The high cost of maintaining bloated personnel structures and heavy recurrent expenditure across aviation agencies is undermining infrastructure development and stunting the growth of Nigeria’s airline industry, Top Brass Aviation Chief Executive Officer, Roland Iyayi, has said.
Speaking at the LAAC Conference 2026, Iyayi attributed the challenge to government policy, taxation, agency charges and the Treasury Single Account (TSA). He argued that aviation agencies must have sufficient resources for infrastructure while avoiding personnel structures that consume funds needed for development.
Iyayi, a onetime managing director of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) cited the agency as a clear example of the imbalance between recurrent and capital expenditure.
“When you look at where we have been, take two decades ago. NAMA had 1,200 staff. The recurrent expenditure at the time was 77%, meaning that NAMA had barely 23% for capital expenditure,” Iyayi said.
He said the situation was unsustainable because NAMA required substantial capital resources to provide the infrastructure needed by the aviation industry.
He also raised concerns about what he described as the continued bloating of government agencies, including the deployment of personnel without the qualifications required for specialised aviation functions. He cited reports of more than 500 people being brought into FAAN as Aviation Security personnel in the past, arguing that such practices add pressure to agency finances.
Iyayi said bloated staffing and high recurrent expenditure ultimately increase the financial burden passed on to aviation stakeholders through agency charges. He argued that agencies spending heavily on personnel and recurrent obligations have less capacity for capital expenditure, while relying on charges to sustain operations. That cycle, he said, makes the cost of aviation services harder to reduce and further pressures airlines already facing high operating costs.
“Now, when you look at the issue of bloating of staff at every agency in the country today, there is absolutely no way the charges that all these agencies are charging are sustainable for their operations,” he said.
The Top Brass CEO therefore called for aviation to be treated as a strategic sector and removed from the Treasury Single Account (TSA) structure. Iyayi said the current arrangement makes it difficult to retain sufficient resources within aviation for infrastructure and industry development.
His argument also focused on the distinction between taxes and charges. Iyayi said aviation should operate on a cost-recovery basis rather than serve as a vehicle for increasing government revenue.
“A tax is an unrequited payment by a citizen or corporate citizen or whoever it is to government,” he said. “By the time government takes 25%, I hear it’s about 40% today, of monies paid by stakeholders to all these agencies, it is assuming, of course, that these agencies are profitable by 40%.”
He questioned the policy of using increased revenue generation as a performance metric for aviation agencies. According to him, such an approach conflicts with the principle of cost recovery.
“Again, remember, aviation is for cost recovery,” Iyayi said. “So, when we also have a minister who, when he came in on board, indicated that part of his metrics will be increased revenue generation for the agencies, there we have a problem.”
Expenditure and the Aviation Revenue Burden
Iyayi further questioned the continued application of the five per cent ticket sales charge alongside other fees imposed by aviation agencies. According to him, Nigeria currently has 54 categories of taxes, fees and charges affecting aviation stakeholders.
He said the continued application of these levies was detrimental to the growth of Nigerian aviation.
Iyayi also cited NCAA revenue to illustrate the scale of government extraction and the resulting expenditure burden on the sector. He said the Budget Office recorded a $496 million contribution from the NCAA to government coffers in 2023. Iyayi estimated that the authority may have generated nearly $2 billion that year, stressing that no Nigerian airline currently generates comparable revenue solely from airline operations in Nigeria.
“There is absolutely no airline in Nigeria today generating that money,” Iyayi said.
Iyayi also linked the policy burden to airline fuel costs. He said fuel accounts for approximately 40 per cent of an airline’s direct operating costs and highlighted the sharp increase in fuel prices in Nigeria compared with other African markets.
He said fuel prices rose by 270 per cent in Nigeria, compared with 60 per cent in South Africa and 80 per cent in Kenya.
He said aviation policy must therefore address expenditure alongside taxation and regulation. In his view, reducing unnecessary personnel costs, strengthening capital expenditure and reviewing taxes, fees and charges would create greater capacity for infrastructure investment and airline growth.
