The Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, has admitted that there is paucity of funds to adequately take care of all infrastructure needs in the Nigerian aviation industry.
The legal luminary said this while fielding questions from reporters after receiving an award from the New Telegraph newspapers as the Minister of the Year (Transformative Leadership) in Lagos.
Keyamo stated that all ministries are facing infrastructure problems and have an envelope system that cannot carry all aviation infrastructure.
While exploring ways out of the challenge, Keyamo identified increased profligate sector investment into critical sectors such as the aviation industry as one of the top remedies to the dearth of infrastructure not just in the aviation industry but in other sectors of the economy.
He said, “What do we do? We must continue to attract private investors into all of these sectors that deal with infrastructure, and that is what we are poised to do. So, we are clear about our objective. We are not confused as to where we are going in terms of our policy direction.”
The minister equally stated that his policy direction is to promote local airlines’ interests by putting in place more robust policies that would drive the carriers to profitability.
He further explained that by doing that, his ministry has helped to ensure that the country complies with the Cape Town Convention, which he said has brought, “Us from 49 per cent worldwide in terms of global compliance to 75.5 per cent, which is the highest in Africa. We have to keep evolving policies, generating policies because that is what governments actually do, policies to encourage the sector and spur everybody in the sector to grow.”
In September last year, the Federal Government signed the Cape Town Convention Practice Direction. The reaction of the government to find an urgent solution to the bad image of the country in the aviation business prompted the review of its aviation processes that helped to restore, albeit temporarily, the image of the sector.
He said further, “We have the highest score in Africa in terms of global compliance. We have opened up so many routes now. Before now, we couldn’t even go from Nigeria to Cameroon, our next-door neighbours. We had to go all the way to Togo or elsewhere. We have fought so hard, and that is expected to happen with Air Algeria now.”
“They are going to go to Algiers, Abuja, and Cameroon. We fought to get that to happen. We are opening up so many routes for Nigerians and others. The aviation sector is so big. It is like a big elephant from policy to infrastructure and directions and decisions to move the sector forward.”
Olasunkanmi Akinlotan @ThePUNCH
