Buhari Should Clean up Political Impositions in Aviation Sector – Saidu

Comrade Razaq Saidu, a one-time Secretary General of National Union of Air Transport Employees(NUATE) and a former member of  the Civil Society Representative(Aviation) in MTSS, believes that one major task awaiting the incoming Administration of Gen Muhammadu Buhari, will be to re-engineer the transport sector by removing identified clogs in the wheel of the sector’s progress. He also sheds light on other critical issues.  CHUKWUEMEKE IWELUNMO with excerpts.

What should be the priority or focal point of the in-comming administration of Gen., Mohammadu Buhari?

What the president-elect should do, not only in the aviation sector but also in all other sectors is to ensure putting round peg in a round hole. That is, he should let professionalism be his yardstick in appointing people into positions of authority.

The Ministry of Aviation should be out rightly scrapped to whittle down the interference in the duties of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and allow NCAA to carry out its obligations and oversight without political interference from the Minister.

Look at this scenario- some staff that were overdue for promotion were recently promoted by the management of one of the agencies and they have been acting on their new positions for months only for a Minister to come in and suspend the exercise only to pave way for his political impositions from outside the system.

That is not good. People have kept the system going before the Minister came and if the management deemed it fit to promote those whom it feel deserves promotion due to their productivity, so be it.

However, appointing a Minister of Aviation this time around will be counter-productive and if at all, the in-coming president is to appoint one, he or she must be a professional in the field of aviation like appointing somebody with medical background as Minister of Health. What we have in most of the Aviation Agencies are political impositions.

Placements for jobs are no longer being advertised as required by law so as to get the best personnel for the highly technical job of the sector. Appointments are no longer on professional qualification or competence but job for the boys on political patronage. Those that came in through this unorthodox way should be shown the way out so as to start in earnest the sanitisation of the industry.

I repeat, the politically imposed appointments must be cleansed from the system. There are a lot of people not doing anything and many more duplication of duties or functions and many more still not qualified for the position they are occupying in the system. This has dragged the aviation standard backward instead of progressing.

I strongly feel that even at that, what is good in this modern era is allow all modes of transportation to be under one Ministry-that is-Ministry of Transport under one Minister and structured into three departments (Aviation, Maritime and Land sub divided into Rail and Road).

Each of this department supervised by a permanent secretary who shall in turn report to the Minister. Duplicating or Triplicating into different Ministries of these transportation modes is counter-productive in modern economies.

Most times appointment made on this old premise are politically motivated without adequate considerations for professionalism and competence and they always come in with policies that are at variant with set standards and procedures for administering these modes of transportation.

For example, in Aviation, previous Ministers of Aviation have always work against the acceptable International Civil Aviation Organization(ICAO) set standards and recommended practices and imposed their personal thoughts and views on the industry without the in-put of operators and professionals in the industry and other indispensable stakeholders. This has brought gross set-backs to the aviation industry.

CORRUPTION

Even, a blind person or deaf man knows that there is corruption in the aviation industry perpetrated by the political class in the Aviation Ministry.

Their unnecessary political interference through the dishing out of policies not in tune with the workability of the industry and not in line with ICAO set standards and has invariably led to the corruption of the system.

For example, BASA account is not meant to be shared as political patronage but ploughed back into the industry through repositioning, replacement of obsolete equipment and training and retraining of personnels. This are what BASA account was meant to achieve.

They thought may be BASA is for the federal Government. It was Nigeria Airways commercial agreement that gave birth to BASA In the days of Nigeria Airways, it established and developed some routes but due to lack of capacity fleet to match foreign airlines on those routes in order to reciprocate, it went into commercial agreement with those airlines in which the airlines had to pay an agreed amount per passenger per extra capacity they lifted which Nigeria Airways couldn’t meet up with.

The royalties accruing there from were therefor paid into the BASA account created. When Nigeria Airways was liquidated, the Federal Government through the Ministry of Aviation hijacked the BASA account which had been transferred to NCAA for the development of the industry.

When Stella-Oduah became the Minister, strange things started happening. The depletion of the millions of US Dollars in BASA account started in earnest.

This is why I want the in-coming government to look into this, especially the disbursement of the money that accrued into the BASA account. It must be critically looked into so as to determine whether various withdrawals follow due process and what were the various withdrawals expended on.

Was it not because one of the NCAA DGs refused to compromise on illegal spending of BASA fund that he was removed? Since his removal, many others were also removed on similar ground.

The NCAA is expected to draw from this money for the training and retraining of its technical staff to enhance its oversight functions, especially on ascertaining the airworthiness compliance of airlines.

To achieve this, the Authority’s staff must be trained both locally and abroad. How many times have they been able to do that due to paucity of funds? Where are the millions of US Dollars in the BASA account? We want to know.

NIGERIA AIRWAYS

Another area which has been the clog in the wheel of progress of the industry in Nigeria was the wrongful and illegal liquidation of Nigeria Airways. This airline was then the symbol of national unity and pride.

It was and is still my view that if at all the national carrier was to be liquidated, a Bill to that effect ought to have been sent to the National Assembly because the airline was set up through an Act of Parliament in 1958 and the Act is still in our Statute book and not yet repelled. However, it was hurriedly liquidated through false premise of alleged huge indebtedness.

I want to believe that the former President Olusegun Obasanjo  under whose administration Nigeria Airways was liquidated must have been misled into believing that Nigeria Airways was owing a lot without properly cross checking on those that were owing the airline of which the Federal Government was the major debtor. As at the time Nigeria Airways, was not owing the amount they claimed it owed.

The liquidator has till today not told Nigerians how much he sold Nigeria Airways and its properties both here and overseas, that is, in the USA, Britain, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Ghana and I other African countries, and most importantly in Nigeria including Kano and GRA, Ikeja.

Those that bought the national carrier’s office complex and hangar at local terminal in Lagos are yet to fully pay for the purchase even though it was under-valued at the time of sale. The staff that were forcefully sacked have not been settled to date.

Therefore, in order to bring sanity into the air transport sector, the president-elect must bring Nigeria Airways back as promised during his campaigns for election and ensure that the staff, many of whom had died get paid their entitlements.

Then, we should ask from the liquidator how much Nigeria Airways was sold? How much was paid for its acquisition by the buyer? Into which account was the proceeds therefrom paid into? All these are puzzles that needed to be unravelled if we are to move forward.

It is from here that corruption crept in to the industry. It is from the dust of Nigeria Airways that corruption began to be the order of the day I the aviation industry.” You come and chop and go and the next also do the same up to the ministry level. It is a cycle of you chop, I chop”.

This has been the domino effects since the demise of Nigeria Airways, which has also affected the dilapidation of infrastructural facilities including replacements of obsolete equipment until we started to give warning alerts recently where some of these gadgets are now being replaced and reposition like the Doppler Weather Radar put in place by NIMET and NAMA too.

CONTRACT MANIPULATION

During the first tenure of the Minister of Finance, Okonjo Iweala under the then President Olusegun Obasanjo, she introduced what was called Medium Term Sector Strategy (MTSS) to determine the contract/projects to be executed  two, three years ahead.

It involved identifying such projects, cost the contracts and it goes into an “envelope” after they must have been determined by a committee whose members are drawn from within and outside sectors involved in such projects.

In that envelope, you cannot go beyond what was approved. It does not give room for contract inflation or manipulation in a way that after somebody must have bided for and won the contract, at the last stage the name of the contractor is then substituted and replaced by another that did not bid.

However, in her second coming under President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, this system-MTSS- was jettissioned. If the MTSS is still in force, and enforced as before by the Budget Office of the Federation, the high level of corruption in contract awards as witnessed in the Aviation sector would not have happened.

The MTSS through the Budget Office then was where the issue of over inflation and duplication of contracts, diversion of money approved for certain projects were been captured and it used to be ” arrested”

It is an irony that in the second coming of Iweala, this system of checks was removed and replaced with Medium Term Expenditure.

What about the real MTSS where you will be able to itemise contracts where government will determine whether it will be able to fund them or through the internally generated revenue of the affected agencies.

The MTSS encompass not less than 19 Ministries/Agencies. This is another area we want the new government to look into. For now, nobody is talking about it. I have the right to talk about it because I represented the Civil Society (Aviation) in the MTSS Committee before it was made moribund by Iweala.

Since 2006, I have written several memos to the Minister and other officials without response. Whereas, we knew then that the Budget Office of the Federation was did a very nice job when the MTSS was functional. Now, everything has been turned upside down to allow corruption to flourish.