More than two months after the Bellview air crash, we still don’t know the cause of the crash, shortly after take-off from Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos. And we still don’t know what caused the crash of Sosoliso Flight 1145 as it came in to land at Port Harcourt International Airport on Saturday, December 10, 2005. With the exception of three initial survivors, all passengers and crew on both planes perished.
But if we don’t know why the planes crashed, we at least know part of the reason why the passengers on the Sosoliso flight died. They died because there was no water at Port Harcourt airport to put out the fire that ultimately burnt them to death. Surely if there is no water in a port city, no one should expect to find it in a city neighbouring the Sahel.
And that was the way it was. For lack of water at Kaduna airport, Captain Shuaibu Ali and his passenger were burnt to death in their Beechcraft plane after it had crash-landed there.
The fire fighters were there alright. The fire engines were there blazing at full blast. There was even diesel in their tanks! The hazard lights were blinking. Everything looked set and almost ready. When you saw them you would pity fire that day. Very set and very ready; only that there was nowhere to go. There was no water—not even a drop. And even by Nigerian standards you need water to fight fire. Or, do you?
You just didn’t know whether it was outrage or pity that you ought to feel for those smartly-dressed firemen standing in, on, or by the side of dry and empty fire engines on most of the nation’s airports. What did they think their duty was? Wearing smart dresses? Going to the airport each morning? Saluting their bosses? Or, standing by their vehicles? But the joke – or the anguish – is not on them. It is on the nation.
With less than one million Naira a borehole could have been sunk at each of the airports; and with another one million Naira each could have been motorized to provide water 24 hours a day. And with less than that amount sufficient foam could have been provided to the fire fighters.
But there is a very big an insurmountable problem. If the borehole is sunk, it will almost certainly not be maintained. If, by some miracle, it is maintained, there is an even bigger and more insurmountable problem. Who will buy the diesel for the borehole generator—and keep buying it as and when due? And who will buy the diesel for the fire-fighting engines themselves?
Yet even if diesel is provided on time, in the right quantity and quality, the ideal situation is if the service of the fire brigade is not called for at all. Keeping things in order and under control then becomes the duty, not of the fire service but, of the agency responsible for checking the airworthiness of aircrafts, the one enforcing flight regulations, and the one responsible for maintaining the physical condition of airports.
But for all agencies, cutting corners has become a national pastime by choice or by force. Even to non-trained and non-technical but well-traveled eyes, there is very little to inspire confidence, for instance, in the condition of many of the aircrafts put to service by the local airline operators. It is as if there is no one responsible for that.
Once, as I sat in one of the planes of one of the oldest local airlines, I witnessed a very difficult-to-forget sight. The captain had revved the plane’s engine ready for taxiing but had to cut power. The aircraft door, which had been closed, was opened; and an airline mechanic in blue fatigues came up and passed to the rear of the aircraft. I noted that he was sweating profusely and I mentioned to my wife who was sitting next to me that the man had in his hands what looked like a giant sledgehammer.
A few minutes later a very loud sound issued from the rear of the aircraft and the plane shook. Again the sound issued forth, and again and again. By the fourth bang, I was on my feet. I opened the compartment and plucked out our bags. I went down with my wife following. By the time I reached the bottom of the ladder a descending queue had formed behind us. Later the plane took off from Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport and, apparently, landed safely in Lagos.
To convince my wife that something was seriously wrong, I had said that, as a rule, products of high technology are not often put together by force; and cannot possibly therefore be repaired by powerful sledgehammer blows. Especially planes!
Obviously, someone from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority was supposed to have inspected the plane. This is what one sees in other places. I always remember seeing a technician at Frankfurt airport sometime in 1984 inspecting several Lufthansa aircrafts with what, from the distance, looked like a giant magnifying glass. He was probably looking for possible cracks or other signs of metal fatigue. I had no way of knowing whether this was routine or a part of some special inspection being carried out. But it was very reassuring—and a sight I have never witnessed in Nigeria.
In contrast, in Nigeria people have often complained that money may indeed have changed hands in exchange for airworthiness. There was a celebrated case in 2004 when a director in the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, NCAA, was accused of receiving a bribe of N250,000 to give certificate of airworthiness to one of the local airlines. An investigation conduced by the NCAA concluded that that money given to the director by the airline was not a bribe.
And for many people it is a thing of astonishment how the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, NAMA, manages to do its job without radar coverage. Once a Group Captain in the Nigerian Airforce told us how he came to the Aminu Kano International Airport, Kano and found anxious faces talking in horrified whispers. When he inquired, he was told that an aircraft had intruded into Nigerian airspace but the duty officer to give chase was not at his post.
The Group Captain, who is a former military governor, was ever ready with his flying kit in his car. He quickly changed and was soon airborne. He gave chase and forced the Nigerian plane down. He remembered that feat with justified pride and those moments with nostalgia. At least some things worked.
A few years later, when he went to the airport, he discovered that the radar was no longer working. It needed a spare part worth a few hundred dollars to repair. Ten years later when he didn’t see the radar, he asked, and was told that one military big shot had written a note and the whole radar was given or auctioned to his girl friend. It was dismantled and the girl friend was later said to have found good use for it. She supplied it on contract to the government of one of the East African countries. Perhaps such a thing could happen only in Nigeria.
But if there is trouble in the sky, there is even greater trouble on the ground. Today, the state of the nation’s runways leaves much to be desired. Recently some European airlines boycotted Murtala Mohammed Airport. There were cracks and potholes incompatible with aircraft and passenger safety. And it will appear that some Nigerian airports are not all that secure. Cattle, goats and birds have often strayed right onto the tarmac, or into the engines of planes.
