Aero Contractors (NG, Lagos) has joined Dana Air (9J, Lagos) in suspending its services to Accra, Ghana citing increased difficulties in securing foreign currency needed to pay airport handling fees.
“Most of our passengers are Nigerians and they usually buy return tickets and pay in naira," a Dana Air representative told the Today newspaper. "But the bulk of the charges we pay in Ghana are in dollars and those charges are so expensive by the time we convert air fares collected in naira to dollars."
The move will allow Nigeria's Arik Air (W3, Lagos), Med-View Airline (VL, Kano) and Ghana's Africa World Airlines (AW, Accra) to corner the Lagos-Accra market given they are its only three remaining operators.
Nigeria has been gripped with a crippling shortage of foreign currency brought on, in part, by a collapse in global petroleum prices, the country's primary export.
With fewer dollars trickling into the fiscus and with mounting foreign debts to pay, government was last month forced to allow the naira to freely float in a bid to release pressure on the local macroeconomic environment. However, from its pegged value of NGN197 to USD1, the currency has tumbled to NGN282 against the green back on the official market while on the black market, it recently traded at NGN 380.
Given shortages of the greenback, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has now directed all airlines to stop selling tickets in dollars and to retail them only in local currency.
Foreign carriers serving Nigeria are owed an estimated USD600 million for seven months worth of unrepatriated revenue. IATA reports fellow petro-dependent economies Sudan and Angola are in the same boat and owe USD360 million and USD237 million respectively
(culled from ch-aviation.com)
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