Why SAATM is not working —Iyabo Sosina

Five years after the Single Africa Air Transport Market (SAATM) policy was signed by African leaders in Addis Ababa to ease connectivity on the continent, the policy is yet to fully work.

Stating this fact at a breakfast forum organized by Phillips Consulting Limited (PCL) in collaboration with the Nigeria-South Africa Chamber of Commerce on issues affecting the Nigerian aviation sector with the theme: ‘Aviation In Nigeria: What Next?’, former Secretary General of African Civil Aviation Commission (AFCAC), Miss Iyabo Sosina, has attributed the failure of the policy to a number of reasons including a lack of understanding of the relationship between the SAATM and the Yamoussoukro Decision (YD) also established by the African leaders.

Sosina equally identified the unwillingness of airlines on the continent to venture out of their immediate environments as another reason the SAATM failed to work out.

According to Sosina: “It is not working because a lot of people do not fully understand the relationship between starting a single African air transport market and the Yamoussoukro Decision (YD) which was an initiative that was endorsed by the Heads of State in 1999. I dare say without being attacked by the airlines’ heads here that it failed mainly because of the airlines, because the airlines are not willing to venture out. They were afraid they were going to die and convinced their principals that if they opened up, they would die, and that is why it has not worked.

“It still holds true for certain that once the airlines, powers, and shakers convince their governments not to open up, Africa will continue to suffer, and Africa will not become the giant that you have in the rest of the global space. We also have high operating costs, and that is one of the reasons it is not working; we have limited access to funding for airlines, and financing is difficult for them. The initiative that we put in to make it easy for airlines to access funds and improve their fleet and modernize their fleet have not been utilized by a lot of our airlines.

Arik Air utilized the Cape Town convention, and that helped a great deal. Those are some of the reasons, including a lack of political will, which is also an issue, and a lack of properly articulating or advertising the system in a way that would make it easier for people to understand one another.

Sosina used the opportunity to clear the air on the insinuations by the domestic airlines that they pay charges to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) declaring that the statement was far from being true.

The money the airlines referred to, Sosina said, was the charges the airlines collect from passengers on behalf of the NCAA and other agencies, which she said the airlines cannot lay claim to.

Her words: “The truth of the matter is that no airline pays the NCAA; the passenger pays the NCAA. NCAA is the only organization whose work is directly for the passenger, and so the passenger pays the NCAA. Most of the airlines come here thinking that the money they pay the NCAA is from the airlines and not the passengers. The airlines receive or collect these monies from the passengers and pay them to the NCAA just to ease the difficulty of passengers so that passenger doesn’t stay there, pay here, pay there. That’s all. These monies are supposed to be remitted to the NCAA, but the airlines feel that they can keep them and use them to fund their airlines.” I needed to put that out in the space because they go to the press, electronic, print and what have you and they say they pay NCAA, they pay the agencies. This is not correct, and that is why sometimes, if they owe so much, they will take them to task for all that.”