While other reasons have been given for the removal of Alhaji Isa Yuguda as aviation minister, many believe the incident in which an Air France jet collided with cattle on the tarmac of Port Harcourt airport played a part.
But Professor Babalola Aborishade, the current minister, thought that a minister should only resign his appointment – or be sacked, perhaps – if his resignation will solve the problem that occasioned it. First, he has not seen any reason why he should resign over the current tragedies that have befallen this nation. Second, the boss has not seen any reason to sack him; and instead he suspended Mr. Tomi Oyedale, the permanent secretary and Mr. Esai Dangabar, a director, leaving the political head responsible for the ministry to probe his own incompetence. Third, the minister has dismissed all calls on him to resign.
He is unable to appreciate the fact that resignation for him, in the circumstance, is the real taking of responsibility for his ministry which has thus thrice thrown the nation into avoidable mourning.
He has chosen to forget that the removal of Yuguda hasn’t solved the problems. He has failed to see that this nature of responsibility for those at whose desk the buck stops is often vicarious. Yuguda was not employed to stand sentinel over Port Harcourt runway and stop mystery cattle at 3.30 a.m from straying onto the tarmac. If he could be removed for that it is only indicative of the partiality in the president’s logic and leadership if he allowed Borishade to stay on.
Instead of removing Borishade, the president was, as usual, pontificating. “We must endeavour to build an aviation infrastructure that meets global standards of safety and industry best practice,” he said. “Too often we have been criticized for failing to rise to the occasion as a nation in areas where we possess comparative advantage. We therefore intend to engage in the restructuring of the entire sector with emphasis on institutions responsible for the formulation and implementation of policies.”
As he removed Oyedale and Dangabar, he said this was in line with his determination to do “a critical assessment of institutional and human capacity deficiencies in the sector as a prelude to urgent reforms.”
First, this is not the way to do critical assessments. Second, if in six and a half years he hadn’t thought of doing this assessment; and would perhaps not have thought about doing it but for the recent multiple crashes, how urgent could it really have been?
That is the question and the answer doesn’t lie in a hurried get-together of a Round Table. We are all suffering from the after-effects of collective national failure. Nigeria has become a nation of corner-cutters, where anything goes. And as anything goes, everything went—and things are now threatening to go up in flames. This spate of our crashes is symptomatic of the coming to a head of decades of cutting corners in the nation’s aviation industry. This nation cannot survive cutting corners in the air. Indeed, it must avoid cutting corners anywhere, and come down to earth.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has always prided himself with having left 32 planes for Nigeria Airways in 1979; and when he came back in 1999, he found only one aircraft remaining. But if the 1979 credit was really due to him, the logical thing would have been for him to recreate the national carrier in the 1999 image he left it. No, that was not what he did. Instead, he killed it, inadvertently proving that, until he was told, he perhaps didn’t even know that it had 32 aircrafts in 1979, or how it managed to get tem, or how it could get them again. Today, it is in liquidation, with an unpayable 46.87 billion Naira pension and gratuity bill. But if Nigeria Airways has lost all its planes, at the aviation Round table, the president succeeded in losing his temper. But losing temper is not very good public policy. It doesn’t prove anything except that you cannot control yourself in public.
While no one is accusing Obasanjo of running the national airline aground alone, he cannot escape blame for failing in six and a half years to do things he has himself declared “urgent.” Of course, even if he had remained the head of state for all those 20 years [1979-1999] the airways would have died a natural death, anyway.
It had always had problems with its capital structure; it had had to contend with the obsolescence of some of its equipment, the inappropriateness of some of the technologies it employs, the excessive bureaucratic interference it had had to endure, the utter incompetence and corruption of its staff; and, especially, the monopoly it enjoyed. These problems could have killed any institution.
Unfortunately, when competition came to the aviation industry, it arrived hand-in-hand with the famous Nigerian Factor and began cutting corners 24 hours a day. And the opportunity for making name and delivering service became, like all the others before it, a mere opportunity for making money.
Setting up an airline became the new and convenient way to invest—and, for some, to launder ill-gotten—funds. Naturally, with the profit motive and the doctrine of its maximization, many invested in aged aircraft. But, to be sure, with a three per cent depreciation rate, 20 years is not too bad an age for an aircraft, provided that it always gets prompt and competent maintenance. And often that is where the other corners are cut. Checks are either not regular, or not of the appropriate grade; because the airlines are confident that officials responsible for airworthiness checks will always look the other way.
And a bad situation is made worse by other equally serious failures. The obsolete equipment at the airports, the broken down navigational aids, fire service without water, and a general I-don’t-care attitude to passenger safety all seem primed for an accident. And with over-worked, disgruntled and risk-taking pilots, a plane ride in Nigeria’s local airlines is simply a disaster waiting to happen. And with the general “anything goes” national mentality, there is just no serious effort to halt or reverse the rot.
And with liquidated Nigeria Airways reeling under the weight of unpaid pension, the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, carries a 7.2 billion Naira debt burden. With malfunctioning equipment, dear radar and general periodic equipment failure, the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, NAMA, is, no doubt, having a rough time managing any space.
In retrospect, the culpability of these agencies in the current spate of air crashes is probably only tangential. The real culprit is the president who routinely withholds the provisions and allocation of the nation’s capital budget from institutions that badly need equipment replacement. But whatever the context, one plane crash may be an accident; two plane crashes may be a tragedy, but three plane crashes in less than 50 days is utter, pure carelessness. Somebody must be punished for this. And it is neither the permanent secretary nor the director of statistics. It is the minister.