Rather than announce that the Lagos Airport domestic runway closed for repairs more than two years ago would be open for use next week, FAAN would be welcoming new set of contractors to the site for a project that is more than one year behind schedule, Lucky Fiakpa writes
The contractors working on the Murtala Mohammed Airport domestic runway are expected to resume work next week, all things being equal. Again, all things being equal, the runway should be ready for use on or before the end of September this year. This much was confirmed by Akin Olukunle, the spokesman for the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, in a telephone chat with Financial Vanguard last week.
He, however, declined to comment on why the former contractors abandoned the work in the first place. He also declined to speak on why it has taken the authority this long to complete the runway, which was scheduled for completion more than a year ago. The initial completion date for the runway was expected to be less than a year, but it had dragged on for over two years now with great pains to both airlines and passengers.
It is said that airlines now lose about N200 million monthly, as a result of taxing the long distance from the domestic terminal to the international runway which often takes between 10 to 15 minutes of fuel consumption time to accomplish. Assistant Secretary-General, Airline Operators of Nigeria, AON, Alhaji Mohammed Tukur, said the calculation that airlines were losing about N200 million monthly on extra fuel expended by aircraft to taxi to the longer international runway could be more depending on the aircraft type. He regards such expenditure as unnecessary. He believes such money could be conserved especially now that aviation fuel is costing about N140 per litre.
PW Nigeria Limited, the contractors that won the runway refurbishment deal in 2006 is said to have finished its own part of the project. What is left are the airfield lightings which are being handled by another contractor and this is largely responsible for the delay in the re-opening of the domestic runway for airline use.
Finance, more than anything else, is allegedly responsible for the contractor�s unwillingness to proceed with the work. The Federal Government institution of the N19.5 billion Aviation Intervention Fund (AIF) in 2006 was with the sole aim of addressing the various problems plaguing the aviation sector. The AIF became necessary when aircraft were literally dropping from the Nigerian skies. Bellview, Sosoliso and ADC airlines crashed in 2005 and 2006 and that sounded the wake up call for the government to realise that the sector, then already neck-deep in crisis, was on the verge of total collapse.
The finance problem became noticeable when the authority had to foot-drag for so long before releasing the needed initial mobilisation fee to the contractor to commence the work. Apart from that, it was also gathered that there was prolonged debate as to the choice of contractor to handle the project. This was because of several power brokers that were interested in the project. This made the choice of the contractor to drag for quite a while.
The state of affairs of Nigerian airports at the time was nothing to write home about.
Runways were bad, terminal buildings were beginning to grow small in the face of increasing passenger traffic and there was the urgent need for expansion and a facelift, pilots literally flew blind, showing that the airspace was not safe, weather reports were mere guess work, oversight functions were questionable due to lack of autonomy of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and many more problems.
These prompted the former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo to constitute the Air Marshal Paul Dike committee to look into the rot and proffer solutions that would prevent further disasters. The problem noted by the committee ranged from obsolete and malfunctioning air navigation equipment to poor weather measuring instruments. Indeed, airport infrastructure, ranging from fire tenders, runways, conveyor belts and other passenger processing equipment were also in a shambles.
The committee came up with a budget of N48 billion as the amount needed to fix the problems. It was reduced to about N36 billion and eventually, the money was pruned down to N19.5 billion. According to the former Finance Minister, Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the N19.5 billion was to be sourced from two places. The government was to get N13 billion from the Natural Resources Account (NRA) as loan while the balance of N6.5 million would come from the banks as a sort of medium term facility with the Federal Government providing a guarantee.
But instead of applying the money for what it was meant, stories coming from that quarters now suggest that much of it might have been squandered or embezzled by officials mandated to provide the needed facilities. Prof Babalola Borisade and Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, two aviation ministers that presided over the fund are now standing trial in the law court for wrongfully putting their hands into the money.
