The recent ThisDay article titled “As Arik Air Continues to Decline” is not an exercise in accountability or investigative journalism. It is a carefully curated narrative built on omission — a textbook case of propaganda achieved by suppressing decisive facts.
The most glaring omission is also the most damaging to the article’s thesis: A Petition to wind up Arik Air International (UK-based entity of Arik Air) was already filed by foreign creditors in the United Kingdom even before the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) assumed receivership in Nigeria. Arik Air International has since been placed in Administration. This is not disputed information. It is publicly available in the UK Gazette, the official journal of record of the British government.
Administration is not a public relations event. It is a legal process triggered by insolvency — a formal declaration that a company can no longer meet its financial obligations. That Arik’s international operations entered administration abroad fatally undermines the suggestion that the airline was viable until AMCON intervened. A company already insolvent in a foreign jurisdiction was not “derailed”; it was already failing.
Yet readers of the ThisDay piece are never told this.
Instead, the article advances a narrative in which debt is portrayed as exaggerated, questionable, or even fictional. This claim collapses under minimal scrutiny. The same financial distress that led to administration in the UK manifested in massive loan defaults in Nigeria. Those loans were classified as non-performing and transferred to AMCON under powers granted by law. Debt on that scale does not materialise by regulatory conspiracy. It is accumulated over years of borrowing without repayment.
The article does not rebut this reality. It avoids it.
Equally troubling is the erasure of legal context. AMCON’s receivership is portrayed as opaque and arbitrary, yet the fact that it has survived multiple legal challenges is ignored. Courts exist precisely to test legality. When a narrative critiques outcomes while pretending judicial validation does not exist, it is not informing the public — it is managing perception.
The same pattern appears in the discussion of fleet size. Headline aircraft numbers are cited without distinguishing between airworthy and grounded planes, creating the illusion of dramatic post-takeover collapse while concealing the airline’s operational fragility before intervention. Selective metrics are not neutral; they are persuasive tools.
But the clearest signal of advocacy is the article’s allocation of blame. AMCON is relentlessly indicted. Former shareholders and management — who presided over the borrowing, defaults, and overseas administration — are largely absolved. This imbalance is not accidental. It reflects a narrative choice that aligns neatly with the interests of those seeking to rewrite their role in the airline’s failure.
That is why the piece reads less like journalism and more like a defence brief.
Propaganda-by-omission is effective because it feels reasonable. Readers are simply denied the facts required to judge fairly. When insolvency abroad is omitted, debt is minimised, and legal rulings are erased, the public record is distorted.
The truth is straightforward: AMCON intervened because Arik Air had already collapsed — financially and operationally. A fact acknowledged not only in Nigeria but in the United Kingdom.
Signed
Simon Tumba
SY&T Communications Ltd
PR Agency of
Receiver Manager of Arik Air (in Receivership)
