GITTENS: NIGERIA DOES NOT NEED A NATIONAL CARRIER
airline that is subsidised.
When this is done true market forces can start and if you have a decent market, your market is really determined by other things not your airline, your market is determined by the magnetics of your destination, the economy of your country, the percent of the middle class that you have in your country that can travel, whether you have a strong Diaspora, because visiting friends and relatives is very strong reason for travel. So there are all kinds of magnetics within your country and that is what you have to look at. You have to look pass your national carrier and if you have strong magnetics, frankly you don’t need a national carrier. Now if you don’t have strong magnetics then maybe you do need a national carrier, maybe no one else will serve the country then you have to work on getting those magnetics. In Nigeria you don’t need that, I mean it has a huge population, a big middle class, very strong economy, you have all kinds of magnetics, you have the Diaspora, all the things I was just talking about, Nigeria has so you don’t need a national carrier. Or if you do have a national carrier you don’t need to subsidise it, allow the competition. Don’t try to protect it, let it survive or fail in the market. Because if it is subjected to market forces then it will work on its management, it will work on its core structure, it may do quite well. A lot of national carriers do quite well.
IATA has been carrying campaign in Africa for some time about connectivity, they put figures of what Africa will gain if there is intra African trade and if there is high connectivity and they see African government as seeing aviation as elitist. I don’t know how far ACI is collaborating with ICAO, IATA, to drum the importance of air travel to the various governments in Africa?
Well, we work with ICAO and other industry organisations on the economic benefits on analysing it, and reporting on the economic benefits of aviation. We work with ICAO. ICAO came out with a document right at the end of last year on the economic benefits of aviation. We are also in an association called the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG), which also produces a report on the economic benefits on aviation. So ICAO did in 2017, ATAG did in 2016 and we will do it again in 2018. So we keep up to date and we publish that, strictly with the help of ICAO, we make sure all governments have it so that they can understand what air transportation does for them and how connectivity helps their economy.
One of the retards in African airport development is training, having the right personnel, the managing director of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) was talking about collaboration with ACI to develop skills, how far has this gone?
Yes, we have an extensive training programme. We have several airports in Africa that are training centres so that their own staff can stay home and get trained but they can also accommodate staff from other airports in other countries. We also have what we call Airport Excellence Programme and safety and Airport Excellence Programme (APEX) and security and the two major airports in Nigeria have already had APEX and safety reviews and they have gone to become certified. The likes of Lagos and Abuja airports have become certified and we are about to do two more, Port Harcourt and Kano. And we are going to be doing APEX and security as well. They are also joining the Airport Service Quality (ASQ), programme which tests their customers’ perceptions of the service, the satisfaction of the services that they are getting and that really is going to help improve the airports because when the customers speak, you understand what the customer cares about and what the customer thinks of the service you are providing. Then that helps you determine the priorities on what you need to do to change. So between training, improvement on safety, improvement on security and improvement in customer service, it is going to go a long way to improving Nigerian airports.
Talking about security and with the threat of terrorism, how do you evaluate security and safety in African airports?
Well, we have an airport excellence and security programme and when an airport asks us, we assemble our team of experts from around the world and we come in and we look at best practices from ACI best practice. We look at compliance with ICAO Annex 17 to see how they are doing. Security is different from safety in that with safety the risk, the threat sits there till you come along and do something about it. Security is always changing, because there are bad guys always looking for new ways to disrupt things. So as soon as you close one avenue they look for another avenue. So it is never over, you always have to keep using intelligence, which is why it is very important for government to talk to each other and for government to share information with the industry. They don’t always have to say exactly what the threat is or how they know about it but they do need to say what has to be protected against. Let the industry which is actually providing the services help them mitigate that threat. If this is not done you are not going to have an industry. Your industry has to be safe and has
How do you see aviation as a tool for development in Africa? Do you think governments recognise the importance of aviation in the continent?
Some do; some don’t. I think you can see which government sees it as important and which government doesn’t. The fastest growing economies in Africa tend to be those where the governments understand the importance of aviation. So they can get their goods to the market, so that they can protect their population because you need air transportation whether it is health or intellectual like technology all of that is facilitated with aviation. In much of Africa, there is going to be leap frogging. In the Western world you had roads, and then car and then aviation. Africa is going to leap frog on some of that because it is developing when aviation is here.
So it can use aviation in the way other parts of the world used roads at first. It is like using mobile phones instead of trying to put in lined infrastructure. You don’t need it because now you have the mobile phone, so you just bypass that whole generation. And it is the same thing with aviation, so I think that aviation is growing because this is a big, big continent, you have big countries and the world is global now so you have to connect not only within Africa but you have to connect outside of Africa and you can only do that with aviation.
Do you think the Nigerian government is supporting airport improvement in Nigeria and what would you expect, looking at the potential that we have; our population? What would you expect when you come to our airports, especially the major airports that we have?
I think what the government is doing, looking to corporatise, privatise; to get the investment in its airport sector is telling us that they do see aviation as important. I think FAAN does a very good job of managing the airport sector and trying to get the improvement, the staff improvement as well as the infrastructure, the training; the management, getting certified, those are very important steps. And if they move ahead with the use of the corporatisation for the privatisation that will bring in more investment, that will bring a faster way in getting professional management and get the training going.