Auditing Nigerian airlines

Kindly Share This Story:

THE Dana Air crash threw up ample evidences of the internal problems of domestic airlines. Air Nigeria whose pilots and engineers were on strike for weeks, alleging poor pay and inadequate attention to industry imperatives was added to the suspension list. There may be more.

Only a proper audit of airlines can reveal their operational status, anything else at this stage is mere speculation. The authorities have to be careful in this season of allegations. Anyone who has an issue with an airline knows he will get a listening ear now.

However, airlines have more matters to handle. Some are accused of evading taxes, including failing to make returns of the taxes their passengers pay on ticket purchases. The tax authorities are handling that aspect.

All these show how lax the regulatory authorities have been. Audit of airlines should be done at regular intervals and improved to capture new developments in the industry. It is unfortunate that it is only after a crash that the authorities take their work serious. Once the beam is off them, they relax until the next crash.

Did the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, need the Dana Air disaster to pay attention to the state of the airlines? The NCAA under its suspended Director General, Dr. Harold Demuren, was strict, especially after the series of air crashes in 2005 and 2006. Its adherence to enforcement of the rules helped Nigeria to obtain the Category One certification from the US Federal Aviation Authority in 2010.

Demuren, in his second term in office, seemed to have become complacent. Why would the many complaints about airlines be ignored until tragedy struck? Does NCAA have the capacity to supervise the operations of airlines? Can it enforce safety standards that can avoid future tragedies?

Was NCAA unaware of the misuse of the aviation intervention fund that was to help airlines improve their operations? Would the scandal around the fund have been known without the recent crash? NCAA‘s decision to conduct critical checks on the airlines after the Dana Air crash is an admission  of the deficiencies in operations of domestic airlines as well as NCAA’s.

The issues with the airlines  preceded the Dana Air crash. The authorities ignored them. What else are they ignoring?
The Federal Government must initiate policy-based assistance to airlines instead of giving cash to them. A domestic hangar, for instance, will reduce the high costs of maintenance abroad. Additional costs from exorbitant parking charges and aviation fuel are other areas that deserve government intervention.

A well-organised aviation industry is one of the main indices of rating a country’s viability as an investor’s destination. There must be zero tolerance to laxity.


Kindly Share This Story:

Related Post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

amehnews greetings

x
%d bloggers like this: