By Mark Tierney
A tribute to Nick Fadugba, who sadly passed in August 2024.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
If ever there were a man who heard, understood and followed his calling, it was Nick Fadugba, founder and head of African Aviation Services, the venerable consultancy he formed in 1990 to promote Africa’s aviation industry, and of AFRICAN AVIATION, the eponymous journal he founded for the same purpose.
Although courted in the 1980s by Steve Udvar-Házy at ILFC and the late Tony Ryan at GPA (the ‘twin’ doyens of the then-fledgling aircraft leasing industry), Nick opted to follow his own star – dedicating his time, energy and considerable intellect to Africa’s socio-economic development by means of proselytizing all-comers to the benefits of a fit-for-purpose air transport system on the continent.
For more than 30 years, Nick organised the annual Air Finance Africa Conference, the annual MRO Africa Conference and many other aviation events.
Nick’s was a grand pan-African vision of and yet ahead of its time: as he understood that the continent’s air transport system needed to be modernised to enable faster economic growth, his Air Finance Africa Conference was initially aimed at gathering together ‘under one roof’ Africa’s airline shareholders. In due course, it became one of the main annual events on the African aviation calendar, attracting senior executives of airlines, original equipment manufacturers, lenders, lessors and service providers.
No less effective was his annual MRO Africa Conference which may have been even more consequential as it touched less on policy and more on practice and witnessed, to Nick’s delight, Africa’s much-improved airline safety record this century.
Always principled, ever dignified, Nick revelled in a challenge and never flinched, sometimes mischievously, from ‘speaking truth to power’. (His was one of the voices that succeeded in having the EU’s aviation ‘black-list’ renamed the ‘banned list’.)
There is a bygone phrase once used by Africans and foreigners alike: Westerners might wear watches … but Africans have the ‘time’. It was a rare ‘stop all the clocks’ moment when Africa’s aviation community learned that, alas and a-woe and all too soon, Nick’s time was up. As we commiserate with Nick’s family and friends, we might also reflect that we owe it to Nick, to them and to the African public, to help make his vision a reality.
Mark Tierney is chief executive of Crabtree Capital, chairman of Santos Dumont and, since 2010, champion of the CAFE initiative (the call for a public-private commercial aircraft finance enterprise to release the aviation brake on Africa’s socio-economic development)