No Fuel? Nigeria’s Biggest Carrier Arik Grounds Flights

The Nigerian airline Arik Air Ltd. is operating only one-third of its schedule on Sunday and canceled all domestic flights a day earlier as fuel shortages worsened in Africa’s top oil producer, a spokesman said.
“We’re operating just a few flights today, maybe 30 percent of our normal operations,” Ola Banji, a Lagos-based spokesman for Nigeria’s biggest carrier, said by phone. “We could not operate domestic flights yesterday.”
Arik Air, with 26 aircraft, cut two-thirds of its 120 daily flights. That included flights to London’s Heathrow and New York needing to stop over for fuel in Kano, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of Lagos, Banji said. Aero Contractors Ltd., Nigeria’s second-largest carrier, said on its website that “all our flights will not operate regularly as scheduled” due to fuel scarcity.

Nigerians have faced long queues for fuel for weeks across Africa’s biggest economy, which relies on imports to meet more than 70 percent of domestic needs, with Nigeria’s airline industry the latest to feel the pinch from shortages.
Nigeria endures perennial shortages because of inadequate refining capacity. The latest round began in March, with fuel marketers, importers and storage companies hit by tight credit, a devalued naira and unpaid government debts that they say has reached $1 billion. The government guarantees cheaper fuel by subsidizing gasoline, paying marketers the difference between the cost of imports and a fixed domestic price.
President-elect Muhammadu Buhari will take over from Goodluck Jonathan on May 29, causing anxiety among creditors that the new government may take longer to remedy the situation, Thomas Olawore, head of the marketers body, said in a May 12 interview.