Dunoma: Despite huge debt, FAAN won’t send airlines out of business

 Saleh Dunoma is the Managing Director of Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN). In this interview with WOLE SHADARE, Dunoma, who is also President Airports Council International (Africa), speaks on security challenges at the Lagos and Abuja airports and how they plan to tackle them; the country’s success at airports certification, the huge indebtedness of airlines to FAAN and how his agency plans to manage the situation without crippling the carriers, among others. Excerpts

Many people didn’t believe that the certification of Nigerian airport is achievable. How was this achieved?

 

This is important to us because these were done by experts in the industry. It was not done by experts within FAAN. Airport Council International (ACI) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommend experts from various countries and they come as a group to do this assessment. Of course, our people will follow immediately to make sure they get it right after the report is submitted and come up with corrective action plan. This plan is a major tool; they audit us. After the completion and correction, they will come back and re-assess us to find out whether we have done the right thing or not. These are programmes that are all designed to improve civil aviation.

A lot of experts are coming for the ACI conference in Nigerian and I urge you to come and attend to give us a good coverage, to project our country in good light.

Safety and security over aircraft poaching in recent times were worrisome. What has happened to airports perimeter fencing?

 

There are certain areas that are restricted. You know that we have access control. We have group of people that come to the airport and other people that are providing the service in the air. We have quite a number of people that are accessing the airport. We must have a robust access control system. Apart from that, since it is a public place, there is a limit to what we can do in order to stop people getting through that place. We have a lot of measures in place.

One of them is that the airport should be fenced quickly. There must be perimeter patrol; there must be technology to help us in the surveillance at the airports. To some extent, we have some of these facilities at all the airports. Of course, security challenges are always coming up in different forms. When you address this, the challenge will come back again in another form. We have to improve on our technology. As we speak, there are two contracts for Abuja airport to make sure that we cover all the restricted areas with CCTV. This project is ongoing. In Lagos, it is about 80 per cent completed. In Abuja, it is about 75 per cent completed. We will soon commission them. All movements across and around the areas will be seen clearly. This is going to help us a lot. We are buying another technology; it is a mobile system that has cameras that can see up to seven kilometres. Even in the night, it has all the cameras that will watch all the movements of the sensitive areas of the airports; the apron, runway and then the accesses will be covered by the cameras. By the time we have all these technology in place and improve on the perimeter road and repair some of the broken fences, security will be water tight up to that level that nobody will have access to the areas because we will be watching the entire perimeter fences and the entire sensitive areas of the airport. With the mobile surveillance system, you can see what is happening at the airports.

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The distance from the international airport to the car park is very far, isn’t this discouraging to international air passengers?

 

It is because we are used to short distances. If you travelled out of the country, from the security checks to the gate in most airports, they will tell you that it is either 15 minutes or 20 minutes’ walk. I am not sure that the distance from the car park to the terminal is up to five minutes

walk. What we did was to improve the ambience. While the passengers are walking, they are walking under a shed because there is a separation. The car park is going to be linked to the new and old terminals. You don’t have to come out. The new and old terminal buildings are all under a roof. But for now, you have to come out. By the time the new terminal building is commissioned, a lot of these problems will be resolved.

The airports keep growing. We have new facilities and infrastructure. In Lagos, we are building a new terminal and extending the apron. As long as we keep developing the airports, we have to keep also improving on CCTV coverage. We are working on CCTV coverage in all the international airports with additional infrastructure. It is a continuous thing and not only that, priorities might also change from operations and security departments.

They may come up with option and say we consider this place and say let us put a camera there. In a nutshell, this is a continuous thing to improve on security by way of improving on technology.

It is said that most of the runways and tarmacs are flooded when it rains. Is this not accident waiting to happen?

