The Minister of Aviation, Mr Osita Chidoka, has blamed the shortage of funds for the slow pace of remodeling going on in airports around the country, but noted that most of the Phase One work started a the airports are more less completed.
Mr Chidoka, who appeared as a guest on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Tuesday, added that “most of the Phase Two works are still on going, but there has been budgetary constraints in some part of the work going on.
“There is some privatisation in the completion; many of them are quite advanced”, he said.
The Minister also noted that they are focusing on airports with 80 per cent completion rate and above “for now” before “moving on to the Phase Two projects to make sure they are completed over the next one to two years”.
He , however, noted that “the expansion of the left and right wing of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA) has been done, the re-tiling has been done, but there is still somethings that we are trying to prioritise correctly”.
He further noted that in remodeling the airports, especially the MMIA there has been an expansion of capacity which must be supported by an expansion of infrastructure, which may have resulted in the long queues suffered before luggage is claimed by passengers at the airport.
“The physical space does not allow you to install more than two of those (conveyor belt/carousel). So, invariably, what you are going to have is some kind of bottlenecks coming out of the expansion“.
Mr Chidoka maintained that the remodeling, which is taking place on existing structures, will be hard to effect a high level of impact as seen in European countries, because the airports are being demolished and rebuilt from the scratch, adding that “we have conducted a study to find out what the causes of the delay; where the delays are.
“Unfortunately, the data does not support the number people of minutes or hours people say they suffer for delay”, he said.
He said the infrastructure that will support the capacity increase in airports will include fast, modern and technologically driven carousels that will be able to read the tags on the bags and separate them based on airline tags.
