Captain Musa Nuhu is the current Director General of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). In this interview, he speaks on trending issues affecting the regulatory agency and the country’s aviation sector in general. Excerpts…
Question: Contaminated fuel and illegal fuellers
There was a gap between the two regulatory bodies; NCAA and NMPDRA. This is a gap that we have closed. We are working with the NMPDRA and they have been very cooperative. Based on the list we sent to them, they have written back to us that they are taking actions on some of the fuellers.
I need to clarify something; the approval we give is not general. When you are given a license to supply Jet A1, it doesn’t mean you can go to any airport in Nigeria. There is an approval for specific airports. Some have approvals for some airports, but don’t have for another. It is based on this cooperation that we have filed with the NMDPRA that we are addressing this and I think the Director of Airworthiness should have sent out a letter to that effect today (Thursday).
The issue of fuel contamination is not specific and we have contacted IATA, but it said no any of the international airlines has reported fuel contamination and on the domestic side the same, too.
This is a kind of a standalone case and it is also an alarming one and we have to look at the entire process of supply value chains, starting from outside the sector. We are not resting on our oars and we have to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. We have set up a committee comprising of NCAA, FAAN, NSIB and others to make their report to us.
Like I said earlier, it is the responsibility of the operators and the pilots and engineers to make sure that contaminated fuel doesn’t get to the system. I don’t have a specific number of companies that are at the airport.
Question: Information management on the latest Jabiru crashed aircraft:
It is unfortunate that everyone is talking about the crash already when the NSIB has not come out with its safety report on it. Some people want to demonise Engineer Gbolahan Abatan who has done a great job for us since he came onboard. Before he took over the NCAA job, he was doing well as a private entrepreneur and in line with the civil service rules, he resigned properly from Air First Hospitality and Tours. The aircraft in question doesn’t belong to him, but he manages it. I think we should not demonise him for whatever reason.
Unfortunately, in this era of social media, you cannot really control people. Events are reported in real time. As it is happening, people are there. On information management, you have to know what happened before you can tell anybody, you can’t predict an accident and for accident, NSIB is the one responsible and I think the DG of NSIB did a good job. As soon as the accident happened, he said they were investigating and he talked about the processes. Unfortunately, most of the people that write are not responsible people like LAAC. They just go out there to write whatever they want to write. It is quite difficult when everybody with a smart phone has become a journalist; that is the reality of life. Some are ignorant and others because of mischief. We will try to do what we can as soon as possible.
Question:General Aviation (GA) in Nigeria
General aviation (GA) is very critical and if you look at any aviation nation that is developed today, they have a thriving GA and GA produces experience for the airline industry. GA has a potential to grow. We are not quite there yet. The feedback is good, but we are just getting over from the audit. GA is quite huge and if I may ask. I will say the GA can bring as much revenues as the airline industry because it is quite huge and has a great potential. It is something that we will do gradually so as not to overstretch our resources.
With time as we get over the audit, there are quite a few retreats that we are going to have. There are quite a lot of things we have to do, but we can’t do everything the same time, we are going to priotise them and with time, we shall get there.
Question: On Nigeria’s Safety Audit
After the safety audit that ends in September, ICAO is telling us that we have to start the security audit in November, which is just six weeks in between. I think that is too much and there is no country that faces that. We just wrote to ICAO to give us more time. Six weeks is inadequate. Though, there are some of the issues between safety and security audits that overlap. There is a lot to do.
Question: AFCAC meeting in Senegal
AFCAC called a meeting of the Director-Generals of Africa CAA and I think 34 out of 52 DGs attended the meeting while others sent representatives because they were not able to attend. We went to discuss actual civil aviation in Africa like sustainable fuel, which is coming up in Dubai in a few months. We talked about environment, safety vis-à-vis the Abuja Safety Target, actual secretariat of AFCAC and their finances and their programmes. It was a good action. Soon, AFCAC is going to send some questionnaires to the African CAAs so that we know what the issues are and the current actions they are taking.
We also discussed extensively about states assisting other states during audits and Nigeria was commended for assisting Sierra Leone and during that meeting, I received verbal requests from about three countries that needed Nigeria’s assistance and we are ready to assist them when they write officially. We can assist the way we can as a country.
