[dropcap]D[/dropcap]irector General Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority ( DG-CA), Captain Musa Nuhu says technical personnel are leaving the agency for better offers.
This is just as he says he has experienced non- interference as DG-CA but said the NCAA cannot exist without government.
He made this known responding to questions of poaching and sundry issues within the industry in an interview granted recently.
Technical personnel:
On personnel leaving the employ of the CAA, Nuhu attributed it to salary imbalance between public and private sector.
He said,”My staff leave the agency regularly. That is the problem of salary. You are earning N500, 000 monthly and a particular airline comes and gives you N1.5 million monthly, what are you going to do?
“It is unfortunate, that is the way it is and that is why we need to be removed from that salary structure.
“Kenya as of two years ago pays some of its technical staff about $10,000 monthly and they were going to increase it. So, you pay your people peanuts and you expect them to do magic that is not possible.”
Political Interference:
The DG- CA said he could not speak on what happened before him but that is currently not his experience.
“We have to determine and understand the autonomy of the NCAA. The NCAA is a government organisation; the NCAA cannot exist in the absence of government.
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“Autonomy of NCAA is on its regulatory functions, our safety regulatory function that is where we have our autonomy. But there are other government regulations, financial regulations and all that the NCAA must comply with.
“The NCAA cannot exist on its own and we say nobody in government should talk to us. There is no civil aviation authority like that anywhere in the world.
He delved deeper,”But, when we make safety decisions, like grounding an airline, then there is intervention that we should reverse, that is interference.
“My own experience since I became the DG, I have not experienced that even once. And like the new minister has said, he will respect that.
“And the first meeting I had with him, he said ‘I am a lawyer, I have gone through the Civil Aviation Act, NCAA is a very powerful organisation and has a very powerful DG.’
“But, if you don’t use power properly, you will do more damage than fixing things. So, you have to be very careful that you don’t get carried away.
“And what is the purpose of the NCAA? To promote the aviation industry, basically that is what it is. So, we work with all stakeholders.
“We have grounded a few airlines when we believed that safety was going to be compromised, we just have to take action.