I don’t think we have flood on our runways. One of the critical things for the design of runways is the drainage system. We drain the runways in two directions. Runways are either 50 or 60 meters wide. The centre is slightly high so that water does not stay on the runway at any point in time and in most of the airports, they are designed for proper drainage. We have longitudinal drain that takes water that is coming from the runway straight and out of the airport. We don’t have issues of runway flooding . Normally, if it is raining heavily, the controllers and airlines look at that and avoid landing or taking off until after the rain. No water percolates on the runway for any moment at any time because our runways are designed in such a way it cannot be flooded. We were there at Enugu airport with Minister of State for Aviation and met with His Excellency, the Governor of Enugu State on issues pertaining to the airport and runway. Of course, the market is there. You know the government had a problem of expanding and extending the runway in Enugu. This programme started sometimes in 2011 and the runway was successfully extended and expanded, but we could not finish the approaches of both ends because of land issues. This land is not within our purview. The Governor gave directive that all development and encroaches should stop. He gave a directive also that Enugu State radio has a mast there to prepare. What is short of that runway is the approach. We could not finish the approach and approach light. We are working on having airfield lightings and other facilities to make it a 24 hour airport.

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How supportive are the states?

We have partnership with several state governments on airports; about six or seven of them. These include Gombe, Bauchi, Jigawa, Kebbi, Akwa Ibom, Delta. We have Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with them. We are providing security, fire cover, marshalling and some technical assistance. The airports are standard already and they did not build the airports without our consultation.

They consulted the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) through the Ministry of Aviation. During that consultation, we gave them the guideline in designing the airport for compliance. We provide them with technical advice so that they would do it in accordance with international best practice. They need to improve on the airports and other infrastructure, technology, personnel. We provide them with guidance materials so that they can do it to international best practice and also in ICAO standards. They don’t work in isolation. They work with us so that at the end of the day, we will be on the same page.

There are noticeable discrepancies with figures of revenues from both FAAN and Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). Why is this so?

 

I need to make some clarifications here. We don’t share revenue with NCAA. May be the NCAA does with some agencies. We don’t go to NCAA for money. We don’t share the TSC with other agencies. We don’t need to know what NCAA collects and what they don’t collect.

So, what about aeronautical and non- aeronautical revenues?

Aeronautical revenues are very straight forward and they are very easy to capture. These are services that are well defined and the charges are also well defined. So, that makes it easy for us to capture. A lot of revenues come from aeronautical sources. That is not to say we don’t have non-aeronautical revenues. We have a lot of non-aeronautical revenue but we are trying to develop and continue to develop non-aeronautical sources of revenue. This is because, first of all, we want to concentrate on our core activity of providing facilities for flight operations and passenger movement. You have to concentrate on that because that is our major job. Our non-aeronautical revenues are down to concessions. So, we concessioned out the car parks, the toll gates so that FAAN can concentrate on their core issues; that is providing and managing the airport operations.

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We have to develop these non-aeronautical revenues. In some countries, I know that there are few countries that generate a lot from non-aeronautical sources of revenue and they rely more on non-aeronautical sources of revenue. Nigeria is working towards that also. By the time we develop programme such as the aerotropolis and bring about a lot of development on the landside of the airports, we would be seen as developing more non-aeronautical source of revenue and then, we will catch on on that. We have issued out pieces of land for the development of hotels and other projects that, by the time they are completed and commissioned, we will continue to earn more revenues. We are working on development of non-aeronautical sources of revenue, but we will want to concentrate on aeronautical sources so that we will make sure that we provide the services that we are supposed to provide to our customers who are the airlines and the passengers.

Why is the level of indebtedness to FAAN high?

Yes, as long as we continue to do business, there will be debts here and there. There is no day that we will say there is no debt or airline owing FAAN because as long as we continue with credit window of two weeks and as long as we give them this credit policy. As you continue with the operation; of course, you need to prepare bills, send it to them before they now pay you. We allow for this. Indebtedness will always be there. You can never eliminate that.

What we have done is to call airlines to come and sit with us. Not only the airlines; all our concessionaires to come and sit with us in our regional offices to reconcile their debts. We have reconciled with almost everybody, and we came up with a programme of payment, which is signed off by each and every person – whether you are airlines or concessionaires. We ask them how they intend to pay their debts while paying your current bills depending on the volume of your operations.

We are also mindful of that. We don’t want to send them out of business. We look at what is reasonable and how they can pay and they sign off on that. We are making arrangements so that they would be able to pay their debts and not to affect their current operations. We don’t have issues with the airlines except if they now default on the programme of payment, then we need to call you back again and sit down and let us look at it and find out why you are defaulting and to see if there is anything we can do to re-arrange how you can pay. We listen to them, consider their issues and see how we can factor that in to see how they can operate and make money and pay their debts.

Wole Shadare