Having successfully repositioned the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria, for greater efficiency since his appointment in 2007, the Rector/Chief Executive of the institution, Capt. Adebayo Araba, has assured the aviation sector and Nigerians in general that he is ready to make the school the number one training institution in Africa. In this interview with Jimoh Babatunde, Araba speaks on his achievements, challenges, prospects and other raging issues affecting the country’s aviation industry. Excerpts:
Can you let the readers into your background in the aviation industry before your appointment as the Rector of the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology?
I graduated from this College in 1976 and I was under Federal Government scholarship. So, I had to work for this same College as an instructor. Then in 1980, I was transferred to Nigeria Airways and I was commissioned in the Nigeria Airways as a Senior Flight Officer on F-28. So, I was in the Nigeria Airways from 1980 to 2004 when the airline was shutdown.
I had the opportunity of flying the slim body, the medium jet and the wide body, which I had command rating in all of them; that is the B737 and the 301 and when the place was shutdown, I was briefly in the industry as an instructor before being appointed back to this College as a rector in 2007.
What are your major achievements since 2007 till date in the College?
What we have on ground here today has never been achieved since the inception of this College in terms of infrastructure and equipment. I can tell you that this College is the largest aviation training institution in Africa.
Is it larger than that of South Africa?
Yes, it is. We comprised of five schools here; the flying school, the AME School, ATE School and we have the ATSCOM School. Hardly can you get any school even in the world with all these schools under the same umbrella. You will discover that in South Africa, they have so many flying schools and if you quantify what is obtainable in each school, you will discover that when you fuse all of them together they can’t still compare with this College, material-wise.
In the Nigeria aviation industry, we have so many challenges from each agency to the other, what are the major challenges facing NCAT?
You see, in a training institution like this, there is no quick fix and gradually, we’ve gone beyond where the college left on about 20 years ago. We’ve gone beyond that in the sense that so many years back, they were not even able to achieve their objectives and clearly we’ve gone beyond that in material training. I don’t want you to lose the focus. Really, the primary objective of this college is to train manpower for this industry and for so many years before I got in here, nothing like that was been done in this college. I will not like to address why it wasn’t been done because I wasn’t here then, but now, we are up to our mission and our vision is quite credible now.
Recently, Kwara State Government established an aviation college in its state; don’t you think this will affect the patronage NCAT presently enjoys as a reputable training institution in Nigeria?
I don’t think so, you see, this college is synonymous with quality. Quality in the sense that we take the best out of the lot, out of the interest groups and if Kwara is going to do likewise, so be it, but as it is today, we can not even accommodate all the competent people that want to fly into this college in the sense that this college is a Federal Government institution and we have quota and our responsibility is to ensure that is fulfilled because it is part of the Federal Government mission too. You see, the quota we are doing is a credible quota.
Credible in the sense that we advertise that we are looking for students and students from the 36 states would apply and they are invited for interview and at the end of the day, we select best from each state and you will agree with me that nothing can be better than that. That is why each course in the school is a course load of 36 meaning from each state and that person is the best candidate for that state. Not that the rest can not fly, but we can not just accommodate because we have some courses here that must be in-house by law.
For instance the AME School; the engineering school, the students must be accommodated in the college like the flying school. They must be accommodated in the school, like the ATSCOM school, they must be accommodated. So, we are really limited by the number of students we can take at any given time due to a lot of logistics. Even having the accommodation, we are still restricted by law because the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority is maintaining the safety oversight of this college. So, we have maximum number of students we can take at any given time.
At present, what is the total number of students we have in the school now?
I think we should have very close to 600 students. What is the management doing to create more awareness about the school activities especially to millions of Nigerians who are not aware of its activities and are interested in enrolling into the school?
I will say this to you; I will disagree with you on this. This college, we spend a lot on publicities. The best way to tell all Nigerians that you are having this product is to go the Nigerian Television Authority, which has the full coverage of the whole country and we do this regularly on air. I don’t think there is anything better than that and that is why this college is open to the literates only and not the illiterates. And I believe if you are literate, you must have heard it in the news and it is there.
And for those people, who are really interested in joining us, we have a website and definitely, people are waiting to give you spontaneous reaction to any question that you ask.