The whole idea is about us within us in Africa. We have the whole resources and it started in South Africa; South Africa has also helped a lot of countries. We are putting our resources together to see how we can assist one and other under the guidance of AFCAC. All what we do in AFCAC have the blessings of Ministerial meetings and Head of States meeting. We are waiting for feedback from AFCAC secretariat. The AFAC Secretary General who is a Nigerian doing a lot to position AFCAC well.
Question:On the Civil Aviation Master Plan (CAMP)
It’s unfortunate that some people don’t seek clearance on some areas of the industry that they are not familiar with. They just go out to the public and condemn people. We had an agreement with ICAO on CAMP and actually I signed for Nigeria. CAMP is a comprehensive plan for Nigeria, looking at all the components of aviation industry, looking at what we have put in place, the government aviation, economic projection for Nigeria, trying to build a roadmap for us as a country for the next 10 years.
What this does is that every sector will know what it needs to do; the regulatory body, the industry is going to grow at a particular rate annually and we put in the plans to push this growth. After audit, the implementation will start and the good thing is that when they come to Nigeria, they are going to talk with aviation agencies, the airlines, finance people, tourism boards, customs and others. Everything that is remotely or directly connected to the aviation industry will be involved in this. So, we can have an all encompassing roadmap for Nigeria’s aviation industry.
If you look at the industry in Nigeria, we are under-travelled, but the sector is growing with several orders by our airlines. We need to grow the industry with the growth of our airlines. It is going to help us and also, it is a requirement and we are killing many birds with one stone.
Question: Minimum of six aircraft for start up airlines
The problem is that a lot of the airlines don’t even have the capacity to meet current financial obligations. If you have three aircraft for instance and you lose one out of it, it has become a problem to meet up with your operations. Then, you start to have issues of flight delays, cancellations and all that. The number of aircraft you will have will depend on the kind of operations you want to do. You can imagine somebody who comes in with just one or two aircraft and one of the aircraft goes out of business, and sell tickets to the passengers, think of what will happen. For you to have six aircraft, it shows you have very strong financial backgrounds of running an airline.
It is not only for new entrants, but the old ones too have a period by which they have to comply. If everybody has one or two aircraft, we will keep having this recurrent problem. We have to avoid that. People will criticize, but every country is different. We have to look at our own peculiar history and try and come with solutions, but regulations are not cast in stones. If the situation changes, the regulation would be reviewed accordingly. Whenever it is necessary, we don’t have to wait for five years before we make amendments.
What again we are trying to do is to institutionalize NCAA, we want to make NCAA a proper institution so that the standard across the board is maintained. It is still an ongoing process.
Question: Nigerian airlines and the regional routes
Ibom Air is going to Ghana soon and we are working with Air Peace to assist them to London. We are also working with OmniBlu to fly to London as well. For United Nigeria under the BASA agreement, the ministry has given some of the airlines to fly regional and international routes, but most want to concentrate on regional flights for now. Only Air Peace is going international routes for now.There are more aircraft in Nigeria registry than the entire west African states, the number of airlines,AOC, airports and so they have are not as much as we have in Nigeria. It is very huge, complex and there are huge demands to cope with in the industry.
From records, about 12 years ago, we had only 16 AOCs, right now, we have 32, out of which 12 are scheduled operators. We cannot keep operating the way we are operating. Changes have to come in and we have started the process, we are acquiring a regulatory software and in the next one or two weeks, we are going to be ready with the software and training of our staff is going to start on the use of the software. It is a three years program and at the end of the period, we are going to make sure that 80 to 90 percent of NCAA processes are automated and also third party is going to be automated.
It is a major paradigm shift from paper based work to automation and if you don’t do the proper homework, you are going to run into trouble. You might run into more crisis. Some we are working with a company to ensure we have this. Automation exposes you to cyber risk and so we have developed a manual that enhances cyber security. Our technical library, we have made it e-library and with this, any staff of NCAA can log into the library and get same information wherever he is. All these are geared towards having a quality agency across the board. What all these done is that it reduces the stress for our staff and reduces the paper work.
There are so many other things that we are putting in place and we have to do them. By the end of next year, the impacts of these things we are putting in place will show on the industry. We have to collaborate with everyone.
