NCAA Names 18 Airports as liability ...300b Spent Nationwide
By Missang AKPET
Over ₦300 Billion have been spent on airports across the country but yet they fail to meet the yearly passenger traffic requirements per airport according to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA).
Many first-generation airports built by the Federal Government during the military era such as Magrate Ekpo International Airport Calabar, Makurdi airport, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano, Kaduna, Benin, Owerri, Jos, Sokoto, Maiduguri, Yola, Bauchi, Akure, Ibadan, Ilorin, Minna and Katsina airport all have profitability questions.
According to NCAA, the airports are underutilized as most of them hardly record daily flights while others only have a few chartered flights sometimes.
Out of the 31 airports in the country, 15 were built by state governments since 1999 with many of them handed over and operated by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, (FAAN).
Speaking to newsmen, the Director-General of NCAA, Captain Musa Nuhu, said those built by the states, and handed over to FAAN for management add a huge financial burden on the NCAA due to the proliferation of state airports and its unsustainability.
According to him, "these airports do not even generate money, some of them have one or two flights a week in which some are even executive flights.
Honestly, we must collectively find a way to deal with that because for me, even as NCAA, it is putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on us" he added.
Also speaking, the Managing Director of FAAN, Captain Rabiu Yadudu, lamented that most of the facilities built by state governments are not commercially viable.
He queried the continuous building of airports by governors stating that they continue to constitute a complex problem for the agency in which the NCAA, FAAN and Ministry of Aviation need to sit and address the issue.
”An airport that needs about ₦300 million a month for maintenance and they have just 1,000 passengers a month, there is no magic that can make them sustainable and FAAN doesn’t have such money to spend on maintenance, it is a very collect situation Yadudu added.