Before you assumed the position of leadership in this institution, NCAT did not graduate students for many years, but not quite long, the school has started dishing out students into the aviation industry as at when due, how did you achieve this feat?
It’s a long story; you see, you will agree with me that if you put somebody who is knowledgeable about doing things in charge of something, definitely, there would be progress, but if it is the other way round, definitely a lot of sycophants will not allow him or her to work. If you look at my background, I was a student and later an instructor in this college and now, I’m a chief executive. Do you think there is anybody in this college that can tell me anything about this institution?
It’s totally impossible because I have basis for comparison. Whatever I need to do in this college, I have basis for comparison. I can say when I was here as a student, it was being done this way, let me improve on it. When I was here as an instructor, it was being done this way, so, let me improve on it. I can collate all those things and I just forge ahead.
Let me tell you this, before I was even appointed to this college in 2007, I was the chairman of manpower development committee that Federal Government set up between 2005 and 2006. I was in this college; I accessed everything they have. I gave a lot of open items to government that ‘look, for this college to continue to operate, these and these are things you’ve got to do,’ all the open items. Now, as God will have it, Government brought me back as chief executive, I just dusted the papers and brought them out and that is exactly what we are going through, all the open items that we identified in 2006, we are closing them and that is why there is progress in the college.
Talking about open items, which of the open items are yet to be closed since you came onboard?
You see, there was no priority at all in maintenance and it wasn’t deliberate, it was due to lack of knowledge. So, I had to close that. When I came in here, I met only one aero plane on the line, they had about 25 in storage; they had no plan of either fixing them or bringing them back in line. They did not even see reason why they must be brought on line to start with. And secondly, bringing them on line then, they had no enough competent pilot on ground to even be instructors in this place.
I brought the aero planes out, I had to go back into the industry to bring back some of the old instructors to this college that they should all come back to savage the college together and I have some of them here and blended them with some of the instructors on ground and that is the more reason why some of the instructors we met on ground, we are still training them. The training is continuous because the way we are going with the college now, some of them don’t even have what it takes to even continue doing the job they’ve been employed to do.
So, there is massive training going on with the instructors now because we want them to acquire better experience and better certificate for us to be able to get to where we are going because there are lots of demands in the industry now for Multi-crew Concept (MCC) training. Apart from the instructors that came from outside to join them, none of them in here can do the training, but now, they’ve started the orientation for them to be indoctrinated into the MCC programme and that is the more reason why I’m in agreement with Arik Air now.
I have about 10 of them in Britain now courtesy of the sponsorship of the Government through the college. I have this relationship with Arik whereby by the time they finish with the training, they will go into the industry, they would fly with Arik for a while and come back here for them to really appreciate what multi-crew concept is all about because you can not teach them multi-crew here, it comes by responsibilities. By the time they are back here, definitely, they will be better materials.
Just recently, some aviation professionals agitated for appointment of professional as the next aviation minister, you are an aviator in the industry, do you agree with this position? My candid opinion is that any intelligent person can be minister of anything. Ok, let’s go back to the immediate erstwhile minister of aviation, Mrs. Fidelia Njeze, she was never in aviation industry and for the little time she spent, this industry recorded tremendous progress. Even in this college, she single-handedly supported the progress of this college or is it the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria that we are going to be talking about? You can imagine the transformation that is going on in FAAN now. Is it NCAA that we are going to be talking about?
It was when she came; I’m not saying she was the architect of the certification we got from the United States Federal Aviation Administration, but she supported it despite the fact that she knew nothing about aviation. If you call her today, you will not believe what that lady is going to tell you about aviation.
The same thing about Mr. Babatunde Omotoba, but if you put a professional that fails to listen, we will be back to square one. You are not very knowledgeable about this thing and you put people who are very knowledgeable, you are bound to listen on the way to go and if you are in any doubt, you have every right to ask anybody. You understand. All we need is just an intelligent person, but there are some disciplines that you are always better to put someone who is very knowledgeable about that discipline in charge.
For instance, when we talk about the Attorney General of the Federation, you need somebody who is a lawyer. Not that you can not put anybody else there, but if you get somebody who is a lawyer, is much better. It’s vice-versa.
