**Deconstructing Allen Onyeama’s Premature Cries Of ‘Wolf In The Lagos-London Airspace!’ (Dr. Ope Banwo responds to Personals attacks from Nation Newspaper Columnist, Remi Animashaun, over the Air Peace and London Price War Debate)

I will start this rejoinder to Mr. Remi Animashaun of Nation Newspaper with the ultimate question we will be going over and over  in this piece –  *What Do Nigerians Really Want? Do we want CHEAPER Air Fares OR The Clout Of A Nigerian Airline Flying London Routes?*

I was partly intrigued, partly pleased, and partly upset, in equal measures when I read the article from Remi Animashaun on the ongoing debate of whether Airpeace should strive to compete on the international scene or whether Nigerians should continue to pay Air Peace higher prices due to the heat Air Peace was feeling from the price war it deliberately ignited. Mr Animashaun’s article was published in the Nation Newspaper of April 23rd, 2023 for those who wished to read the piece for context

While the article in the Nation Newspaper Columnist by Remi Animashaun, made some good points on the issue of international aviation politics , I was stunned that a supposedly intellectual columnist like him could not stay on topic without attacking my person, or my imagined motivation. Mr Remi ill-advisedly chose to libel my person and my motivations by insinuating that I must be a ‘hired hand’ or ‘paid saboteur’ against Air Peace, for giving my take on the ongoing Lagos-London route debate, though I have never met the fellow before in my life

It is always disappointing and sad  when some Nigerians, who assumed they are the only ones patriotic about Nigeria, assumed that everyone they disagreed with on an intellectual debate must be a saboteur or ‘sponsored mole’ or ‘someone paid by somebody’ to write what they wrote. In my opinion its a lame emotional blackmail that only works on citizens who are too timid to stand their ground

In my own Fadeyi experience, this ‘ad hominem’ approach to a discussion is always a sign of intellectual cowardice, and often the default mode for those who cannot articulate the merits of their position for the world to judge. I will not indulge Remi Animashaun by getting into the gutter with him but instead will take my argument even further so we can continue to have a more robust national debate on this all important Lagos-London aviation matter.

I strongly believe our dear nation will only benefit from a robust debate where all sides can state their positions without fear of being personally vilified or their motives or patriotism called into question just because we disagreed with them

Contrary to the assumption of our London-based Mr Animashaun, I consider myself as patriotic as the next guy. In fact, it is my sense of patriotism that made me challenge the trying to ‘psychologically scam’ Nigerians to protect him from lower prices by his competitors when we have all been praying for lower fares from the exploitative International Lagos-London operators for years. 

While I would have wished Remi Animashaun of Nation Newspaper had written his own position on the issue of Air Peace and foreign competition without attacking me personally because he did make some good points, the fact is he missed or ignored the real core issue: *Do we want lower air prices for Lagos-London route or do we want the ego of a Nigerian-owned airline flying London routes?* That’s the crux of the matter, but instead of addressing that in his rebuttal, the man went after me personally. 

As this Air Peace debate continues to resonate on twitter, Facebook , WhatsApp chat rooms and on other social media platforms, I think we Nigerians need to make up our minds: Do we want Cheaper Flight Tickets Or The Ego that a Nigerian owned airline is now flying to London? because it’s clear we can’t have both!

So we are not distracted by ad hominem or Red Herring attacks from misguided ‘patriots’ like Remi Animashaun, here are the real issues:

1. First, Nigerians complained that foreign airlines were taking advantage of them by charging exorbitantly for flight tickets to London and Europe. They also complained that Nigerian-owned airlines are not being allowed to fly to London in violation of some bilateral treaties with the UK.

Dr Allen Onyeama and Air Peace then decided to join issues with them and started complaining very loudly, first that the UK and other European countries were preventing Nigerian airlines operators from flying to London and secondly he screamed for anyone who cared to listen on Tv, Radio and newspapers that this kind of discrimination against nigeria is color based and should be resisted. .

Nigerians listened and backed him up. I am also on record for taking up his battle call and speaking for Mr Onyema and air peace at the time when his cries on social media will not let us rest (my posts supporting him at the time as a proud Nigerian are still live on twitter for those who think I am an unpatriotic hater) . We all joined him to do ‘vawolence’ for govt to do something . Some even literally blackmailed the govt by claiming that the govt didn’t want to help him get a permit because he was Igbo, which of course was nonsensical  but it worked.

Eventually, the Tinubu Govt listened to the social media vawolence of Nigerians on the matter and acted. Minister Keyamo, SAN was promptly dispatched to the rescue. Now, with full participation of the government minister for aviation, Hon Keyamu, SAN, who went out of his way to back up a privately owned company, Air Peace, a local airline, was finally allowed to fly the coveted Lagos-London route.

