BPE DG visits SAHCOL on facility tour

As part of the Bureau of Public Enterprises’ (BPE) post privatization monitoring programme, it has visited the Skyway Aviation Handling Company Limited SAHCOL on an inspection tour of facilities.

The Director General of BPE, Alex Okoh said he was at SAHCOL to see the facilities in a view to assessing the position of the establishment.

Okoh while describing Sachol facilities as ‘world class’, facilities said he was not expecting much with what he was hearing about the company expressing satisfaction with the transformation there.

Okoh, who was accompanied on the visit by the BPE Director of Capital Market, Baba Mohammed, and received by the Managing Director of SAHCOL, Rizwan Kadri, and the Management staff at the company headquarters.

Okoh said his visit was to ascertain when to give SAHCOL a clean bill of health, in order to present a discharge certificate to the company, so as to be completely off the monitoring of BPE.

The Director General, revealed that SAHCOL was one of their success story so far, and hence will want to understand the dynamics behind the success and to be able to replicate it in BPE’s future privatization and transactions.

He stated, “essentially we want you to know that we are quite pleased with the progress SAHCOL has made so far, which goes to justify the principles of privatization.”

This, according to him, is to ensure that the efficiency of the services rendered by these enterprises are improved upon, and also to stop the bleeding in terms of the pressure that these enterprise that were not fully efficient were putting on the treasury of the federation.

He said, Nigeria Airways was one of the enterprise that was identified to be privatized, while others cuts across various sectors. Incidentally, SAHCOL was one of the subsidiaries of Nigeria Airways that was slated for privatization, and this was because of the realization that Ground Handling as an aviation services will be best managed by private sector led initiative.

In addition, he said the transaction method observed and chosen for the particular privatization of SAHCOL was full privatization, so as to heighten the level of services rendered, given the international benchmark, but in some of the other enterprise sold, government has held some stake essentially in order to direct the strategic services that is provided to the public space.

Reinforcing the essence of his visit to SAHCOL, Alex Okoh emphasized that, what BPE tried to do, especially for the fully privatized companies like SAHCOL “is to keep monitoring the performances of the level of services rendered, given the international best practices that have to be met, to ensure that they meet the critical objectives of privatization in the first place.”

He congratulated SAHCOL for a job well done so far, while disclosing that BPE will also be looking at possibility of SAHCOL listing some of its shares in the stock market in the future.