Following the conversion of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Abuja to a domestic airport, the brand new international airport to be constructed will be ready in December, the Minister of Aviation Princess Stella Oduah disclosed in an interview with journalists on Monday at the commissioning of the General Aviation Terminal Abuja. She also spoke on the planned national carrier, the 30 aircraft to be purchased by Nigeria, aviation fuel issues and more.
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How much did it cost to build the Abuja General Aviation Terminal (GAT) facility and how did you manage all the intricacies that came with the project?
I don’t know the intricacies you are referring to but in a building, you have to conceptualise it, draw and design it, then build it and follow the other processes involved in building. There were no intricacies at all. The truth is that we had to have a General Aviation Terminal which supports aviation business. That wasn’t in existence yet the business is growing. Government would like the business to grow far more than what we now have and the only way we can achieve that growth is to provide infrastructure, the policy and the procedure to drive such a business. That is what we have done.
We have also finished the general aviation policy. Hopefully by next week, we will have a meeting with private jet operators. There, they would know the policy that guides what they are supposed to do, how they are supposed to do it.
We do have a lot of grey areas in our general aviation policy but we will remove all the grey areas in the policy and make them operational.
On the cost, it is difficult to give you the full cost just yet but it’s a fraction of the Lagos cost (N648 million). This is just phase one, the phase two is coming behind. We are just waiting for the Air Force to vacate so we can commence the phase two. It really should be more elaborate than this. Currently, we have about 50 private jets. We are estimating that by next year, we are tripling that number. But if we will do that, then we need a larger GAT than this. But the entire cost of the project wouldn’t be going beyond N500 million at the end of the project.
Since the liquidation of Nigeria Airways, the catering business angle has been in limbo. What is the plan of the government to resuscitate the catering business so the airlines can be adequately served?