Immediately it got its charter, Air Peace ill-advisedly, started flexing about how his first flights and all its scheduled summer flights are 100% full. This in itself is very unusual and blessed. Most airlines launching a new route elsewhere in the world typically take months, if not years, to start getting full flights of passengers. So Air Peace was blessed to get that successful so quickly.

2.Apparently, that instant success was not enough for Air Peace and its ubiquitous chairman, Mr. Onyeama. They also felt they needed to start a price war too. Otherwise why would an airline just starting a new route, and which was blessed to have booked all its flights for next 6 months fully booked, feel the need to cut prices and aggravate their competitors? When your flights are getting fully booked, it’s proof that there is strong demand for that route, and in such a case there is no hurry to start cutting prices until you are fully ensconced in the space !

Personally, I thought it was a costly play-to-the-gallery move by Air Peace, which incidentally has one of the MOST EXPENSIVE tickets on its local Nigerian flights where it dominated to now pretend it wants to be cheaper because he loved us more than Virgin and BA on the london route. In my opinion, It was a psychological ‘scam move’ to get the buy-in to Nigerians who have already bought into Airpeace anyway, that backfired on him but which Nigerian passengers are now benefiting from.

3. Of course, and I am not an economist but as a Fadeyi man, I have never seen Mama Lati reduce the price of her rice and beans when she had people lining up all the way across the streets and fighting to get in line to buy her stuff. Only someone looking for trouble from competitors will reduce prices when all of you have full customers and the people on waiting list anyway.

Same way, even Mama Modina in Obalende that is right next to Ikoyi, never reduced her food prices at those times she had executive customers, literally fighting to be in the line to buy her rice and fried meat in the 90s. Why? Because Strong demand does not demand lower prices. It commands higher prices. It’s the law of the marketplace jungle anywhere. Yet Airpeace, with full flights for 6 months after m a route it has just entered thought it was a wise move to reduce prices but didn’t expect a vicious response from its competitors?

When you violate that principle in the marketplace, you invite a price war that would force prices down since everyone is currently charging premium prices anyway and won’t lose much by reducing prices, and that’s what Air Peace got. Customers will win and vendors will get their prices shaved. That should be a good thing, right? But Dr Onyeama and Airpeace cried wolf anyway and expected us to cry along with them .

For those who are blaming foreign airlines for gouging us with ever-rising prices before Air Peace, you keep forgetting the simple law of the marketplace. The higher the demand, in a market with with limited supply of planes, the higher the price. You don’t do discount sales when you have more than a full demand and where people are even paying good money to be on the reserve stand-by list!

Before Air Peace entered the London Route, there was a very strong demand for the Lagos-London-Lagos route and the demand appears to be inelastic to prices at the time. After all, it’s a fact that No matter what the airlines charged, Nigerians kept filling the seats! For my Ikoyi guys who travel all the time, some with side chicks just to go do a weekend in London, how many of them have ever traveled on an outbound Lagos-London or even USA flight in an aircraft that is empty or not full in the last 3 years after the COVID epidemic had died down?

So what’s the imperative that would make airlines want to lower prices when you ALWAYS have full flights and people are fighting to get in on standby? VENDOR COMPETITION IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN BRING PASSENGER PRICES DOWN and now that Air Peace has increased competition, bringing down the price in the process, as we all prayed for, it is now crying that prices of others are falling below its own? Seriously? And some misguided Nigerians are crying along with him?

We must make up our minds, do we want lower prices or just want to boost our ego that we also have a Nigerian airline flying London routes? Mr Onyeama KNOWS that the prices even now are still bloated and all his crocodile tears are just disguised way to protect the huge profit margins still left in those flights! Afterall , even Air peace rates from Lagos- London are still HIGHER than from Ghana- London ? Who is deceiving who. I am a patriot and I say NO! Let him reduce those prices some more and then cry later .

Not only was Air Peace gleefully thumbing its nose at its foreign competitors by boasting of its full schedule for next 6 months, it also joyfully announced that it was reducing the prices of tickets to London by over $200 to $350 per flight from the current prices charged by other airlines.

Of course, almost everyone hailed Air Peace for reducing prices finally but I guess Allen Onyeama and all Nigerians expected the foreign airlines will just pack up and go or maybe crawl into a corner and declare bankruptcy or something 🤷🏿‍♂️😂. Seriously? Air Peace slapped grown men in broad daylight in the village square and didn’t think they will respond with vawolence? How naive!

I was stunned when I first started seeing the videos of Air Peace ‘victory parade’ soon after getting its London Charter because anyone that understands real-life ‘Fadeyi Street marketplace economics’ could have seen that Air Peace had just ignited a price war with its posture of undercutting current prices so deeply in its first month of operations.

