1st December, 2023
By Femi Ogunshola
The House of Representatives Committee on Finance on Friday threatened to instigate the removal of the Managing Director and other top officials of the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) for allegedly hiding billions of naira of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR).
Rep. James Faleke (APC-Lagos), the chairman of the Committee, said this at the resumed interactive session with revenue-generating agencies in Abuja on Friday.
Faleke accused the NCAA management of depriving the nation of its financial responsibility by hiding the amount of revenue it generated annually.
He said the NCAA management had refused to give the committee the requested data on the number of passengers that flew airlines because it does not want to disclose the amount of its annual IGR.
He, however, promised that the committee would get the money no matter how hard the NCAA tried to hide it.
“You people have always reported a negative balance. I have done so much research this year on NCAA, which is why I have so much information.
“If we further compel you to provide such information, somebody else will occupy that office,” he said.
The committee unanimously agreed that if the NCAA came back and could not produce the requested document on or before Dec. 14, it would affect their seat.
The committee said it was empowered by law to scrutinise the NCAA’s document and must be tendered on request, adding that anything such as presenting the document would amount to a waste of time.
The committee said the abandoned recklessness going on in the nation’s domestic airlines was unprecedented.
Falake demanded comprehensive details on how the NCAA arrived at the data of passengers flying month by month and which airline carried the passengers submitted before it.
He urged the Nigeria Meteorological Agency (NiMET) to also produce its reconciliation of the revenue shared by the NCAA, adding that it was not enough for the NCAA to give it just N2 billion without proper reconciliation.
Falake, however, asked the NCAA to produce “the total number of passengers that flew all airlines every month, and the airline, and how many passengers they carried.
Others included: which destination and the fare charge, where the five per cent of the money retired was, and which bank account and distribution pattern of that sum and evidence of distribution
The committee also threatened to issue an arrest warrant for Nigeria Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) if it failed to appear before it on Dec. 4.
In their response to various allegations, the NCAA representatives, Captain Ibrahim Dambazau and Abubakar Gachi said the data of passengers being requested was presented earlier, and it was correct, contrary to the committee’s claim of presenting fake data.
He said the data was analysed with the same document presented before the committee.
NIMET, on his part, said it used to do account reconciliation with the NCAA before now, but it had since stopped in 2017 with the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN).
From the documents earlier submitted to the committee, the NCAA declared N12.7 billion in revenue from the share of the gross revenue allotted to regulatory agencies in the industry.
The lawmaker, however, said the amount was below the computed gross revenue share received by NCAA worth N66 billion, realised from both revenues accrued from local and international travels for 2022.
(NAN