Aviation Expert Urges Procurement Process Review

• Aviation Expert Urges Procurement Process Review

President of Topbrass Aviation, Captain Roland Iyayi, is seeking the review of procurement for aviation infrastructure to save the sector the billions of naira spent on airport and air navigation facilities.

Iyayi said the practice where bids were called for in aviation infrastructure without seeking the approval of service users was unhealthy for the utilisation of scarce resources.

In an interview in Lagos, the Topbrass boss said agencies of government should enlist airlines, concessionaires and other users in the tendering and procurement before committing huge funds into facilities that would not be needed.

Iyayi said it was only by involving stakeholders that the government could feel the impact of what projects that are priority in the sector.

He said airlines, which are the major clients of aviation agencies, including the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA), should have a role to play in choosing critical airport and air navigation facilities that the government should install at airports.

Iyayi said a situation in which agencies procure facilities without recourse to cost to recovery models was unhealthy for business and profitability of such organisations.

This, he said, explains why FAAN, and NAMA should engage airlines to prioritise projects to be installed at airports to enable them achieve a competitive bidding for the firms that would undertake the supply.

Iyayi said NAMA would not have run into the hitch it experienced in the execution of its contract with a French company, which supplied and installed the components of the Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria (TRACON) project.

He said the involvement of stakeholders would not only make procurement transparent but would save a lot of tax-payers money through transparent bidding.

Iyayi said: “Therefore, the emphasis should be on providing transparent procedures that will help in establishing effective public-private partnership procurement framework.”

He said failure to adopt global procurement procedures had resulted in high cost of fixing aviation facilities, which pushes the agencies to impose higher charges of airlines.