FAAN: Case Of Throwing Away Baby With Bath Water?

A furious sack and demotion of top officials of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) jolted many. It also shows the high turnover of personnel in the aviation sector, as people are primed to lose their jobs whenever there is a change of government or whenever there is a new minister appointed to oversee any ministry.
In less than eight years, over 400 people have either been sacked or frustrated out of the system with incoming ministers resorting to recalling some of them when they eventually discover that people saddled with responsibilities lack requisite experience to carry out their duties.
This does not in any way excuse mediocrity that is on display in most of the agencies. There are many who do not deserve the positions they held and this writer is in total support of many that were asked to go who got promoted beyond their wildest imagination.

More worrisome is the fact that there are many who should have been booted out that are still proudly holding on their positions in FAAN. In the system, you have people who keep altering their ages and length of service to remain there and it is so shameful that the system allows it.
Government reserves the right to hire and fire, but the manner of doing it according to many is less than satisfactory. Even if government was going to fire them, it needed to be done with respect, decorum and not the humiliation they were subjected to especially when a very few of them have not been found wanting in their jobs. Ministerial appointees are needed to be advised by not negotiating away expertise and competence on the altar of mediocrity.
The position of director is said to be political and does not call for demotion since they did not come in through the civil service system, so, why subject political hires to civil service rules? Penultimate week, over 22 directors, general managers and deputy general manager got a rude shock of their lives when they were demoted.
Others were sacked or advised to go. Many of them who were on Grade Level 17, 16 and 15 were demoted to between Level 10 and 12 following a recommendation by a committee set up by government to look at placing in virtually all the aviation agencies.
It was a gnashing of teeth for most directors and general managers who could not fathom reasons deduced for the Tsunami that puts many of them in the labour market with just one pronouncement.
In truth, there are many who came to FAAN that do not deserve pity because they came in like thieves in the night and became a thorn in the flesh of their colleagues and carried on as if they are special breeds.
This article is not for them. Some of the professional hires distinguished themselves and helped FAAN to be where it is today. For those very few people, the Federal Government should reconsider their actions and recall them to finish what they started, to reposition the agency.
Government should be careful not to throw away the child with the bath water. It would look patronising if these people are mentioned here. They are few in number that can be recalled or at best be consultants to the agency in its revenue drive and complete the innovation they started in the agency, which people are sure would be discarded going by past experiences.
Some of these professional hires were said to have been brought in by former MD of FAAN, George Uriesi, to turn around FAAN’s critical matter to improve revenue generation. Some of them excelled in their different careers, which spanned engineering, banking and finance.
Since 2012, FAAN’s annual revenue generation has continued to rise. The agency’s revenue skyrocketed from N34, 212,579, 917.51 in 2012 to N48.7 billion in 2015. This is no mean feat and it shows that some leakages could have been blocked while other sources of revenues may have been opened to make this successful.
Don’t ask me what FAAN did with the huge revenue it generated. That is a topic for another day, considering the fact that most of the facilities at the airports are in decrepit shape. There is enormous amount of money devoted to the Directorate of Environment, but there is nothing to write home for billions of naira for projects in that department.
For Finance and Accounts Directorate, the story is same. There are plethora of allegation of a bazaar, with money freely shared and given for foreign trips they never embarked on and virtually all the directors who fumbled while in office know themselves and should look at themselves in the mirror.
Contracts were said to have been awarded to friends and cronies. The next big projects in FAAN are in fire service department and a man (name withheld) is already positioning himself to be the General Manager to head that department.
There is no doubt, the authority needs total management overhaul because very few are taking advantage of the nepotism and corruption to short change others that are vulnerable in the system.
There had been a noticeable renewed level of energy within the workforce and the display of higher value system, which shows commitment to moving the agency from a business as usual to one that looked responsive even though there are overwhelming evidences of corruption.
This is a situation where a high majority of the workforce had, through the years grown a laid back attitude to work, lacking the zeal for both personal and organisational development, nursing instead a contentment for the years to steadily roll into a pensionable period, as a result, losing the capacity, ability and determination to continuously work on an inherited system.
Specifically, the authority has moved over the years from a period of financial stagnation to substantial revenue growth, principally owing to factors such as reduced revenue leakages and new business ideas.

Wole Shadare