In Fadeyi economic real life, you don’t eat the launch of the street bullies and then go on the playground where everybody can see you, to boast about doing it. You would be giving men of vawolence excuses to do vawolence against you and your family wherever they are found. That’s exactly what Airpeace has done and now it does not want to face what its eye is seeing in the vawolence it started in the market.

Air Peace owner, being a Igbo man, may not be aware of a proverb from Yoruba elders that is roughly interpreted as: “When your planted Yam seed is germinating and growing successfully, you will cover it as you eat it quietly, so that you don’t arouse the envy of your neighbors” (I am sure Igbos also, being very rich in culture, would also have an equivalent or maybe even better proverb than that).

Air Peace apparently has never heard that proverb before. He boasted of besting the Big Dogs of the jungle and then kicked them to boot and went on tv to rave about it. Now the foreign airlines, realizing they are finally in a dog fight, knowing that the gravy days of charging anything and still getting full prices are over, decided to also reduce their prices so they can continue to also get full flights.

I would have thought Nigerians would be over the moon at a situation where the airlines are now reducing prices and looking for more incentives and ways to entice us to take their airline, where previously they would have just ignored us, but many seemed to be feeling sorry for Airpeace because its Ceo, Mr Allen Onyeama is crying wolf and waving the green white green flag?

Somebody should have told Dr Onyeama that Nigerians have seen that move before from Chief Mike Adenuga and Glo. In Guru Mike Adenuga’s case he didn’t just cry against the ‘foreign’ MTN or wrap his business in national colors against foreign competitors, he actually CRASHED the prices of mobile data; he started per second billing instead of charging full minutes for a 5 second call; he disrupted the prices in the communication marketplace  and DARED the other foreign competitors to crash the prices below his own! When they went low, he went lower!

Why did he do that? Chief Mike Adenuga, aka The Guru, KNEW there was plenty profits left from how MTN and co have been fleecing us to death just like these foreign airlines have been doing and he ended up making glo a long term competitor. Even today , Mike Adenuga’s glow still has one of the the lowest data rates in Nigeria .

So what is Dr Onyeama afraid of by not playing the Mike Adenuga Card to the full? He KNEW, like we all do, that the Lagos-London prices are bloated. Yet, after only one price reduction he now wants the prices to hold steady? He now does not want to go to ‘full scale war’ in reducing prices as he promised us? No. We NO GREE. Let the prices crash to the point where they are all just barely making a decent profit. If the foreigners then still continued to undercut him after that, we shall listen to his new wailing tune then . For now, I for one I am NOT listening . Nigerians deserve lower prices and we are not at the bottom yet

So Remi Animashaun of Nation Newspaper then chose to call me unpatriotic ? How is rooting for a competitive war that forces prices down for Nigerians an unpatriotic thing to do as the Nation Newspaper just accused me?

Predictably, The other airlines have now joined issues with Air Peace on prices and helped them to further reduce the price of airfares. This reaction led to even further reduction in flight fares to the regular traveler.

As passengers began to celebrate their good fortune, here comes Air Peace crying on TV and newspapers, AGAIN like ‘dende elekun’, this time he is accusing the foreign airlines of trying to frustrate him out of the marketplace when he started the price cutting war in the first place, with his arrogant and baiting action. He stood in the village square and raised up his arms, flexing like he was the new champion in the arena and then acted surprised when someone sucker-punched him for his impudence. Air peace and Mr. Onyeama played to the gallery of Nigerians, got a major applause and then got smacked down. 

Surprisingly, and this is the part that is confusing to me, some of the same Nigerians who have been complaining about high ticket prices to London for a long time are now crying along with Allen Onyeama and Air peace, making all sorts of drama about how Air peace is being mistreated by the foreign airlines then labeling those of us who are saying ‘let them fight’ knowing that every blow they throw at each other will REDUCE our flight tickets, as being unpatriotic.

All I can do is laugh and shake my head at the naivete of some Nigerians and their confusion about what they really want and with guys like Remi Animashaun prematurely trying shield Air peace from bullets shot at it by foreign airlines, they will not let us get to the bottom of the price where everything can then be at equilibrium.

So, I stand in the Nigerian village square with this article and ask: do we want lower price tickets to London? or do we want to be able to boast that a Nigerian-owned airline is plying London routes? We obviously can’t get both now if we don’t insist that Air Peace should go get more competitive. Airpeace, facing heat from competitors, has started by giving free flights from any part of Nigeria to Lagos to its London bound passengers as part of their competitive strategy. It was a great competitive move since the foreign airlines do not have local flights, but didn’t Airpeace know about this before? Of course they knew they could do that, but they would not have considered it if this price war has not started. So I say let them fight it out in the marketplace!

