What’s in a name and a logo?

There’s apparently a lot riding on a name and a logo as we learnt at the recent unveiling of Nigeria’s new national carrier, Nigeria Air. The chosen name is so unique that the Minister of State for Aviation, at his presentation, had to gleefully regale us with the process that gave birth to that name. According to him, “we will engage the youths of Nigeria because we do believe in the Not Too Young to Run”. Is that a metaphor or it actually refers to the Not Too Young to Run act? Still struggling to connect the dots. He further said “we engaged 400,000 Nigerian youths to arrive at the name of the airline”.

With the non-availability of Air Nigeria and Nigeria Airways, one must commend the 400,000 Nigerian youths for arriving at one of the two available most common naming conventions for national carriers, that’s genius, or is it?

The Nigerian youths were, however, too young or is it lazy, to design the logo to go with the name they came up with; this had to be farmed out to a company in Bahrain. As an afterthought engendered by the backlash, the Bahraini company pulled down its first broadcast announcing the branding project, and put up another which included credit to a Nigerian marketing agency which isn’t even incorporated with the Corporate Affairs Commission.

One would think that with all the information technology hubs that the Vice President of Nigeria has been conducting photo-ops at, there would at least be one that is worthy of designing a logo for the national carrier under the guidance of a Nigerian aviation consulting firm. There is also a claim that the contract was worth $600,000, which translates to N216m at an exchange rate of N360/USD. I really want to believe there’s no truth in this, but given our penchant for malfeasance, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turns out to be true.

Although I think there are more pressing issues the government should deploy our hard earned resources to, the idea of a national carrier in itself isn’t such a bad idea if done right. For one, we can start taking advantage of all the agreements in place for many of the busy routes that are currently been served by only foreign airlines. Also, since it is meant to be a business venture and not charity, there is the opportunity to earn decent return on investment.

Read also: Passenger dies while boarding airplane at MMIA

There are also those routes that are better served by direct flights, so travelers will not have to first journey East to go West, or South to go North. Imagine a flight from Lagos to Atlanta which is about 18,120km via Dubai, but only about 9,400km on a direct flight, or Lagos to London which is a direct flight of about 5,020km but about 11,400km via Dubai and 9,840km via Addis Ababa.

The problem I see with the project is that it isn’t going to be done right, and the auguries are not promising. The government has already decided that it is going to own 5% of the venture, but how that figure was arrived at, nobody knows. In the 2017 budget, N555m was approved for the establishment of a national carrier, and N200m for consultancy. In the 2018 budget, N50mn was allocated for establishment of the same carrier and N20mn for consultancy.

The federal government has estimated a preliminary pre-start-up cost of $8.8m and take-off cost of $300m. The name and logo have been decided, the company has been registered as wholly owned by the federal government, with nominal directors from the ministry, and negotiation with aircraft manufacturers is currently ongoing. For a project that is meant to be private sector driven, I’m wondering what contribution is left for the owners of the 95% stake to make? Will the government be responsible for the $308.8m pre-start-up and take-off costs?

I hope at the end of the day we won’t be asked to start praying for government to find collaborators on this project when the expenses government would claim to have made on the project don’t stack up. If you intend to own 5% stake in a project, common sense dictates you allow knowledgeable stakeholders with 95% of the equity make contribution from the conceptualization to the take-off stage. Enough of this stupidity!