However, Richard Aisuebeogun, the managing director of FAAN who inherited the abandoned domestic runway project has promised to complete it within the shortest possible time. �This (the project) and many other projects are the priority of this administration and we will not rest on our oars until we achieve our objectives,� he was quoted as saying recently.
Olukunle echoed in the same vein the views of his boss. In a report credited to him last week, the FAAN spokesman said the project was delayed because reaching agreement with the contractors somewhat proved difficult initially. Apart from that, the airport authority did not get necessary approval from the Federal Executive Council at the time to commence work on the project. �We discovered that a lot of stakeholders have shown interest in that particular project and we believe that it is part of our responsibility to the general public, the airline operators and other stakeholders that we produce a runway with efficient services.
�So that is why we are coming up with another contractor that would put the runway in good shape. The delay in terms of agreements with the contractors has been settled and we have gotten all the necessary approvals for work to continue,� he said.
Olukunle also said that when the authority discovered that some portion of the runway was bad, �we decided that those parts that were affected had to be fixed.� He added that what happened was not a case of any incidence but part of a maintenance culture that �we are maintaining at the airport. We do not want to wait until everything runs down before we can ensure maintenance. So that is why we have decided to fix up that runway. We have to follow due process.�
He revealed that what is going on at the airport at the moment goes beyond mere maintenance of facilities. �What we are doing now is the total change of the entire infrastructure. So it is not a case of just repairing because some of those facilities have been there since the establishment of this airport and we are talking about two decades ago.
�So we are going to change all those facilities, instead of just repairing we are making a total change of those facilities. At the Lagos Airport, we are talking of the conveyor belt. Also the cooling systems, we realised that they are old and they should be changed and we are making efforts to change them all,� he said.
But the delay in re-opening the Murtala Mohammed domestic runway for use by airlines, is somewhat consistent with how the authority operates.
When the authority announced the closure of the Port Harcourt Airport on August 18, 2006, it was to be closed for only four months when repair works were expected to be completed. But it dragged till last year December 18, for the airport to be open for airline operations. Even then, there were clear signs that the airport was not complete as at the time it was opened for the airlines.
It is not clear if the hurried opening of the airport was due to pressure from some leading personalities in the region who thought the long delay was due to some political undertones. There were opinions then that if the airport had been in other geo-political zones in the country, it would not have taken that long to re-open.
Although officials of FAAN roundly denied any political undercurrent in the delayed re-opening, the airport at that time it was re-opened for airline use could only accommodate day time operations. According to the Assistant General Manager (Public Affairs) of FAAN, Mr. Victor Arisa: �The runway can take any size of plane and is ready for use�, but added that the reason they were resuming only daylight operations was that the field lights were yet to be put in place. The contract was awarded to ADB, a German firm and an arm of the smeared Siemens, which was indicted and blacklisted over bribery scandal.
Operating only on daytime would affect the revenue of the airport, which was put at N8 million daily before the closure. Also, the complete fencing of the airport was yet to be done as only operational fences are in place to guard equipment and necessary things.
The airport was yet to have total radar coverage and has to rely on Instruments Landing System and Omni Directional Radio Range. In spite of this, it is the clearing house for aircraft, which land in Owerri, Eket, Airforce base, Osubi and Escravos. This singular function kept the airport technically open while the main closure lasted. Planes seeking to land in the zone take their bearing from the airport where air traffic controllers manually direct them on how to take course and land safely.
Other safety installations include the reactivation of the hydrants to make them workable, refurbishment of the fire trucks and the separation of the boreholes so that the one serving residential quarters would be different from the ones serving the airport to avoid overstretching of the facility.
During the Sosoliso crash on December 10, 2006, part of the problem which occasioned slow response to rescue the victims included lack of water as some staff claimed that power failure led to no water being pumped into the reservoir while some said that the pressure on the facility was higher than the capacity since it served both the staff quarters and the airport. Now, the boreholes have been separated from the one dedicated to the airport only.
