31 Oct 2008 |
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Flying blind in Lagos By Levi Obijiofor Friday, 31 October 2008 To all those who fly into or out of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, here When members of the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation visited the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency in Lagos last Friday, they were shocked by what they saw. The chairperson, Bethel Amadi, told journalists: “Our visit to the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency on Friday paints a picture of sadness. We were very sad and very unhappy. In fact, it made me very scared to fly. We believe that something urgent and critical needs to be done to avert a disaster… Right now, there is no radar cover at the Lagos airport. What is simply being done is manual. They are now using radio communication to give information to the Air Traffic Controllers, and that is what they use to direct aircraft, which is very dangerous.” If Amadi sounded like an alarm bell, he had good reasons to do so. Air travel is an interesting experience. But it is also a dangerous means of travel. Everything must work very well for planes to take off and land safely. There are no half measures. It is not like road transport where a bus can pull over a side street so the driver can fix a problem in the gearbox. Because of the sensitive nature of the aviation industry, it is important that the safety of air passengers is not compromised, particularly through reliance on a derelict airport radar system. In the past, air passengers in Nigeria used to fret about the quality and airworthiness of the aircraft in which they were flying. Not anymore. Half-hearted reforms in the aviation sector have eliminated some of the “flying coffins” – not all of them – from the skies. Today, air travelers in Lagos and indeed other parts of the country have another reason to worry. They face a greater risk of endangering their lives, not because of the onset of an unusually inclement weather or natural force but sadly because of the use of the dilapidated radar equipment. There is reason to be anxious about the decrepit state of navigational equipment at our airports. As we approach the peak travel period leading to Christmas and New Year festivities, everyone should be concerned that pilots and air traffic controllers are relying on their instincts rather than on the appropriate technology designed to ensure safety at the airports. For those who do not know, the airport radar, according to Argos Press which publishes books and journals across a range of disciplines, is a system that “provides information to air traffic controllers on aircraft in the local air space. Airport radar systems include:
The Punch reported on Monday this week that a $56 million contract was awarded in 2003 to install the radar equipment that would cover the entire country. That contract, the paper noted, was expected to have been completed in 2006. The Punch also quoted the Minister of State for Air Transport as stating that, between 2007 and September 2008, a monstrous sum of N6.5bn had been spent on the project. With all that money spent on one project, why has the Lagos airport radar problem not been fixed? There is something unwholesome about the way contracts are awarded, monitored and evaluated in the country. This says as much about unsatisfactory financial accountability as it does about the lack of interest by federal officials in the Lagos airport radar saga. Mercifully, the Federal Government has woken up belatedly to its responsibility by announcing on Tuesday this week that the French company handling the radar project has been given 14 months to complete the task. That will be more than three years after the original date scheduled for completion of the project. It is a scandal of grand magnitude that a major airport such as Lagos has been using radar equipment which was set up exactly 30 years ago. It is in this shocking situation that pilots and air traffic controllers are compelled to rely more on their guessing skills to steer aircraft to safe landing and takeoff. It is a disgusting and dangerous practice. But it can only happen in a country where human lives count for nothing. It is a distressing irony of the way things work in the country. While the rest of the world is celebrating new technologies that have allowed countries, individuals and organisations to do things better, more efficiently and in less time, we are still grappling with yesterday’s technologies that ought to have been replaced or upgraded. It is not that Nigeria lacks the financial resources to equip its airports with state-of-the-art technologies. The poor state of the radar at our airports is simply a reflection of the high level of ministerial incompetence and misplacement of priorities by national and state leaders. With this dizzying approach to matters of national importance, are we ever going to catch up with the rest of Africa and the world? The wrecked radar equipment at the Lagos airport is a national tragedy and an accident that is waiting to happen. As the heartbeat of commerce and industry in the country, Lagos holds a special place in the hearts of many people at home and overseas. Owing to the poor state of federal and state roads, air travel has become the most important means of accessing or exiting Lagos. Unfortunately, many people flying to and from Lagos don’t realise the extent to which they gamble with their lives each time they board a plane heading to or out of that city. Here is the paradox of our situation. Nigeria is an elite member of the global oil cartel known as OPEC (Oil Producing and Exporting Countries). As a member of the top eight oil producing nations, Nigeria earns a lot of money through oil production and export. But even with the gigantic revenue from oil sales, our political leaders don’t seem to know what to do with the oil revenue in order to develop the country, to enhance the lives of the greater population and to improve important infrastructure across the country. Improving the lives of the people who wallow in squalor in the oil producing parts of the country remains a major national hurdle. The irony is that while political leaders are clueless about how to utilise national resources to tackle urgent problems of development, they are never short of criminal knowledge of how to convert national wealth into their private overseas bank accounts. In essence, the national resources which political leaders cannot use to uplift the economic conditions of the people, they eagerly use to look after themselves. Over the past 48 years, Nigeria’s political and military leaders have consistently shown the world that they are a breed of spineless leaders, strong in loud talk and empty boasts but weak, very weak in making the right decisions to advance the interests of the nation. Nigeria, a nation that refers to itself as a continental leader, should have learned a long time ago to put its priorities right. It is blunders such as the failure to upgrade the Lagos airport radar that expose the hollowness in the nation’s claims to continental leadership. A continental leader is a title that is usually earned through national achievement rather than appropriated verbally.
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is a piece of bad news to scare you. The radar facility at the airport is faulty. The airspace is unsafe. And the potential for air traffic accidents is high. The implication: when you plan your next flight to or from Lagos, you need to pray passionately that your journey should go according to your wishes. You also need to place within easy reach of your hip pocket a copy of your bible or Koran. Why? 
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