We have cases where professionals have been there and they ran into problems and we’ve had cases whereby professionals were not there they recorded progress. So, it depends on the way you look at it. I would rather abstain from saying a professional must be here or a professional must not be there, but I strongly believe that whosoever that is there and he has lots of professionals working under the person, definitely there will be progress, but if you put someone who is not knowledgeable there and he appoints people who are not knowledgeable manning the industry, then, it becomes a problem.
Just like every major government agency, funding has always been the main challenge, you are the helmsman in this institution; how much of funding or investment do you think NCAT really need to compete with its counterparts either in the continent or around the world? To be very honest with you, what we are having on ground now, are good enough to compete with any other institution in the world.
How much do you have on ground?
If you say how much, there are some things you can not really quantify, possibly you should have asked ‘what and what do you have on ground to have given you that impression?’ Now, let’s say flying school, what do we need in flying school to get it going? You need the equipment and the materials. When you talk about the equipment, you need the simulator, the airplanes and others.
Do we really have good number of people to man all those things and the answer is yes. Like I told you, what we are having in this college today, even if you bring a nonentity here, what I’m having on ground today can not collapse in the next two years, by the person not even doing anything at all. So, whatever I have on ground now, is good enough to get the college going for the next two years, but I’m trying to go beyond that; that is the next two years because it is possible I might not be here tomorrow, but I can tell you with what we have here today and a nonentity in charge, things we have here can not collapse in the next two years.
The quality will still be there. In another month or two, we are expecting more new equipment in this college; we are expecting brand new simulators again. We are expecting two more simulators and my target really is to have a 737 NG Level D simulator in this college. By the time we have that one here, how many flying schools in the world with that equipment on ground? Very few except those affiliated with the airlines. The simulator is for the training of pilots and it will cost us about $10m or thereabout for one.
That is equipment whereby you don’t even need an aero plane to fly for you to have the certificate.; you don’t need an aero plane for you to get the endorsement and that is what everybody is doing in Nigeria today, that is the Level D aspect of it, it is the zero hour endorsement. Whatever you can do in that simulator is what you can do on the airplane. So, all the training and checkout would be done in that simulator. By the time you are done in that simulator, you have your license. That is what is obtainable now anywhere in the world.
With the simulator, it takes how many months for you to be licensed?
It depends on the training programme. There was this information we gathered that Capt. Adebayo Araba recently suspended a pilot who said he was not in the good frame of mind to fly without pay and it took the intervention of some professional bodies in the industry for the suspension to be reversed to suspension with pay and not quite long after that, a report said you called the Director-General of NCAA, Dr. Harold Demuren to seize the license of the pilot, which was promptly done, what is really the true picture on this issue?
Anyway, if you are an aviator, you will agree with me that what you’ve said, they don’t add on. They don’t add on in the sense that what’s my relationship with Dr. Demuren that I will call him to seize somebody’s license unless Demuren is not straight upright then he would do that. It’s just like Demuren also telling me to put a particular student on ground unless I’m not an upright person that I would comply with that.
I will tell you what happened. You see, part of the problems we are having in this place is night facilities. We don’t have night facilities in Zaria and that one is creating a lot of fund drain to the college. Any time we want to do night training, it is either we move to Kano or Kaduna where they have runway light and navigational equipment. So, this particular course, they were due for night training. And let me say this to you, when it comes to safety, we are second to none in the world. We have that discipline and we promote it and we don’t even give a waiver for that discipline.
Anytime a course is due for night, both the instructors and the students, we don’t occupy them during the day, never even when I was a student in this college, it was like that. Once you are starting a night operation, even a day before the night operations, we normally put everybody down just to be sure they’ve gotten adequate rest.
So, they went to Kaduna, I wasn’t there, I was having a meeting in Lagos with all the other heads of parastatals. They were in Kaduna two days earlier and the instructors too went for their own refresher training a day after we got into Kaduna and they were supposed to start flying with students two days after. The students reported and the instructors reported, we got the briefing and somewhere along the line, one of the instructors went to meet the students onboard the aero plane that they should continue with the pre-flight and that he would catch up with them later.
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