ABUJA RUNWAY CLOSURE UPENDS AVIATION PLANNING.

ONLY IN NIGERIA! 

Let me quote the Minister of State, Aviation Hadi Sikira extensively on this matter of the imminent closure of the Abuja Airport runway,

“Structurally speaking, all the four levels are gone. It’s not the top layer we’re talking about here. It’s total repairs. The work-at-night repair approach has been in place for 14 years. The runway has outlived it’s lifespan. It was commissioned in 1982 and had a lifespan of 20 years. So, it has gone bad and has been patched for 14 years. If we don’t fix it now, it’ll shut down itself. * * *

"Same happened to Port Harcourt Airport,” he recalled.

For the last comment, I offer the Honourable(?) Minister my congratulations!

Una do well! . Seriously.

Why on earth did the same thing happen earlier in Port Harcourt? It has been proven time and again that these people have no sense of shame. Nigerians within the political circles will insist, following the Peter Principle, to rise unrestrained to the point where their incompetence, unfitness for office, is glaring. Running an airport system is not exactly the same as running NASA or SpaceX. Far from it. That said, the operators must be both knowledgeable, competent and committed. We have never had that here. Both master and servants are perennially wanting.

Has nobody ever heard of the expression "multiple redundancy" routinely applied by every plant operator in Ikeja and Agbara industrial?
Do we need a constitutional conference to mandate the design and construction of a second runway at Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja?
Who and who sit down to discuss the strategic consequences of the many glaring omissions in our hare-brained decision making processses. Is anybody home?
Perhaps we should line up Chikwe, Fani-Kayode, Stella Oduah and Chidoka to explain to us serially what they have been doing in the name of planning all these years.

Finally, I recommend that some flights should be diverted to Enugu. As for reinforcing the security in and around every hamlet on the route from Kaduna Airport, I can tell the minister straight away that I personally cannot put my life at the mercy of his watery promises, especially in the light of current events in Kaduna. He and his boss should concentrate on pacifying that unfortunate part of this cursed federation. We had assumed all along that the Boko-Haram infestation in the North-East is the worst problem on our hands this decade. How wrong we are.