With the needed facilities put in place, the airport in readiness for the resumption of operations issued Notice to Air Men (NOTAM) to all airlines that hope to operate from the airport.
Safety standards at Nigerian airports came under close scrutiny when President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered urgent reforms in December 2006 after two plane crashes that killed more than 200 people in 2005.
One of the crashes on December 10, 2005 was at the Port Harcourt Airport where 106 passengers, many of them school children, were killed. Some commentators said that lives could have been saved if the fire trucks at the airport had had access to water. The disaster came seven weeks after another airplane crashed near Lagos, killing 117 people.
In July 2005, an Air France plane with 196 passengers on board ploughed into a herd of cattle on the runway. No humans were killed, but authorities blamed the accident on the lack of a perimeter fence.
In 2005 alone, the runway collapsed eight times, a situation which kept Stenco, a repairs company, almost perpetually busy on the runway. Informed opinion said that there was no other option than to close the airport or risk a major disaster since the runway was the link between an aircraft in flight and delivering its passengers safely to earth after take off.
When the airport was built in 1976, the company that constructed the runway recommended the resurfacing of the runway after every 10 years. From the time the airport came into operation, nothing of such was done. Instead, what was happening was that any time there was a collapse of the runway, there was a scramble for repairs and thereafter they continue to use it like that.
Governor of the state then, Dr. Peter Odili made available an interest-free loan of N2 billion to ensure that the facility was turned around and opened for use as it drives the economy of the state which is based on oil and gas.
It was, however, disgusting to hear Fani-Kayode speaking during the Senate probe of the N19.5 billion AIF that out of the N2 billion, which was essentially not part of the intervention fund, given to the authority by the Rivers State Government for the Port Harcourt runway, approximately N350 million had already been spent on other things outside the runway before he came to the ministry.
That was a clear pointer that all does not seem to be well with the nation�s aviation sector. Whereas the sector needs all the money it could get to fix facilities at the various airports, funds that should naturally be at its custody for such programme are domiciled elsewhere.
The Civil Aviation Act 2006 grants autonomy to NCAA and Section 75 of the Act empowers NCAA to use funds accruing from air services agreements solely for the development of civil aviation in the country. �All funds accruing from or as a result of air services agreements entered into by Nigeria, whether multilateral or bilateral, should be paid to the Authority and maintained in a separate account to be used solely for development of civil aviation in Nigeria, in accordance with regulations made by the Minister and Appropriation by the National Assembly,� the Act stated.
But that has not been the situation with funds accruing from the controversial Bilateral Air Services Agreement (BASA) Account. The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, for instance, that is supposed to maintain this account is for now a stranger to it.
In January this year, the Senate Committee on Aviation directed that NCAA be made the signatory to the account without delay. But it appeared the committee never really spoke to anyone as the directive was not obeyed. This has prompted the committee to summon the Finance Minister, Dr Shamsudeen Usman, the Attorney-General of the Federation, Mr Michael Aondoakaa and Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ibrahim Dankwambo, to appear before it over operations of the BASA Account.
The Committee, headed by Senator Anyim Ude, in a statement issued in Abuja said the trio would have to explain the warehousing of the BASA Fund domiciled with the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
Specifically, the statement noted that Aondoakaa would have to shed light on the legal impediments, if any, why the Committee�s directive in January, this year, for management of the BASA account to be transferred to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), within one week was not complied with.
The meeting, at which the directive was issued, had issued a communique which stated in part: �The Accountant-General of the Federation is to transfer management of the BASA Fund to NCAA by effecting a change of signatories.
�This action of transfer of BASA account to NCAA is consistent with Section 75 of the Civil Aviation Act, 2006. The Honourable Minister of Transportation and the Honourable Minister of Finance are to facilitate the change and ensure that action is completed within one week, from January 28, 2008.�
The Committee said the Accountant-General of the Federation would be required to give details of the money that accrued to the BASA Fund from 1999 till date, and how the funds were expended.