Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo (SAN), says the Federal Government will come hard on people who obtain licenses to operate private flights but clandestinely commenced commercial flights. He also discusses airline maintenance, repair and overhaul, and other issues affecting Nigeria’s aviation industry.
The senior advocate was a guest on Channels Television’s
Newsnight programme during the week.
Someone will say it’s amazing how a lawyer and a Senior
Advocate of Nigeria will be sitting in an aviation chair and piloting the
industry in this nation. How has it been like for you?
(It’s) an exciting
experience for me. I just have to give kudos to Mr President for his vision,
his dexterity. I don’t know how he knew that about 90% of what we have to do in
aviation has to do with the interpretation of BASAs (Bilateral Air Service
Agreements), enforcement of agreements, and all of that, so it’s incredible.
So, it’s like he threw you into your area?
He (the President) threw me into a natural environment. For
me, it also requires a lot of diplomatic shuttles, and funny enough, I am a
fellow of international arbitration for the United Kingdom so I discovered that
most of this work has to do with interpretation of international agreements and
all of that. So I just found myself in a natural environment and I’m loving it.
How are you loving the fact that it’s under your watch
that Air Peace is now flying direct to the UK?
I discovered that immediately I resumed office my natural skill as a lawyer and member of the inner bar is needed to interpret these BASAs and enforce them. So, I put my feet on the ground for these things to happen for our local operators. It has drawn a lot of accolades but now I can tell you that it is barely scratching the surface because we have quite a lot of issues to deal with in the aviation sector. This is just a low-hanging fruit that we decided to pluck. There are a lot of things that we need to address in the aviation sector but the support for our local operators is one objective we identified very early in this administration.
I did not see any previous government highlight this issue,
this objective as much as this government is doing now. Support for local
operators and their survival is key to revamping the economy and giving
customer satisfaction in terms of pricing. 90% of those we preside over in the
aviation industry are local operators. They are private sector people. So, if
we don’t pay attention to them, what am I presiding over as aviation minister?
One of the marching orders Mr President gave me is to pay attention to our
local operators and make sure their businesses survive through government
policies and programmes.
So, when we came on board, we identified five priority areas in the aviation sector, the first one, of course, is safety because safety is number one in the aviation sector. Secondly, we talked about the improvement of infrastructure across the country and that is one area we are going to address, but it’s not a quick fix; it’s not a low-hanging fruit as it were, but we are going to address it. It is the improvement of our infrastructure that enhances customer experience. We talk of terminal buildings, the arrival and departure halls, and all of those things. We are going to address all of that but there are also other infrastructure that people do not see every day that also improve the aviation sector. The MROs — the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul facilities.
We want to attract MROs
to the country. In fact, we have set that as one of our major priorities.
People are looking at local airlines now crashing airfares and not putting
pressure on the naira, but the MRO is just going to be the final nail in the
coffin. When we bring in the MROs, our planes will not have to go out again for
C Checks and this will reduce the cost of operations as they don’t have to
source for foreign currency again to pay their international obligations
because everything in the aviation industry now is in dollars. When you want to
change a bolt, you want to do one check or the other, you have to source for
foreign currency and it’s putting pressure on the naira but when we bring these
facilities into Nigeria, that will serve the whole of West Africa, Central
Africa and part of North Africa, you will see that they will chase the naira.
Those in Africa will have to look for the naira to come and use these
facilities and you will see how much it will improve the naira.
We also want to
improve our Instrument Landing System (ILS). In the aviation sector, any
equipment above 10 years should be due for upgrade because there’s so much
dynamism in the aviation sector. So, we are in the process of improving the ILS
equipment in the five international airports and all the airports. We are also
looking at those equipment that guide planes to land even in the haziest
conditions.
The third objective
now is to support our local operators, ensure their survival and prosperity
while at the same time holding them to the best international standards.
There’s a high level of mortality rate in the aviation sector. In the last 40,
50 years, more than 100 airlines have gone down in Nigeria, and we ask
ourselves; why are they going down? What is happening with the attendant loss
of jobs? I’m going to come back to Air Peace but I’m just listing our five
objectives. So, we discovered that support for local operators is key.
The fourth one is human capacity development and we thought
that we need to train and retrain our aviation personnel. There’s something I
discovered in the industry that I’m going to come very hard on. Some people are
bypassing critical training when they ought to go for refresher training at
regular intervals and all of that. Some of them are skipping it, but I’m going
to ensure that this thing does not happen because it will impact the safety in
the industry.
The final objective is revenue generation. We are a
revenue-generating ministry with all the agencies almost revenue-generating. We
want to optimise that, ensure that we digitalise the process of human factor
collecting fees. We want to optimise revenue for the Federal Government. These
are the five priority areas we looked at and we think we are on cause to
realise them.
You’ve talked about your five-point agenda but let’s go back
to the support for local airlines and the matter of revenue generation.
Different fees are being paid by local operators. Is that going to reduce in
any way because that’s part of what the airline operators complain about. They
say they are not making any money because there’s so much of taxation here.
Well, we met that on
the ground, and I’ve ordered a review of those taxes. Now to ensure that
Nigerians have succour at the end of the day, I called the NCAA (the Nigerian
Civil Aviation Authority) that is in charge of all of that and I’ve told them
to look at it again. There are some charges that are very important, no doubt
about that. All over the world you have charges built on tickets that you can’t
avoid but there are some that we can avoid in order not to put pressure on the
traveling public. I’ve directed the NCAA to look at it again and come up with
recommendations as to which ones can be adjusted or tweaked for the benefits of
Nigerians.
