The COVID-19 pandemic continues to clobber the aviation industry resulting in humongous losses in revenue. However, the Managing Director of Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) Captain Hamisu Yadudu tells SULEIMAN IDRIS that the agency is strategically prioritising its revenue generation.
Excerpts:
What is your assessment of the industry in 2020?
The aviation industry was devastated by the covid-19 pandemic and it took its toll on our finances. It impacted on almost all aspects of aviation.
How has FAAN been able to recover from it?
The recovery will take a long time to be fully achieve, but from the beginning when you have a pandemic, it is a force majeure, when you are in a bad situation like that, there is pretty little you can do to stop it alone because you are operating within a system. The aviation industry has many components; the airport is just one of those components. So when the entire component is affected by one thing, the only thing we can do is to try to minimize the effect of the pandemic by strategic implementation of a lot of innovative ideals to make sure that while the pandemic is going on you minimize the effects and when it goes finally by the grace of God, you would have strategically positioned yourself to be at a higher pedestal that you wouldn’t have been if you had not implemented all those strategizes.
What are the strategies?
We concentrated on innovative strategies that we know will assist us to minimize the effects during the pandemic and to make us come out much better and we achieved a lot of these through the composition of committees to assist us in streamlining our operations. The Committee will assist us to be more efficient in our revenue generation and collections, a committee that assisted us to enforce the covid-19 protocols because they are on ground and in our operations everything that happened at the airports was their responsibility. So we set up committees to assist in implementing and enforcing all these protocols because if they are not implemented the way it is meant to be, and enforced, the natural effects would be that there will be a lot of compromises at the airports, our people will not be safe and we cannot tolerate that because the people are our primary assets and of course our various stakeholders will be affected. Primarily passengers and all that you know and it will undermine confidence in the industry. Confidence is key and without confidence there will be no aviation. So, we wanted people to feel that when you get to the airport, you are not compromised, you are safe and protected. And so far, nobody is worried to go to any Nigeria airport you will notice the believe people have in the system because they felt there is no compromise. When we sustain that kind of level of confidence, the industry will go on and when that happens, sooner or later the pandemic will be over by the grace of God and we will be in a position to quickly recover. So we have to protect ourselves and our businesses by countering and protecting ourselves against the pandemic and we did a lot to protect businesses by implementing strategies that will assist efficiency and performance.
A more deadly second strain of the Covid-19 has emerged, what collaborative efforts are you making with sister bodies to curtail it?
In aviation, we like to keep it simple; we are not a health agency so we know that there is a pandemic. This new strain from all intent and purpose is just another variant of the corona pandemic. So we try to maintain and enforce our protocols and we monitor all the relevant sources of information within the country such as the NCDC, PTF on Covid-19 and also monitor international information and other guidance from relevant agencies like ICAO, ACI so that at the end of the day we are sure that we implement the local ones and the international ones also, and if there is any need for enhancement of our protocols, these are the sources of information that guides decision making processes. We avoid jumping into conclusion without proper guidance. The protocols are there and what we do is to improve on them as time and circumstances demands and according to information from the relevant sources I mentioned earlier. Do these we believe we’ll never go wrong.
Efforts are focused on passengers’ terminals, what about cargo terminals?
Our attention was drawn to it around May last year and we promptly implemented the same protocols at the cargo terminals, but of course there are deviations and variation because of the nature of businesses there. If you go to any cargo terminal you will discover they are pretty much covered the same way as the passengers terminals are, especially now that cargo operations have become much more significant in our operations. The cargo business wasn’t affected much during the Covid-19 if not for the national lockdown because they don’t carry passengers, so their vulnerabilities are not as much as those of the passengers. That was why I felt that let’s do as much as we can just like airlines are doing across the world by strategizing and incorporating more of cargo businesses into their operation, so at the airports also, we are strategically working to ensure we improve our capacity and re-orient our businesses to make sure that the cargo aspect is pretty much enhanced. We are working to ensure it improves constantly because it is one aspect of operations that was not greatly impacted by the covid-19 and what more, during the lockdown, most of our flights came through the cargo terminals. A lot of medical supplies, equipment and evacuations came through cargo operations. Now we need the cargo even much more than before.
When are you commissioning the Kano airport?
All things being equal we expect to have Kano commissioned before the 20th of this month, including Port Harcourt and Enugu-the 3 remaining international airports. We are working to commission them before the 20th. That is our plan but of course you plan and there could be difference because we need the businesses but of course our operations are pretty much going on but the numbers are down, only about 30-35 percent but when we open more it will be better service for our people, and for us at FAAN it will mean more businesses.
How has increase in Passengers Service Charge been utilized?
We are utilizing the fund pretty much the same way we have been utilizing them. We operate, maintain and manage these airports, we pay our wages, that is the same utilization and the expected improvement in revenue has been achieved. The only drawback is that we have achieved it on the 25-30 percent operations we are having now due to the covid-19 pandemic. Without this pandemic it would have been 100 per cent improvement. We are doing 25-30 percent and achieving the desired result on the much reduced percentage but it is better than if we have to recover on the old formula of the N1000. These are part of why we decided to restrategise to work together to ensure that we come out of it at a higher potential and this is one of it.
Are you looking into improving non-aeronautical sources of revenue generation?
We are already working in that direction. We were forward thinking even before the advent of the covid-19 because years ago we started working to see what we can do to improve it. It is one thing to know and identify a problem and start working to resolve it but seeing noticeable result do take some time especially as some aspect of the non-aeronautical naturally don’t seem to have a lot of traction in West Africa. If you look at the airport companies outside Africa, most of the non-aeronautical comes through retails, shopping and then most importantly parking. But cultural issues made the parking not that recoverable because we don’t have the culture of coming into the airports and parking your car for one week, one month until you return. Our tendency here is that you come with your family members to drop you and then return with the car, so it will take a lot more time for us to start achieving much in terms of parking, but we are working, we are improving our car parks, in Abuja we already have the Amuta car park, we are automating them to position ourselves, with the data on ground, we will achieve much in that aspect in the very near future. We are working with government and the travel agencies, hotels to see what we can do to unlock the full potential in non-aeronautical. We are building capacities in parking, retail, shopping and automations to reduce leakages.
What should airport users expect from FAAN in 2021?
They should expect much better services in terms of safety, security and efficiencies of our operations. Last year it was very demanding but we are grateful to all our staff, stakeholders and passengers themselves because there was over 90 per cent compliance to all the safety protocols and processes we put in place. We received letters of commendations and reactions on the social media expressing positive views on how we did very well in our activities and the cooperation was exemplary. We use this opportunity to call on our stakeholders to please maintain the same amount of commitment and dedication to ensuring that our protocols laid down to protect everyone against the covid-19 is observed, protected so that the aim is achieved. Once there is compromise, it undermines confidence in our operations, it erodes confidence in aviation, not only FAAN but airlines, various handlers, shops operators and everyone and all aspects will take a hit. We assure them of the safety of their activities across our airports because we have given our staff the best training to operate in any condition, last week they received training from WHO. If we don’t train staff, they cannot protect themselves let alone our stakeholders. When people come to the airports, they should count on us to assist them go through their boarding facilitation, we have staff trained in that aspect but training alone does not deliver protection. We call on people to please understand and cooperate so that we can achieve the desired benefits of being protected. This is key and we have been getting that but we must not relax, the pandemic is still very much around.
