The Director General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Capt. Musa Nuhu, has said that many of the state owned airports in the country lack regulatory requirements to function effectively.

Speaking at the second annual national transport technology conference and exhibition with theme: “The Viability of State-Owned Airports: Issues, Challenges and the Way Forward,” held virtually recently, Nuhu said that the more airports are built by state governors, the more regulatory burden they put on the agency.

He declared that most of the state airports are unviable and not thought through, leaving the Federal Government with the responsibility of inheriting the aerodromes after being built. “We have been stretched beyond our capacity. How does an airport generate revenue when it operates once a week? Most of the airports are unviable; built without traffic in mind and leaving the burden to the Federal Government to shoulder. Airports should be a catalyst for economic development. It has to be well thought through. It becomes a problem when an airport will not generate economic returns,” he said.

The guest speaker and the immediate past Director General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Dr. Muda Yusuf, said that out of the 32 airports in the country, only four of them are viable and include the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos which generates about 50 percent of the entire revenue, the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport Abuja, the Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport (MAKIA) and the Port Harcourt International Airport.

Many of the airports he said, are heavily subsidised by their state governments just to give an indication that they are working.

The president, National Association of Nigeria Travel Agencies (NANTA), Susan Akporiaye, who was one of the speakers, blamed lack of funding for the reason many of the state-owned airports are not thriving, stressing that no business will come and open a business when the airport only does one or two flights every day.

An aviation journalist who was one of the discussants at the Webinar, Wole Shadare, alleged that many of the airport embarked upon by state governments are conduit for fleecing their different states, noting that out of the several airports projects by the states, only few are worth the huge amounts expended on them. He expressed displeasure that many of the state governors after building their airports subsequently transfer them to the FAAN which only put pressures on revenues from the only four viable airports.

He said that despite the failure of some airport projects embarked upon by some state governments to take off effectively, more state governors are still desperate to build unviable aerodromes in their domains. In this circumstance, he said the regulatory authorities are “forced” to spend revenue earned from four viable terminals in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano to subsidise operations in the 28 other airports managed by FAAN.

“From estimation, not less than N374 billion have so far been expended on such projects by the states, development, observers reckon as a mere conduit to siphon public funds than for economic interests.

“Even as most of the aerodromes currently operate far below the requisite capacity, Edo State government was recently granted approval by the Ministry of Aviation to site another airport in the northern part of the state, besides the one in Benin City, the state capital.

“Stakeholders are worried that the rate at which state governments were going about it, virtually all the states in Nigeria would have at least an aerodrome in the next five years. While very few of them are viable, many others have been described as white elephant projects,” he said. (Daily Sun)

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