Has it been that easy for you?
Well, there are very difficult issues and issues that may
take some time for us to deal with. It’s not a quick fix, but we can start
somewhere. We have started already, we have identified the ones we want to
attract people to come and cooperate with us to achieve. We have identified the
ones we want to concession. Even the MROs I mentioned earlier, international
investors are talking to us. We are a place of choice because they just realise
that Nigeria is a huge market, West Africa is a huge market, Central Africa a
huge market and Nigeria as the Big Brother in these regions. They just realise
that Nigeria is a place to establish these MROs so that it can attract
customers from all over Africa. The Arabs are talking to us, the Chinese are
talking to us, the Americans are talking to us, the Europeans are talking to
us. They’re coming with their money. Many of them are coming with all kinds of
very juicy packages for us saying they can build and operate them. We have the
traffic, we have the economy, we have the people, we have the ambition, so we
can do it.
This sounds very ambitious especially considering the fact
that in our space we also have competing issues. For instance, you’re talking
about MROs, there are states who are also building MROs. Akwa Ibom, for
instance, has built that though it’s not yet operational.
The more the merrier. We are supporting the building of the
MRO in Akwa Ibom, in Uyo. I went there, fantastic facility that is there, I
mean Akwa Ibom has just shown the world that a subnational can do so much like
the private sector and they have spent so much of their energy on this over the
years. Akwa Ibom has been very lucky to have successive insightful governors
who are very focused. The present governor has continued in that trajectory. I
went there, and I saw what they are doing. They are even building a proper hub
for sub-regional operations. It’s beautiful and like I said, the more the
merrier. We’re not going to depend on one facility, one facility cannot take
all the airplanes in West Africa, Central Africa or part of North Africa, it
cannot. We are aiming to have at least one MRO in all our five major
international airports. We can take two in some, but at least one in Enugu, one
in Kaduna, in Kano one, in Abuja, one in Port Harcourt, and one in Lagos.
It is one of the major reasons affecting the operations and
the survival of local airlines because each time they have to fix their planes,
they spend so much forex for normal routine checks like C checks or D checks.
Some of them cannot even raise the forex, so the airline dies. So, these are
all the plans we have to ensure their survival.
The other plan is to ensure that they have access to
aircraft that other airlines around the world also have access too. And the
only way for an airline to survive on a long term is not to survive on wet or
damp leases. It is to have access to dry leases; dry leases are far cheaper,
the terms are better and almost all the airlines in the world survive on dry
leases. When you get these planes on very good terms and then you have to hire
your own crew, your own pilots and captain and everybody, everything will be
local, you don’t have to import the crew because when you do, you have to take
care of them in foreign currency and all of that.
One other thing that is hampering that (dry leases) is the insurance policy. This is the first time I’m going to talk about it, but it’s a major issue that we are looking at. The lessors around the world insist that you don’t place the risk in the local market in Nigeria. They don’t want the risk of the insurance to be placed in the local market, they insist that the risk should be placed in international market. However, we have a problem in Nigeria where the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) insists that all of this risk must go through our local insurance. I support local content, however, the problem is that the risk in aviation is so big that most of this local insurance will have to go for reinsurance again for them to survive it.
They have to go for reinsurance in the international market once the risk is
placed in local market and this is at extra cost to our local operators.
International lessors and manufacturers are insisting that they will not bring
aircraft here if the risk is placed in the local market. They are saying:
‘Place the risk in the international market before we can bring our aircraft’.
These are the twin issues I’m attacking. I want to start engaging the National
Insurance Commission to look at an exception for dry leases. Other insurance
within the sector can come to the local operators because I support local
content but, on this issue, the international lessors are not going to bend,
they want the risk to be placed in international market and not in the local
market. We’ll be engaging NAICOM in the next few months.
I was in France to assure them, all the lessors in Europe,
almost all them gathered in Airbus to wait for me and Airbus being one of the
manufacturers who give these planes to them, asked me if we are ready for them
because they cannot ignore us. We’re going to work together to clear all those
knotty issues.
How about human capital development by the airlines for
quality service delivery?
Training and retraining will happen among our airlines
because there will be competition. What drives customer satisfaction? It’s
competition. What brings about good prices is not monopoly. Nobody will fly an
airline with poor service delivery if there are 15 other options. But for a
foreign country to dominate our airspace, dominate our airlines, dominate our
total routes here? We’re not going to allow that to happen.
You’ve said service delivery aids competition and customer
satisfaction but you’ve also said that some people are skipping training.
These are things we cannot discuss before the camera because there are people within the system, bad eggs who just take gratification and endorse these (untrained) people to continue, not knowing that you are putting the flying public in danger. I have my intelligence report on this and I’m going to do something about it very soon. You are going to hear some kind of announcement I’ll make in the next one or two weeks on this issue including unlicensed private aircraft in commercial operations. These private jets, almost all of them, are operating commercial to the huge loss of revenue to the Federal Government. They get licences for private operations but do five to eight commercial flights a day.
It’s economic sabotage and I’m not going to
allow that to happen. Some people who are even my friends or friends of Mr
President, we are going to come hard on all of them and perhaps ground all
their planes, withdraw their licenses. We’re not going to allow that to happen.
To the issue of training and retraining, it is in most of these private
aircraft you see those who have not gone for their routine training and we have
complicit people within the system, people who are supposed to check them that
are not doing their job. I have intelligence on them and we coming very hard on
them because we have to raise revenue for the federal government, ensure that
the laws are kept and that Nigerians are safe.
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