Dr. Christoph Franz, chairman of the Executive Board & CEO Deutsche Lufthansa, was in Nigeria recently as part of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, team to Nigeria recently.

•Christoph Franz,

As   Chief Executive Officer Deutsche Lufthansa AG since January 1, 2011, he is responsible for the Lufthansa Group, which comprises the Passenger Airline Group, Logistics, MRO, Catering and IT Services segments and has over 117,000 employees worldwide.

In this chat with Vanguard’s JIMOH BABATUNDE at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja, he said Nigeria deserves a national carrier, just as he talked about issues affecting the world aviation industry. Here is an excerpt.

 On his visit to Nigeria

We are exploring all three countries our chancellor is visiting and what our future business opportunities are.

Nigeria is a special case,   because there is no other country in Africa where we are flying three destinations.  Lufthansa and Nigeria has a very long love affair since 1962 when we started flying to this country and we kept flying even during difficult period in Nigeria history. In this sense, we have been able to develop link between Nigeria and Germany, Europe and the world.

We think this is something that can be further developed at this point in time. We see a lot of business opportunities evolving here in Nigeria and it is interesting for Lufthansa, so we have increased our daily flight to Lagos, Abuja and then continue four times to Port Harcourt which is a very important oil and gas destination in Lufthansa portfolio and which compliment destinations here in Africa like in Libreville in Gabon, Luanda in Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo.

On possibility of signing MOU

We have been discussing with Nigerian government for a long time on MOU to establish a strategic partnership in Aviation between Nigeria and Germany.

Based on this agreement, Lufthansa has been able to increase its capacity to Nigeria quite considerably and are at this point trying to move from MOU into bilateral air service agreement between Germany and Nigeria. That is the discussion that is ongoing and is not only focusing on number of flight and frequency.

Lufthansa is not only about airline but aviation group, so we can offer other services to our partners in this country like MR Hall facility in Lagos. We are not doing that for our airlines alone but others here in Nigeria and creating high qualified jobs for technicians here.

We are bringing values here to this country; this is a partnership that is win- win situation for both parties in terms of royalty payment.   And provide safe air travels in this country

On multiple entries to Nigeria

This is not detrimental to local airlines as there are many destinations we don’t fly to. There are many destinations and airports that we are not flying to on direct services. We don’t fly to Kano for example, we bring passengers here and the local airlines distribute them. We enlarge the customer base here

We don’t have any traffic rights to do domestic transport here.  Even though we bring passengers from Abuja to Port Harcourt, we don’t make upload in Abuja. So there is no direct competition with domestic airlines.

On figures of passengers generated from Nigeria

I don’t have the figure here, but I do know that we have growth here between Germany and Nigeria.

On challenges from Middle East airlines

It is the same challenges for the airline in Nigeria. When an airline is flying to a neighboring country; and in the worldwide system and since we are part of the world trade organization so there is no court of appeal to guarantee fair rule. So the only way our airlines are working is to establish air service bilateral agreement.

And in this respect, with bilateral air service agreement you are always focusing on number of traffic, but you can never guarantee  that your partners from the other country is  running its airline on the same level playing field.

Let us talk about traffic between Dubai on Lufthansa which we do from Frankfurt, they are basically local passengers, this is good business for Lufthansa too as we do daily fly.

But our problem  with  Middle East  airlines from Europe  that they are not only focusing  on passengers wanting to fly to Dubai, their major business, because Dubai is  not a big markets,  but on passengers going to India  or you  have passengers flying  to India via our hub in Germany, or to South East Asia, East Africa and to Australia and all these business that their capacity increase so fast that they are not only taking away the growth of the market but they are taking away big part of the business.

We have airport fees to pay in Germany because it is privately owned and they have to cover the airport fee and ours is much higher and in Dubai it is much lower and the difference is in the class of 85% lower compared to what we pay.

That is big advantage to them because the whole system of air traffic control, airport and airlines are run in integrated way in order to develop Dubai.  This is a very difficult challenge to cope with.

On Nigeria aviation industry

What we do is try to support the Nigeria aviation sector here by establishing our technical, catering business and our subsidiary are working here.  What we see is that the standards are improving.

I think a country like Nigeria with its standard and population as well as increasing wealth must have a national carrier. Full stop.  It must be generated as a professional business.

It must not be generated from airline relying on subsidy, aviation business is a professional business it is not an easy business , it is not about easy money, by buying airlines. It is an industry that has never been profitable enough?

We should be aware that what we are dreaming of  and what will become of it will take a long time and Lufthansa  will want to assist with technical know how to this country and we will want to support the existing airlines to become  strong carriers.

On Challenges

The two major challenges we are facing is getting fuel, Financial crises and then in Africa here political challenge.

The second challenge is that of qualified pilots being enticed with big money from the Middle East.