THE Federal Government said yesterday it will not hesitate to concession the nation’s airports for effective and efficient service delivery. The Minister of Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, noted that the concessioning process would boost revenue drive of the government, adding that President Muhammadu Buhari’s government as social democratic in nature, has vehemently refused to sell government property as carried out by past governments.

Sirika, who spoke while presenting the agency’s projections on the Medium Term Expenditure Framework for 2021 to 2023 before the Senate Joint Committee on Finance and National Planning Stakeholders on the details of the 2021and 2023 Medium Term Expenditure Framework, MTEF, and Fiscal Strategy Paper, FSP, forwarded last month by President Muhammadu Buhari, said the Aviation sector was a service-oriented one. The committee is led by Senator Olamilekan Adeola (APC, Lagos West.) The Minister warned that with the COVID-19 pandemic that has affected all globally, Nigeria would up till the first quarter of 2022, continue to witness sharp decline in the number of passengers.
 
He added that the aviation sector needed fund to carry out its activities, warning that if the government could not fund the Industry because of the challenge of income, it should not take the little the sector has. Sirika said: “So we are in a difficult and challenging times and we do not have solutions to it, even as advanced countries are spending huge amounts of money to support civil aviation businesses.

The government, because of the challenge of funding, has not been able to respond to civil aviation requests and civil aviation funding like other countries have done.