The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority has warned that any move to increase the share of its revenue allocated to the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency could undermine aviation safety and jeopardise Nigeria’s performance in future International Civil Aviation Organisation audits.
The Director of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection at the NCAA, Michael Achimugu, said the regulator remained opposed to any proposal that would further reduce its funding, insisting that the agency was already operating below the level recommended by ICAO.
“Meetings have been called because it became clear that the NCAA was ready to fight over the matter. The CAA’s position remains the same. You cannot fix NAMA by destroying NCAA. And nowhere in the world does NAMA take money from the regulatory agency. In any case, if you take NCAA’s money now, we are going to fail the ICAO audit,” he stated.
A proposal before the National Assembly seeks to amend the sharing formula for the statutory five per cent Ticket Sales Charge and Cargo Sales Charge collected from airline passengers and cargo operators. Under the current arrangement, the NCAA receives 56 per cent of the revenue, while NAMA gets 22 per cent, with the balance shared among the Nigerian Meteorological Agency, the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology and the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau.
