The Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, and the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, FCCPC, are at daggers drawn over Air Peace’s alleged encouragement of other airlines to increase fares.
FCCPC had weekend, warned Air Peace against distracting the ongoing inquiry into its pricing, saying among others, the airline had been accused of inciting other domestic carriers to raise fares.
t also stated that some petitioners had accused Air Peace of cancelling flights arbitrarily without care nor compensating passengers for canelled flights.
Careless statement
But reacting to the agency’s statement in an interview with ARISE NEWS yesterday, Keyamo said: “I think it was a very careless statement – I say that with all apology – by the agency, making such a statement without consulting the core agency involved in regulation, which is the NCAA.
”The power to regulate these airlines and for the airlines to inform about their price increase and all of that is domiciled in the NCAA; that is the core agency.
“They should have contacted the NCAA for them to look at the books, which we have been doing, so we would have given them facts. But to single out a few airlines that we are struggling to expose to the world for them to get more enhanced capacity, it was a bit careless.
”What we are facing is a problem of capacity of the airlines to acquire aircraft and to service their routes. Again, we have things that are totally out of our control, which is the issue of the fluctuation of the forex, the exchange rate, that affects everything in aviation. Everything in aviation is dollar-based.”