The conspiracy to strangulate NCAA

This write-up requires a historical excursion. The exercise will take us to the years 2005 and 2006, which were a particularly dark period for aviation in Nigeria. It was a season of air mishaps. The aircraft was dropping off from the Nigerian skies. Precious lives were lost. Properties and a huge amount of money were also lost to those accidents. The most painful of them was the Sosoliso Airlines Flight 1145 plane crash on December 10, 2005, at the Port Harcourt International Airport that claimed the lives of generations of Abuja-based Loyola Jesuit Catholic school students. 60 of them perished in that mishap.

One of the actions from within and outside of the regulatory Authority that led to those accidents includes political interference in the oversight mandate and in other activities of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority. By this time, the Authority was considered too powerful and needed to have its powers and influence whittled down. As if that was not enough, some influential stakeholders team up against the then Director of Airworthiness Standards and got the director out of the way. The offence is the strict enforcement of compliance with safety regulations. Of course, the affected director sought redress in the law court and was on the way to victory when an out-of-court settlement was sought and reached.

As a result of these crashes, the international community, as represented by the United Nations agency on aviation, the International Civil Aviation Organisation, blacklisted Nigeria’s airspace and tagged it ‘unsafe’.

To get the country delisted thereafter, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration embarked on some far-reaching reforms.

The first step in that direction was the conduct of a Civil Policy review to dissect the problems with the aviation industry in Nigeria. That done, the 1964 Civil Aviation Act was also reviewed, and this led to its amendment and the enactment of the Civil Aviation Act 2000. It was further amended in 2022, and the Authority was made autonomous, financially and in its safety oversight responsibilities and core mandate.

The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority’s only sources of income are the five per cent Ticket Sales Charge and five per cent Cargo Sales Charge as enshrined in the Civil Aviation Act of 2022at Part V Financial Provisions, Section 23 – [1]. Passengers are the ones paying the TSC and CSC, not the airlines, as is frequently twisted in the narrative outside. This position is, however, captured explicitly in subsection B of the Act mentioned above.

Only recently, the NCAA went through an international assessment or audit by ICAO. Tagged Universal Safety Audit, or better still, a comprehensive safety system check. The country emerged victorious and scored over 94 per cent in the exercise. Nigeria and Nigerians jubilated.

It costs good funding to sustain this feat by the authority, whose main capital project has been the training and retraining of its personnel.

So, if you take away any fraction of the NCAA fund from what passengers paid to sustain the Authority in favour of the Airlines in the name of a bailout, that amounts to indirectly strangulating the Agency. That is rubbing Peter to pay Paul.  This write is prompted by honest intention as a stakeholder, to put the record straight because the Authority’s management, as an officer of the State, would not state their predicament for obvious reasons.

It has happened before, and the consequences were severe, and there is hope that the Federal Government would not make the same mistake of going through that foul route again, so that we do not have a repeat of 2005 and 2006 in Nigeria. God forbid.

Sam Adurogboye is a former General Manager of Public Affairs at the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority