By Uche Mbah
Nigeria’s aviation sector may take up two years to recover from the effects of COVID 19 as it continues to experience financial drag in spite of government’s reopening of operations, the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika has said.
“I think until quarter four of 2021 and perhaps quarter one of 2022, we will continue to see a sharp decline in passengers and that is directly proportional to the revenue that we collect because people’s confidence has to be raised,” Hadi Sirika said.
Sirika had recently announced the resumption of International flights August 29. Before now, it was only chartered flights and flights with special permissions that flew the Nigerian airspace.
Airlines have been having running battles with Aviation unions over staff welfare and load shedding, with ultimatums causing turbulence in the industry.
Federal Airports Authority had reported N44.39 billion losses in 3-year due to the non-profitability of some airports. Besides Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt, other Airports, particularly those in the North, are not self-sustaining.
The losses according to a report were incurred in the operations of 17 airports across the country as lack of sufficient traffic, huge overhead and maintenance cost dominated expenditures
“They have to begin to want to fly again and certain factors that encourage propensity to fly are also being eroded during this period,” the minister said while interacting with Nigerian lawmakers in Abuja”, he said.
According to him, the sector has run into difficult and challenging times due to the impact of coronavirus pandemic.
“We are not in the business of selling phones that we can still sell and get the required revenue. The revenue for yesterday is lost. Therefore, we are hugely impacted by the COVID,” He said, adding that many advanced countries appear to be spending huge resources to support the civil aviation industry after the reopening of airspace and resumption of operations. But Nigeria, he said, is falling short of its responsibilities n this regard.
For this reason, he said, Government plans to concession some airports in the country, and has already concluded the basic outlines, only waiting for concessionaires. He said privatization is no longer the option because concession“is simple and that is because this government, the APC administration is social democratic in nature, it does not want to sell national assets.”
“If the government is not able to fund us because of the the challenge of income, then the government should not take the little we have. Every single agency in civil aviation is so critical that we need to fund it and because we understand the nature of this business, that was why we have now introduced the concession of our airports.
“We have now done the outline business case, we are now going ahead for the procurement to concession this airport.
“It wants to keep the assets with the people but we can concession them and improve thebm to make them better. We are very sure that when we do that, we will improve the revenue of the nation.”
