil and gas producing state, so, there are so many things in our favour. We are young. We are developing things. We are talking with a lot of people in the state, the experts. But I see the future as very bright for the airport and the state.
