President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday sent to the Senate six bills on aviation sector, urging the senators to ensure their speedy passage into law.
The bills are Civil Aviation Bill, 2019; Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria Bill, 2019; Nigerian College of Airspace Management Agency (Establishment) Bill, 2019; Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (Establishment) Bill, 2019; Nigerian Meteorological Agency (Establishment) Bill, 2019, and Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (Establishment) Bill, 2019.
In a letter read during plenary by Senate President Ahmad Lawan who received the bills, Buhari explained that the request was “pursuant to Section 58 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended)” and requested that the 6 bills “be considered for passage into law by the Senate”.
Speaking on the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (Establishment) Bill, 2019, Abdulsalam Mohammed, rector of Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT) Zaria, told BusinessDay that the Act establishing the college was signed in 1960s and since then it hasn’t been reviewed, despite the changes in the industry, and the amendment bill seeks to address all these.
“Over the years, the college has grown into what it is today; we are a regional training centre of excellence. We award ND and Higher National Diploma (HND) as approved by the National Board of Technical Education. The Act establishing us doesn’t give us the status of a tertiary institution legally and because of that we cannot access Tertiary Education Trust Fund,” Mohammed said.
“These are some of the benefits we intend to get and it will also give us the opportunity to be able to conduct more courses and training programmes at a higher level. Aviation training organisations like the ones in the United States and Singapore are accorded the same status as tertiary institutions. That is what we hope to get by the passage of the bill,” he explained.
He assured that with the passage of the bill, NCAT will be able to run degree programmes like other universities and this will be separate from the aerospace university that has been approved for Abuja.
“We deal with specialised professional courses which are not offered in universities. So, we cannot deviate from that,” he said.
John Ojikutu, member of Aviation Round Table (ART) and chief executive of Centurion Securities, told BusinessDay that there is a plan to merge Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) with Federal Road Safety, which implies that AIB will be able to investigate air, marine, rail and road accidents.
Ojikutu said this will be like trying to copy what the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is doing in the United States.
“For me, once you do this, it will mean the AIB is completely out of aviation. This is now going to be like a National Transport Bill. If that is the case, we need to know if we have enough professionals to manage this aspect, other than aviation because when you talk about transport services you are talking of roads, railway, maritime amongst others,” he said.
Akin Olateru, the commissioner, AIB, had earlier confirmed this in an interview with journalists, when he said the bill to empower the agency to begin multimodal transport accident investigation was already before the Senate.
He said that the Federal Executive Council had in 2018 approved the new draft bill, which when passed, would make AIB one of the agencies in the world engaged in the investigation of all forms of transport accidents.
Speaking on the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) Bill, 2019, Ojikutu said his idea about FAAN is that all the non-aeronautical services and infrastructures at the airport, which include the terminal buildings, the car parks, the cargo terminal buildings, hangars and the land areas need to be concessioned out because they are non-aeronautical, which means they have nothing to do with safety.
“When International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) comes, they don’t go near the non-aeronautical areas. If there is any bill like that, then let us talk about concession. We need to first know what we are concessioning. We need to concession the non-aeronautical and not the aeronautical,” Ojikutu said.
Ifeoma Okeke & Solomon Ayado, Abuja
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