It is not yet uhuru in Nigerian aviation sector - Akerele

The former chairman of Ministerial Committee on Airspace and Secretary General of Aviation Round Table (ART), Mr. Sam Akerele, in this interview with Gboyega Adeoye, reviews the aviation industry in 2007, pin-pointing issues the authorities must look into that have generated controversies in the year under review. Excerpts:

What is your comment on the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN)?
Well, if you look at aviation in 2007, I think somehow we are luckier. This time we don’t have wide body aircraft accidents resulting in many deaths. However, there are a lot of problems in the industry. If you take FAAN for example, nobody has been able to explain how the N19.5 billion aviation intervention fund was spent and what has been the impact. Remember we said infrastructure is obsolete and decaying and if we look at the Air Vice Marshal Paul Dike’s Committee report and White paper, they made a lot of money, about N60 billion I think and Obasanjo, who is supposed to be somebody who does not give easily, gave out N19.5 billion. But we have not seen the impact. The infrastructure, the facilities, terminal building, are still the same. There are no new aprons; they want to repair Port Harcourt Airport and then they do overlay of 18 left runway in Lagos.

I think they also said they paid some severance package. There are no infrastructure. Where is the solid infrastructure they have been able to improve upon? Out of that money, one would have thought they would have bought this Doppler weather radar, even if it is only two for $2 million, that is about N250 to N260 million, so that this weather that is always affecting us, we would be able to predict round shear, thunder storm and other heavy winds and then be able to tell the pilot to stay on ground or wait in the air for minutes to see if the weather will clear. And then we said two years ago that the security men were not adequate.

I mean FAAN is supposed to recruit about 500 security men who are supposed to watch the monitor for about two hours and rest for one hour. Actually, the law is 40 minutes and rest for 20 minutes. But at times they are there for three to four hours watching the monitor and once you stay too long, any human being, your brain will relax and something can pass through. So we said recruit more security men.

Now it is taking them over a year to recruit just security men and at the last count, we heard that there is a petition from the consultant; that they are even putting names of people who did not even write application, do exams, do interview, they just add their names on the list. When you mess up security like that, you can imagine what is happening in other spheres. So, there are serious problems in those areas. The Port Harcourt Airport repairs was supposed to take three months.

Why did it take 15 months and to me that is a lot of inefficiency and because Nigerians do not remember things very well because here we have short memories and always look after what is happening right now. Three months after we forget that and go to the next one. For any country that wants to be great, there must be people who are planning its life, monitoring what is going on continuously, people who are dedicated, not politicians who want to make money.

There are people who saved this country from going to the abyss. I think Nigeria needs that type of people.

This terminal at Murtala Muhammed Airport (MMA) was built in 1979. It is still the same. We are supposed to have A,B,C, D and E. They only developed D and E.

The A, B, and C up till now, almost 40 years after, nobody has remembered to build another terminal. What type of country is that? And it is because there is no holistic plan for 10 – 20 years. Everybody comes, he wants to put his own plan there, he wants to make money in a hurry and even when he is sacked, he goes away. So the country cannot move forward. Look at the car park they said they built at the international airport; the thing has started falling apart. Whoever took money for that car park should be asked to return the money because that job was not properly done. And if it was done in-house, which is direct labour, which is now the new means of making money, the engineers of that department should be asked to return that money. How can you do a car park and less than a month or two it has started falling apart and everybody seems to have forgotten.

Look at the crowd control at the same airport; it is like Oshodi. There is no difference between that International airport and Oshodi. I have not seen one. It is the only airport in the world you go to and see such a large crowd at the entrance.