The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has summoned former Minister of Aviation Hadi Sirika to explain the disbursement of funds budgeted for the Nigeria Air national carrier project, deepening the scrutiny facing the initiative barely three weeks after it was unveiled at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport. The summons follows the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation's 6 June finding that the unveiling amounted to a "fraud" and its call for those responsible to be investigated.
Sirika, who left office at the end of the Buhari administration on 29 May, has maintained that of the N5 billion budgeted for the project's take-off, only N3 billion was actually released, and that this sum was spent on consultancy fees, salaries, and administrative costs associated with setting up the carrier rather than diverted improperly. He has rejected suggestions circulating publicly that far larger sums, in the tens of billions of naira, were spent on the project.
A Project Under a Cloud From the Start
Nigeria Air was first announced at the Farnborough Airshow in 2018 as the centrepiece of the Buhari administration's plan to relaunch a national carrier after the collapse of the original Nigeria Airways in 2003. The project was repeatedly delayed over the following five years, and its eventual unveiling on 26 May 2023 used a Boeing 737 chartered from Ethiopian Airlines rather than an aircraft owned by the new carrier, fuelling accusations that the event was more symbolic than substantive.
Ministry officials have acknowledged that Nigeria Air had not been issued an air operator certificate at the time of the unveiling, meaning the carrier was, in a technical sense, not yet capable of commercial flight. That admission has become central to lawmakers' argument that the event was staged primarily to allow the outgoing administration to claim a national carrier had been delivered before its term ended.
Pressure Builds on the Incoming Government
The EFCC summons places the newly inaugurated administration of President Bola Tinubu in a position where it must decide how aggressively to pursue accountability for a project it inherited rather than initiated, a question that would come to a head later in the year once a substantive minister of aviation was appointed.
