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Louis Ibah
After nearly two months without a substantive minister to oversee its affairs, President Muhammadu Buhari is expected to name a new cabinet Minister of State for Aviation anytime this month from the pool of 43 nominees screened by the Nigerian Senate a fortnight ago.
Although many industry observers have tipped the erstwhile Minister, Mr. Hadi Sirika, to return to his job, the fact that the prerogative to allocate positions to nominees lies solely with Mr. President still leaves the possibility of a new face coming on board as Aviation Minister.
The last two months without a supervising Minister, has seen the Nigerian aviation industry recording scenes that are not just embarrassing to the country, but also pose severe threats to air safety compelling concerned stakeholders to list certain areas as ‘quick-fix’ priorities for the incoming minister.
Security at airports
It was while the industry was operating as an aircraft without a pilot with the absence of a supervising minister that a lone man (from Niger Republic) successfully breached all set-up security structures at the Murtala Muhammed Airport Lagos to access a most critical section of the airport at the apron/runway and to disrupt the take-off of a Port-Harcourt bound Azman Air aircraft.
Without a doubt, nothing captures the absence or porous state of security at Nigerian airports than that scene. He could have been a terrorist, and if he actually intended to bomb the aircraft nothing could have stopped him. The fact that it can happen in a prime airport as the Lagos where security appears to be tight more or less leaves safety conscious passengers wondering what would the state of security at the other airports. At the Owerri Airport for instance, an airline official who wouldn’t want to be named told Daily Sun that there are days where the scanning machines won’t function properly to x-ray persons and luggage content forcing airlines to board just anyone and their luggage with all the attendant risks. A staff of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) also confided in Daily Sun that most of the scanning equipment at the international airports were obsolete and were not capturing luggage contents effectively to detect hard drugs. “We usually rely on our intuition and on our training to profile persons travelling with drugs at the airports,” said the official.
Olayinka Abioye, a former Secretary General of the National Union of Air Transport Employees (NUATE, told Daily Sun that nothing drives away air passengers than a lingering perception of an unsafe operating environment.
Abioye in an interview with Daily Sun at the weekend stressed the need for the incoming Aviation Minister to tweak the security architecture across all airports to halt the regime of breaches noticed in recent years.
“Aviation security is the key to passenger and airline happiness, relaxation and comfortability,” said Abioye.
“At the moment, there are a plethora of aviation security being performed by all and sundry, Police, DSS, FAAN security, NSDC without a clear-cut definition of areas of work, duties to be performed.
“While FAAN aviation security personnel have the primary responsibility over airport security, the Police comes second with secondary duties. What then are the roles of other security agencies such as NSDC, DSS?
“Do we have a central command structure that gives overriding directives on how we are secured, and gather intelligence amongb others” Abioye queried.
According to him, the new Minister has to hit the ground running from day one and his first priority should be addressing the security challenges at the airport to boost passenger confidence and attract more people to fly.
Enugu, Port Harcourt, Lagos airport runways
It was while the industry operated without a supervising minister that pilots flying through the Nigerian airspace decried the poor quality of communication with Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) as well as the poor state of runways at the Enugu, Port Harcourt, Lagos and Abuja airports.
The four airports’ runways, according to the pilots, don’t allow sufficient friction for landing aircraft tyres especially during rainy conditions. The worse if the Enugu airport runway that turns into a swimming pool whenever it rains forcing airlines to cancel flights into the airport. Chief Pilot of Air Peace Airline, Capt. Victor Egonu, who addressed journalists in Lagos said pilots were flying into death traps during raining conditions in some of the country’s airports.
“If you fly into Enugu, it is so bad that air traffic controllers have to advise you that they are potholes and that stones jumping off from the potholes could burst your tyres and pilots are usually scared. We have airlines with torn tyres from this,” said Egonu.
“At the Lagos airport runway 18L, we are now avoiding it whenever it rains because it doesn’t drain well and so we have to divert to land at runway 18R. The Port Harcourt airport runway is equally waterlogged whenever it rains. And even in Abuja our aircraft had a burst tyre from an object it picked up after landing on the runway and this is very dangerous because if you pick up something from the tyre on the runway as it was the case of the Concord aircraft, it could ignite fire once it reclines and makes contact with the fuel tank,” Egonu added.
There have been near-mishaps at the Lagos, and Port Harcourt runways in recent weeks. Whoever comes in as the new Aviation Minister has to take immediate steps to address the crisis at the Enugu, Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja airport runways in the interest of air safety.
Public officers
For the new Minister to make a difference from his predecessors, there is the need to set targets and time-lines for delivery on assumption of duty. We can’t be doing the same thing year-in-year and year-out by allowing public officers work at a pace not dictated by set goals and objectives that grows the industry and be expecting laudable results.
For this reason, from day one, the Minister must outline measurable key performance indexes for public officers charged with the responsibilities of managing the Nigerian airspace, the airports and the officers charged with the overall oversight of the industry. And those who fall short of targets should be eased out for more competent, dedicated and result oriented workers.
