The federal government has assured that Nigeria and Nigerians will not be shortchanged in its planned airport concession policy.
This is just as it announced that it would finalize the concessioning of the four international airports across the country between July and August this year.
Speaking at the end of the 2021 Airport Business Summit and Expo held at the Lagos airport, the Minister of Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, who took time to reveal the efforts so far made to ensure due diligence was followed in contrast to the notion that the concession plan was flawed with secrecy, equally assured that there would be no job loss while the concession would provide more opportunity to engage more hands in the system.
Sirika who said that in his 37 years in aviation, Nigeria has never had a government as transparent as the present one, listed efforts he had put in place to ensure all key players including labour unions were carried along.
According to Sirika, the fact that it has taken this government six years to prepare the ground for the concessioning could only point to the fact that the government did not want to do a shoddy job.
The minister used the opportunity to reveal that before the end of this month, that the government will commence the running of advertisements calling for bidding from interested concessionaires for the airports.
The call for interested bidders, he said, will be followed by an evaluation of the interested bidders and subsequent submission of proposals from the qualified bidders.
The delicate issue of labour, he said, will be tackled in February 2022, after when the concession project will finally be presented to the National Assembly for debate and the Federal Executive Council for approval to be followed by the unveiling of the successful bidders to now manage the airports.
Sirika, while insisting that the government will not sell the airports but concession them in a way that it will be operated with a view to providing more revenue, added that all agreements on the concession were already contained in the outlined proposal.
He assured all workers at the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) that there will be no job loss as the successful concessionaires would be made to retain all the inherited workers for the first two years within when those qualified to continue would have been identified.
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