Anambra Airport Is Not Competing But Complementing Other Airports, Says Transport Commissioner

The Anambra State Commissioner For Transport, Mrs. Patricia Igwebuike, says the Chinua Achebe International Airport in Umueri is not in competition with other airports in the South East and other parts of Nigeria but was established to complement them.

Speaking in an interview held on the sidelines of the 9th Airport Business Summit and Expo held in Lagos on August 20 to 22, 2024 under the Theme: “Airport Viability is Key to Successful Aviation Business Ambition,” Igwebuike said: “The interaction I had with Imo State and Enugu State Airports and soon to be 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 in competition. I see us in complementary services. I don’t see Anambra as competition with Lagos. It’s complementary services that we all share the same space. Nigeria has over 200 million people and all of them are potential passengers, flight passengers. I’m 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. I am also told. Not that I am new to the aviation space, but the people that know the space, the airspace, will tell you that 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. The future is very bright and it’s complementary to everybody. So, it’s 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 ten 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 number of the volume and people are now wising up to taking flights. In the UK, people might have the opportunity to use the train, and they have now realized that with EasyJet and all those things, it’s cheaper to fly. 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. It’s because we don’t have many airlines that the prices are exorbitant. So, eventually we will get there.”

Tracing the origin of the airport, she said: 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 blues. 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 history 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 it now continued. That ideology continued to the Peter Obi era and with Orient Petroleum. It was the immediate past Governor, Chief Wily Obiano,that now started to implement it. 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, he implemented the construction of the airport. The airport’s conception, as I said before, was mainly for cargo and passengers. The cargo aspect of it was because we are a commercial state. We build. 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% of it, ends in Anambra state. So, that’s the concept behind the airport. We also, not only  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. We are talking multi-modal transportation.”

She said the airport already has more than 30 proposals for concessions and management agreements and is making efforts to attract more airlines like Ibom Air and Value Jet as Air Peace and United Nigeria Airlines already operates there.

“We are going to be three years this December and we’ve already done over 343,000 passengers. We’ve done over 5,700 flights. So the demand, anytime you want to travel, if you don’t book your ticket on time, you’ll be looking at more than N200,000, simply because there’s the demand. And that is what we will be interfacing with the other airlines to tell them that we are open for business,” she said.

“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’s quite a lot of things that people want to build, restaurants, sightseeing areas, tank farms. There’s quite a lot of things that people want to build. 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 butt I see the future as very bright for the airport and the state,” she added.