Engr. Akin Olateru is the Commissioner/ Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB). Earlier this year, he was reappointed into office. In this interview with ADEOLA TUKURU and SULEIMAN IDRIS, he explained his priorities in his second tenure, assessment in the aviation sector during the COVID-19 pandemic and the way forward.
What will be your major priorities in the second tenure as the CEO of AIB?
There are a few items on the list. Priority number one is the issue staff welfare. The issue of training, issue of promotion and equipping our staff with the right tools and things that will make them happy.
For instance, going to the accident site, the right operational vehicle and the whole things that will give them satisfaction.
Number two priority is to ensure that we continue to deliver our mandate and it is clear that we must investigate serious plane incident and accident and it has to be done to the highest professional level.
The best that can be done is to release a report in good time and the quality of the report should be topnotch and the fact that should be clear and it must be communicated in a way the reader can understand. All this will make AIB an enviable place to work.
Also, since the public hearing in the National Assembly, there has been a lot of consultations taking place and that happened till the end of my first term.
From next week (this week), I will re-engage the consultation with major stakeholders and the consultation side is about 96 per cent done and it is just to finish up with it within the next two weeks and passed it to the National Assembly.
Why did AIB handed over its investigation on the recent Air Peace aircraft incident to NCAA?
What actually happened was that when I returned, I did a review of the issue and found out that they did not complete the assessment before taking a decision.
The attention of the management was called to it to re-evaluate to listen to the CVR and FDR before you take a decision when it is not clear as to what decision to have taken.
This is because when you talk of serious incident and accident, you need serious clarification to be able to determine, which decision to take. It is in that determination, but my team did not have enough information and they determined it to be serious incident, but after listening to the CVR and FDR, they later found out that it was an incident, but not a serious incident.
What has the management done to consult other stakeholders outside aviation in its multi-modal accident investigation drive?
You must understand that the NSIB bill was an Executive bill sponsored by the Executive and it is not a private bill. The bill was debated at the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and it was approved by Mr. President before it was sent to the National Assembly.
I guess these stakeholders you are talking about are still under the presidency and this bill is not AIB, bill but it was the initiative of the presidency.
If a minister takes a decision, is there any need to consult any agencies under him again? It is not done.
The heads of these agencies were at the FEC meeting and a circular was circulated to that effect on the bill proposal and if there had been any objection, it will have been made known.
What is your assessment of the Nigerian aviation industry under Covid-19 pandemic?
One thing is that aviation is not a Nigerian thing, but a global and governed by international treaties and agreement and COVID-19 is not a Nigeria thing but a global issue. If you asked me from the management of the situation locally what do I think? I think the government has really done well from the way they have managed the pandemic so far considering the rate of infection, the death. I can tell you that we have done well than most of the richest countries, even though we are not the richest, but we have done excellently well.
The flight from Houston to London, they combine three days flight, they are still not up to 50 per cent. Yet coming to Nigeria, the flight is always full.
Besides, aviation in Nigeria is slightly different from other part of the world. We beat all this world analysis because we have peculiarities different. Look at our domestic and international operations, while most flights around the world are going half, ours is full. If you want to fly to Abuja and you don’t book three or four days ahead, you are not going anywhere. Meanwhile the passenger load is still there.
So in terms of assessment, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, I think we are still doing very well; we just need to keep up with the standard and making flight enjoyable for passengers. Then we also need to make our customers relations better and I think we will get there with time.
