… to lose N80m from Abuja airport closure
Skyway Aviation Handling Company Limited (SAHCOL) says for Nigeria to fully benefit from its untapped export market, it needs to address the challenges of global certification of agro-allied products and enhance infrastructure across various states.
Speaking at a press conference at the weekend, Rizwan Kadri, managing director/CEO, SAHCOL, said Nigeria was blessed with the land, farmers and hardworking people to harness the agro-allied market, but still lacked needed infrastructure, good road network and empowered personnel.
“We need safety on the roads, empower our farmers and give them facilities to help grow their products. If government invests in these, the returns will be in ten folds. The road infrastructures have to come in, the freezing facilities also have to come in because the farmers are in remote places and for them to exports, the products have to come in from one of the major airports, either Lagos, Abuja, Kano.
“They also need the refrigerators fans. The government has to get into the global certification process because the goods are going out and it is accepted from other countries but not from Nigeria. The government should have confidence in the products we have. The vegetable, mangos and yams can be acceptable through the global certification process,” Kadri said.
He disclosed that as against 31 million metric tons carried out by the handing company in year 2015, imports in 2016 gradually increased to 35 million tons, showing an increase in importation by 12.9 percent.
He further said that exports saw similar increase from 15 tons to about 40 tons daily, as Nigeria’s products had continued to gain traction in other countries.
On the Abuja airport closure and how it will affect the company’s turnover, Kadri said the government was taking the right step in the right direction to get the runway repaired, but noted that stakeholders were neglected in its decision to divert flights to Kaduna.
According to Kadri, “We are definitely going to lose a lot of revenue, if we make about 70 to 80million out of Abuja in a month, we have lost that. No one asked us what we think. If we have to move our equipment to Kaduna, we have to spend a lot of money on that and it is a huge burden on us.”
He however identified dollar constraints as its major challenge in year 2016. “People do not import as much as they want to because of dollar constraint, otherwise, there is a huge demand for import.”
The CEO SAHCOL said the company enhanced its service delivery in 2017 and is still putting in a lot of processes for ease of doing business, which is the reason it could pull a lot of the agents to clear goods from our warehouse.
