Managing Director of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, (FAAN), Mohammadu Yusufu in this interview with Gboyega Adeoye in Accra, Ghana, x-rays his agenda towards reactivating the ailing agency.
What are the gains of your parastatal, the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) from this conference?
First of all, the first day of the conference was more or less introductory.For us to assess the benefits of this conference on the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN),I believe one has to see the programme through to the end. Then, one can make effective judgement of the gains.
There have been crises on private public partnership in Nigeria. What do you think is responsible?
My attitude is that when key technical questions are asked, I always prefer to have technical people around me to address such questions. The operators of the Murtala Mohammed Airport 2, Bi-Courtney Company, led by its chairman, Dr. Wale Babalakin, presented a paper on private public partnership: Infrastructural Developments, Challenges and Prospects at the Conference. I would have expected that such a question was asked after his presentation and if it was asked then, I believe you would have got a better answer to the question.
What I tell most people, especially your colleagues that ask me, is that I do not believe in rumour mongering. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed recently with clauses inside and definitely, it is difficult to start talking on all the clauses in the MoU.
Your agency,(FAAN), was accused of concessioning of cargo. What do you say to this?
I will ask you, is the N5.00 being charged in consonance with the best practices? If I may ask, what happens to other airports of the world? What is being proposed at the Nigerian airports is in consonance with the best practices? Is what we are doing good enough for the Nigerian aviation industry and should not be improved upon? When the N5.00 that is being charged is converted, does it measure up to what is being charged in other African airports? Unless you make such researches, I do not believe in saying, things are like this and they ought to have been the other way round. I can assure you that if whatever we are doing is good enough, we will continue doing it.
And talking about FAAN entering into an agreement with a Lebanese company to collect revenue for it, is it the Lebanese that is the problem or the agreement?
You see, whenever I operate, I do not look at sentiments. The revenue collector could be from Germany , United Kingdom or even from the United States of America or anywhere else. I think the best question you should have asked is to know whether what we are doing is proper or not, are we operating at optimal level or even nearer it? But when people inject sentiments to issues, it amazes me.
Are we saying we should continue with policies and operations of the past 10 years in FAAN?
These are issues to look at. For the past seven or 10 years, FAAN has maintained a stagnant revenue generation level and I believe that whatever position you were last year should not be the same position you maintain this year. You must always strive to move forward in whatever you do. When you have an organisation that is stagnant in terms of revenue generation for about five or 10 years, I believe such an organisation should devise a means to improve its revenue generation. If we continue to stick to the N1.1 billion revenue that we accrue monthly, and we are to pay staff salary of about N600 million in a month and you still want to use the remaining revenue to develop the airports in terms of infrastructure and other logistics, how will you continue to stay afloat? Whatever you are doing, I believe everything depends on the revenue you are generating monthly.
I would have preferred to look at the operations of cargo and concessioning businesses. Are we charging the right rates, undercharging or overcharging the customers? For you to improve from the stage you are, you need to improve your revenue. To me, it is not about a company that was awarded the contract but I think we should be looking at the other way round. We should be looking at the benefits to the authority. Without bringing ourselves down, look at the situation of the airports in Ghana. When I came, somebody told me that Ghana had maintained a single runway for years and there was never a time the runway was closed down.
This is possible because of a good maintenance culture of the Ghana Airports Authority. Our bane in Nigeria is our inability to maintain whatever we have. For our industry to progress, we must have a changed mindset of the staff. The moment the staff or any other person stops to see FAAN as a place of money making for himself, then, we will progress.
The only thing that can reduce or stop loopholes in the authority is a computerised system that is networked to monitor operations of goods and cargoes at the airports. Through this, any aircraft that takes off, you will have the exact kilos of cargoes that it is carrying. Those who are fighting against the concessioning of cargo to a private company must probably be those who have been benefiting illegally from the business for over 10 years. It is only in FAAN that I realised that from 1978 till date, they do not have any department that is computerised. What you have are desktops and laptops for individuals but I know in all modern airports, the moment a plane lands, such a plane is captured wherever it may be within the airports.
The Port Harcourt airport is still closed, what are you doing to get the gateway reopened?
You must have read it in the papers whatever was lost as FAAN revenue since the closure of the Port Harcourt airport in August last year. I do not have facts and figures to give now. The Port Harcourt closure is unfortunate, but are you bothered about the loss of FAAN by not computerising its activities? You do not look at the closure of the airport from the angle of revenue but let us take a look at it from the inconveniences it is giving to passengers. We in FAAN are trying to expedite action to put back the airport into proper shape so that it can be operational but not revenue per se.
What are you doing about the certification of the airports?
Certification, when you check, first during the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s visitation last year, we brought in experts and we got over 90 per cent result. With the technical audit carried out by the Federal Airports Administration (FAA) of U.S, FAAN has engaged consultants; some of the old retired staff of FAAN, other professionals from outside and there is a joint team with the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) that have been working for the past four months. As I am talking to you, some systems have been installed and we have placed some people at the major airports in the country. They are there working with the NCAA. Some targets were set and are being met. If there is any shortcoming that is observed, we will put them in place before the certification period.
As at now, I have not received any complaint from the NCAA. We are working and things are on track. It is just that I am not the noise making type but I know a lot is going on. When ICAO team came, despite all the rumours, we got the best result. It is when the result comes that you can now access our performance.
What is your revenue target after putting all these things in place?
Let me give you a typical example. FAAN made an analysis not too long ago. The NCAA computerised capture data on Passengers Service Charged (PSC) is between N12 to N13 billion every year. The one captured by FAAN has been wobbling between N3 to N3.5 billion yearly. If you check the difference, it is about N9 billion every month on PSC. This excludes the landing and parking charges and other revenues like the toll gate that is being done manually and leakages from cargo charges. You can only solve this problem by being automated and that is the simplest thing to do. Automation is done anywhere in the world. As you can see, from the PSC, we lost about N9 to N10 billion annually because we are not computerised. When I challenged my staff in a meeting, the excuse they gave was that we had none tax paying passengers.
I know in a normal aviation industry, if you take a rebate or a free ticket, you still pay tax. For them to tell me that some of the tickets are rebated or even free was not tenable. When you have people who don’t know what they are doing, the workers will try to use lots of jargons to either confuse you or try to hide things. I am not blaming FAAN staff so to say, but I am blame the system that allows that to happen. When you have a right system, things work well.
Through the manual operations, I know colossal sums are being lost annually. Even if you are doing your best manually, by the time you go automated, you are going to make tremendous revenue. Without quoting any figure, I believe the revenue would increase tremendously, but for us to achieve this, we need the support of everybody both internal and external stakeholders to get the system automated.
Gboyega Adeoye in Accra, Ghana
Saturday Tribune
Saturday, September 8, 2007
