Azman Airline has sacked at least six pilots and four other critical staff over “indiscipline and promotion of anarchy.”
This is also as the airline stopped other airlines under the auspices of Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) from engaging the sacked staff due to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the operators signed on engagement and disengagement of critical staff.
Checks by Businessday show that the pilots were sacked over the weekend by the management.
Abdulmunaf Yinusa, chairman of Azman Air, confirmed the development but said that the workers were sacked due to the need for reduction of staff.
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Yinusa lamented that the advent of Covid-19 pandemic led to the reduction of its flight services, thereby making the sack inevitable.
He said: “The only thing I know about this is that some of the staff were terminated due to reductions of our flights as a result of low demands because of Covid-19 impact.”
But, information gathered indicated that the pilots and the other staff were sacked because they complained of late payment of salaries and arbitrary reduction in their salaries by the airline.
Further investigations show that plans had reached an advanced stage by the airline to replace the sacked pilots with foreigners.
According to information gathered, the airline had commenced the recruitment exercise of the foreign pilots.
A source close to AON who craved anonymity said that the airline operators had signed an MOU last September to stop engaging any pilots who resigned or sacked by another airline.
The MOU stated that before any sacked pilot could be engaged by another airline, his previous employer must give him a letter of no objections before he could be re-engaged by the other airline, a development, causing unrest among the pilots.
