The senate has ordered that an investigation be carried out regarding claims that foreign airlines charge arbitrary fares on Lagos-London and Abuja-London routes. This decision was made following a motion sponsored by Hope Uzodinma (Imo West) which claims that that foreign airlines, particularly British Airways  (BA) and Virgin Atlantic are involved in charging these rates.

The Senate President David Mark expressed great displeasure over the alleged action of the airlines and vowed that the chamber would do something about it and not watch Nigerians suffer.

In his words:
I think you have done a lot of good work, there is no doubt about that but I think there is a lot more the committee should have done or should do. I have not seen in this report where you have explained the difference in prices among airlines that fly to Accra-London, Lagos-London or Abuja-London.Secondly, let me agree with you that our laws are weak, but even these weak laws are not fully implemented.”

“Weak as the laws may be, they are not being fully implemented because it is this partial implementation of the weak laws that is giving you the authority to recommend some reform here. So, we already have problems with implementing laws we put in place.

I think the problem is that there are rumours in the air that Emirates wants to come here and that the Aviation Minister said Emirates should go to Enugu rather than going to Kano. The committee should find out all these for us whether they are true or false. When we say we want to allow competition in the system, let us provide a conducive environment for everybody to have a fair deal in the competition. These are the questions in my opinion, you need to go back to answer. We will treat some of the recommendations today but we will give you more work. You need to go back and bring very critical recommendations that will make us change the aviation industry. As it is at the moment, there are very many problems. Of course,one of them is to. re-organise our airports properly. We also need to do our homework properly before pointing accusing fingers or blaming others for our problems.