The title of the book; ‘One week, one trouble’ authored by the renowned writer, Anezi Okoro can be borrowed to describe happenings at the country’s aviation sector.
In other words, no week passes that the sector will not be enmeshed in one news or the other. Sadly, most of the news are found to be on the negative side.
It is no more news to hear of injustice, wrong appointments, sabotage, hostile environment, domestic airlines incapacitated by government’s unfriendly policies, infrastructural decay; to mention but a few tearing the sector apart.
This week, if it’s not the airlines that are crying over some bad policies, next week, it may be the aviation authorities struggling to defend their policies.
At times, it may be the issue of poor infrastructure based on years of neglect and negligence.
One obvious thing is that all these myriad of challenges have brought the sector into a bad limelight particularly in view of the negative image they have on the airports.
There is no doubt that the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) is the number one gateway in the country in view of its location and the activities going on there coupled with the huge revenue it yields to the coffers of government.
Fine, other airports across the country have their own challenges but the role Lagos airport plays as the busiest and highest revenue maker is not commensurate to the attention it’s getting from the Federal Government.
At the Lagos airport, it is now normal to hear of either power failure, poor cooling systems, disgraceful toilets, illegal road blocks mounted by the various uniform personnel to corroded underground cables always sparking fire at any slightest opportunity owing to years of expiration.
Only last week it was rumoured that an incident of vibration was recorded at the international wing of the airport but thank God for the swiftness of the minister of state for aviation, Senator Had Sirika who visited the scene and discovered through the findings of the airport officials that the vibration was caused at the air handling room of the cooling system.
“This door is a huge metal door that needs to be locked properly. It was locked but it wasn’t latched properly; the latches were not in place and that gave rise to the vibration,” he said.
Sirika also attributed the incident of power outage recorded to what he described as redundancies that were dedicated to certain critical areas of the airport that provided power to these areas.
“Indeed there was power outage at the airport; however, we have dedicated generators, to certain areas of the airport and those generators were working at the time we lost the power. The terminal building where passengers found themselves were affected but the outage did not get to the critical safety operations of the airport and even at that; it took us a couple of minutes to identify the problem and we went for it.”
Not quite three days, the news filtered out again that another fire incident has engulfed the headquarters of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) which took the frantic efforts of the fire fighting men of the authority and those of Lagos State fire department to contain.
Of all the challenges, the most constant and dangerous is the issue of fire incidents which has continued to be a worrisome issue to stakeholders in the sector.
It is worrisome because a common reason attributed to the fire out break incidents has been that of expired cables which are as old as the 30-year-old airport.
To avoid a situation where the nation would wake up one day to see that its major airport has been razed down, there is an urgent need for government to embark on a total rehabilitation of the Lagos airport.
Priority should also be given to the Lagos airport just as government did at Abuja and Kaduna for the sake of preventing a national disaster and disgrace.
With the revenue coming from the Lagos airport coupled with its position as the number one in terms of traffic, there should be no more time wasting in repositioning the airport for if the government is sincere on its plan to commercialize the four major airports, Lagos airport can only attract investors if all these avoidable challenges are tackled.