The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has attributed the rapid demise of Nigerian airlines to lack of corporate governance, just as its strict regulation has forced the number of carriers to keep going down.

Spokesman for NCAA, Sam Adurogboye, said most of them lack corporate governance because individuals own them, Besides, he said that if NCAA finds out that a particular airline does not demonstrate to NCAA that it has the financial muscle to operate, such carrier would be disallowed.

He said that the NCAA had formulated and implemented sufficient policies aimed at improving safety and efficiency of airlines, noting this can only be achieved if there is good corporate governance on the part of the operators.

He said rather than accuse the aviation regulator of adding to their burden by applying five per cent Ticket Sales Charge (TSC), he said carriers are the architect of their own misfortune.

Speaking to Woleshadare.net, he said that for the agency to be autonomous in truth according to the dictates of the Civil Aviation Act, it needed to source its funding independently.

He added that the five per cent, which used to be collected from passengers at the airport prior 2001, was the only way to ensure non-interference.

He dispelled allegations that the aviation regulatory body added five per cent Ticket Sales Charge (TSC); a situation the airlines said had become a burden to them.

He stated that the charge was never a tax on airlines as they would have Nigerians believe but a charge on passengers collected in trust by airlines to be remitted to the government so as to ensure facilitation is not hindered at the airports.

He said: “Five per cent ticket sales charge is not paid to NCAA by the airlines as tax, it is a charge added to the passengers determined airfare.

When passengers pay five percent how does it become a charge? The airlines brought up the idea that to enhance passengers’ facilitation at the airport, they will collect the five per cent on our behalf, after, which the monies will be remitted to us, which we all agreed to in 2001.

The money is for the sustenance of the CAA.” After the take-over of Arik Air by the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), domestic airlines under the aegis of the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) criticised in strong terms the charges in the industry, attributing the many failures of airlines business to multiple taxation and other unfriendly taxes not found anywhere else in the world but Nigeria.

Adurogboye said aviation and airline business are highly capital-intensive, stressing that there is no operator that did not know about the charges before they commenced operations.

His words: “We had to compare what obtains in Canada, United States, South Africa and other places, all CAA are meant to be autonomous and it cannot be autonomous if we are not financially autonomous. We exist because of the safety of passengers and the passengers pay for the CAA to run.”

He said the five per cent charge is meant to sustain the agency, which, he noted, has been built into ticket sales that are collected by the airline on behalf of the NCAA.

On the accusation of multiple taxes by the agency and how they are crippling airlines’ business, Adurogboye said that there was no country where charges were not present and that even some of those charges were not charged in Nigeria.