Aviation Minister Explains Policy Shift In The Industry Under His Watch
The Minister of Aviation & Aerospace Development, Mr. Festus Keyamo (SAN) has explained that contrary to previous administrations’ disposition of depending on foreigners to come run the show in Nigeria and discourage local capacity, “I say no! Let us see how those people do it and rather, bring that same environment to our own people to achieve what others who are not anyway, better than us can achieve. It is a clear policy shift and that is what we have decided to do in the aviation industry.”
“It would have been easy for us, like some previous people did to throw up their hands and say, look, it is not working. Some other people have more capacity than us and they go outside to bring those capacities to kill our local capacities. So, I am very clear as to our direction in the aviation industry and Mr. President directed that we should go that way. I want to thank Mr. President for giving us all the support. I am sure you see the clear difference in policies. One says no. We cannot do it. So, go and get people from outside to come and dominate our space. I say no. Let us see how those people do it and rather, bring that same environment to our own people to achieve what others who are not anyway, better than us can achieve.”
It is better to take the hard road and get to the glory land at the end of the day. What we have done is to take the hard road. What is the hard road? We decided to go round the world to say, Look! What do you want us to do to be like Qatar; to be like Addis Ababa? What do you want us to do? They gave us conditions.
We have the country already. We have the economy. We have the population. We have the travelling public. So, why can’t we be like them? So, they gave us these conditions. We have started to address the conditions one by one. Other people ignored these conditions in the past. I saw letters of ten years ago, five years ago that they wrote to Nigeria to say, you are not fulfilling this, and they ignored those letters. I went back to those letters.
This is the first step. There are other steps coming. What we did is, we drew from our wealth of professional background. We did the Cape Town Convention. We did the practice direction. They are rating us high,” he explained.
Keyamo pledged to continue in efforts “to ensure that this country becomes a country that enjoys the patronage of lessors and financiers across the world. That is the path we have taken.”