Frankly, I maintain, on behalf of previously oppressed Nigerian passengers, that we should be celebrating lower prices of flight tickets instead of buying handkerchiefs for Air Peace executives. This is supposed to be the year of The Revenge of The Passengers. It’s supposed to be the time Nigerian passengers to London are celebrating their good fortune, but Mr. Onyeama of Air Peace won’t even let us do that for a few months before he started his ‘Dende Elekun’ routine on tv and radio with his wailing orchestra led by people like Remi Animashuan and co. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Seriously, I must ask those who said I am unpatriotic for blowing the whistle on Mr. Onyeama’s hubris. What do you want the govt to do with Allen Onyeama and his constant cry of Wolf! in the Airspace? Are you saying the govt should now ban other airlines for him? Or should the government enact ‘anti-competitive laws’ to make sure prices do not go down so that Air Peace can survive while WE as passengers continue to get screwed? Or are we going to ask our government to force these foreign airlines to raise their prices just because Air Peace is saying their prices are giving Dr Onyeama sleepless nights?

So, I ask again: What do we want? Lower prices of flight tickets or pride of a local operator flying to London?

Or are we advocating that Nigerians should keep paying Air peace more than they would have to pay with BA or Virgin Airlines for our tickets just because the airline is owned by a Nigerian?

What exactly do we want to happen? I am curious. How should we respond to Air Peace’s and his ‘premature cries of being squeezed by competitors?

Let’s be frank, it is getting tiresome reading about the cries of this Air peace guy every time his business ran into competitive waters. Is he the only private for-profit businessman in Nigeria? I don’t see Innosson motors crying on TV every day against the crushing competition from foreign car manufacturers, even when our govt plainly ignored him to go and buy 100s of $200,000 cars from abroad.

*So, What Do We Do About Air Peace’s Constant and Irritating Cries of ‘Wolf In the Marketplace!’?*

To be very clear, I am NOT against govt support for Air Peace to make them solvent but my point is that we have NOT reached that point yet.

I agree govt can, and should ,bail Dr. Onyeama and Air peace when they start drowning in the competitive war but it’s TOO EARLY! You can’t start throwing additional fighters on the side of our guy when he has not even competed for 3 months. He said Airpeace has book FULL FLIGHTS for next 6 months. So what’s the hurry? How would he learn to cut costs and give more incentives to passengers that would benefit all Nigerians if we start coddling him from round 1?

Those spewing all this misguided nationalistic stuff as a basis to cry along with Air Peace against foreign airlines probably forgot or chose to ignore the fact that Air Peace is a privately owned company. He keeps his profits in his pockets and none of us in Fadeyi or Ikoyi gets a piece of that!

Air peace is a for-profit company like 1,000s of other struggling companies out there and he should not have any expectation of govt or people coming to his side every time his competitors make a move on him, especially on an issue that benefits the pockets of the citizens: LOWER PRICES. After all, his company is not the only one struggling with competition on a global level.

My advise is that Dr Onyeama and Air peace should grow up and stop crying, put their heads down and come up with great incentives to stay ahead of the competition. You are not in Aba anymore, sir. This is big boy territory now. Nigerians WANT to fly Air Peace. Nigerians are ROOTING for Airpeace.I AM ALSO ROOTING FOR AIRPEACE WIN contrary to what some may imagine (afterall I am a die hard Nigerian and my antecedents speak for me) but it should not be at the cost of Nigerians overpaying for flights!

After all everyone, including Airpeace agreed London flights are too expensive. So why is he crying when it started going down? Lets reach bottom first and then he can pick up his crying bowl and cry us a river .

Air Peace decided on its own that it was in its own best business interest to lower its fares to London because he was trying to break a market dominated by foreign airlines he has already broken into with full flights, and  he got more than he bargained for. So, now that the foreign airlines have reacted to his moves in the market, he must be prepared to fight in that space, compete aggressively, at least until he has used all his strength before calling for backup from govt 🤷🏿‍♂️

For now the welcome fact is that lower prices are now benefiting Nigerians for a change (we never got that before!) and we should be allowed to enjoy this rare season of lower air fare prices for a bit before Airpeace and their Wailing Orchestra starts wailing again .

My Name is Ope Banwo, and I assure the likes of Remi Animashaun that I am as patriotic as the next guy, but people of Fadeyi economy and even Ikoyi people too, need to see this price war among the airlines play out first. Let the ‘2 Fighting’ among local and foreign airlines play out a bit before anyone blows the whistle to ask our government to give a bail-out to someone who is not even distressed yet!

*Dr Ope Banwo is an Attorney, Social Activist and Political Commentator. He writes from his ‘Balcony’ in Fadeyi