The Federal Government is planning to amend the establishing Act of the Nigerian College of Aviation, (NCAT) Zaria.
The document, according to Akinyele Caulcrick, rector of the college, is currently receiving necessary legal attention in the Ministry of Justice.
“We are trying to change the Enabling Act. Don’t forget that the Act is one of the oldest in the aviation industry today. It is 50 years, it needs to be amended. We are in the process of achieving that,” he said.
He also disclosed that document to this effect had gone to the Attorney-General of the Federation adding that ‘all we are waiting for is a directive from the Federal Executive Council before it is sent to the National assembly.”
He regretted that the existing Act had strictly been treating the college as an arm of the Aviation Ministry, thus making it to have a lot of limitations. “This is part of the constraints we have,” he said.
Speaking on some of the efforts to move the college forward, Caulcrick noted that NCAT had secured temporary accreditation from the National Board of Technical Education (NBTE) to start diploma courses. He further said that the entry requirements of some of the courses offered were now first degree because they were professional courses.
“But we are not sure where we are, whether we are going to make the entry for all our courses, first degree, particularly flying because we need to capture them early. That is why in the past we take them after the School Certificate Examination but now we have over a million of Nigerians who are willing to go into aviation and have acquired their first degree at the age of 20 or 22. That is still okay for us because we have a limit.
“So, we may raise the entry requirement to that of first degree because we tried that in the past, it failed. It failed in the sense that the age at which those graduates came in, were beyond the age limit you have to capture them,” he said.
