•Claim local pilots, engineers inexperienced
…Bristow, Air Peace, Overland, Skyjet highest spenders
…Bias against Nigerian experts worrisome –NAAPE
By Chinelo Obogo, [email protected]
Despite the vast pool of qualified and experienced aviation professionals in Nigeria, domestic airlines have spent N46,840,000 million on expatriate quota renewals in the last two years, Daily Sun investigations have revealed.
Top spenders are Bristow Helicopters, Air Peace, Overland Airways and Skyjet.
Stakeholders are miffed over the development because it shows local experts are loathed.
The humongous spend on expatriates has sparked concerns about the industry’s over-reliance on foreign pilots and engineers, when there are good hands to inject into the system.
There are also concerns about local carriers’ reluctance to develop indigenous capacity because they do not want to invest in manpower development.
An expatriate quota is a document that allows foreigners to work and live in Nigeria freely and the Federal Ministry of Interior grants such requests and issues appropriate documents to companies in line with Part V, Section 36 (1) of the Nigerian Immigration Act, 2015 and Part III, Subsection 12 (1&2) of Immigration Regulations. The grant for the establishment of expatriate quota is usually given to companies to enable them engage the services of expatriates for a period of three years in the first instance and renewable biennially within a life span of 10 years. When a company wants to renew the employment of its expatriates, it applies to the Ministry of Interior and if all conditions are met, the quota would be renewed for a period of two years until the expiration of its 10 years life span.
According to the National Civil Aviation Policy of May 2023, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), shall provide from time-to-time, regulations on the use of foreign crew/technical personnel and put in place mechanisms to ensure that it can assess and determine that the foreign crew and technical personnel are required.
“It is the responsibility of the NCAA to ensure that the foreign crew/technical personnel are used only when there is no availability of qualified Nigeria crew/technical personnel.
“Operators seeking validation of foreign flight crew/technical personnel shall provide to the NCAA, full justification for the request, including detailed practical programmes for training Nigerian flight crew/technical personnel and phasing out the foreign crew/technical personnel. “This programme would be carefully reviewed for compliance every 90 days by the Director General of the NCAA”, the law states.
However, documents exclusively obtained by Daily Sun from the Ministry of Interior following a Freedom of Information request, show that between January 2022 and December 2023, six airlines; Bristow Helicopters, Air Peace, Overland, SkyJet, Rano Air and Dana, have spent N46,840,000 on expatriate quota renewal for their foreign staff.
Overland Airways
On May 31, 2023, Overland applied for the renewal of expatriate quota for 16 positions which include captains, pilots, aircraft engineers, airframe and powerplant engineers. It said in its application letter to the Ministry of Interior that it is compliant with the Nigerian local content laws and that at the time of application, it had 26 Nigerians in top management positions, 138 Nigerians in middle management and 91 Nigerians who were junior members of staff.
The airline, however, said that there was an urgent need for type rated expatriate pilots and engineers for the aircraft type they operate to keep their operations going.
“The paucity of Nigerian local content (pilots and engineers) with technical expertise, skill and experience in aircraft maintenance and flying our aircraft type has made it expedient to engage qualified foreign aircraft pilots and aircraft engineers to fill up these positions as we should not compromise safety.
“Also, ATR and B1900D pilots and aircraft engineers are currently not available in Nigeria as it is common knowledge that Nigerian pilots want to fly Boeing 737, EMB 145 and other jets. In addition, several pilots and engineers trained by Overland Airways have moved on or jumped training bonds to jet operating companies. We are therefore constrained to find balance for turbo-prop pilots and engineers.
“Furthermore, our company plans to expand its fleet with the Embraer 170/175/190 and would need foreign expertise to operate and train our indigenous personnel to operate the aircraft type,” the airline said.
But on August 17th, the Director, Citizenship and Business in the Ministry wrote back to Overland Airways and demanded the names, qualifications and training programme for the Nigerian understudies attached to the position. However, records from the Ministry show that between May 10, 2022 and August 8, 2023, Overland Airways made a total payment of N2, 220, 000 (two million, two hundred and twenty thousand naira) for processing and approval fees for the expatriate quota.
Rano Air
On August 25, 2022, Rano Air wrote to the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Interior, asking to be granted approval of the expatriate quota. In its letter, it said it has acquired five Embraer 145 LRs and needed to have a minimum of three captains per aircraft and a minimum of one type rated engineer in addition to other qualified technicians per station but that despite several attempts, they were unable to find suitably qualified Nigerians to take up the positions.
The airline applied for 10 type rated Embraer 145 LR captains to pilot their planes and train Nigerian first and second officers that they would be working with and 10 type rated and experienced Embraer 145 LR engineers to repair and maintain our planes and train Nigerians. The airline said it would take all steps to ensure the speedy training of Nigerians to take over from the expatriates.
Between September 28, 2022 and November 15, 2022, the airline paid N2, 200,000 (two million, two hundred and twenty thousand naira) for the processing and approval fees.
SkyJet
Between September 21, 2022 and October 14, 2022, SkyJet Aviation paid N1, 730,000 (one million, seven hundred and thirty thousand naira) for processing and approval fees for the renewal of expatriate quotas for 16 positions which was applied for on September 21, 2022. The airline applied for the renewal of expatriate quota positions for five pilots, three co-pilots, two captains, five avionic engineers and one general manager.
Green Africa
Green Africa airline applied for the renewal of 27 positions and between November 4, 2022 and April 3, 2023, paid N1, 500,000 for the processing and approval fees.
Dana Air
The airline applied for the renewal of 20 expatriate positions on March 27, 2023 saying in its letter to the ministry that it requires more skilled expatriates to support its operations since there was an ‘acute shortage of qualified/skilled employees in Nigeria ‘. Between June 6, 2023 and June 27, 2023, the airline paid N2, 200,000 (two million, two hundred thousand naira) for approval, portal and processing fees.
Air Peace
On May 10th, 2023, Air Peace applied for the renewal of the quota positions of 50 pilots and 50 aircraft maintenance engineers. It said this due to a shortage of qualified and skilled employees in Nigeria, it is seeking skilled expatriates from overseas to support their operations. It previously applied for the renewal of 27 positions (23 pilots and five aircraft engineers) all of which were approved by the ministry of interior. Between April 27, 2022 and June 15, 2023, the airline paid N12, 600, 000 (twelve million, six hundred thousand) for processing and approval fees.
Bristow Helicopters
On January 20, 2023, Bristow Helicopters applied for the renewal of expatriate quota for 52 positions, which includes pilots, risk advisory managers, training managers, aviation technicians, aircraft engineers, aircraft maintenance supervisors and aviation training managers.
On April 14, 2023, it applied again for another batch of 20 positions (pilots, aircraft engineers and aircraft technicians) and on June 23, 2023, it applied for the renewal for 64 positions.
The company said that given the fact that their support services cut across the oil and gas exploration and production companies, services of only experienced pilots are required to maintain their fleet of aircraft, hence the need to retain the services of their certified and experienced expatriate workforce.
However, it said it strongly believes in the potential of indigenous resources and has taken specific strategic steps to support the development of cadet pilots and engineers within the industry. Between January 3, 2023 and December 12, 2023, Bristow paid N24,350,000 (twenty four million, three hundred and fifty thousand naira) for portal, processing and approval fees to the ministry.
In its applications, Bristow claimed to have implanted the following strategic initiatives within the Nigerian aviation industry: Full sponsorship of 20 qualified Nigerians in partnership with Nigerian Content Development and monitoring Board (NCDMB) at the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria. This is our contribution to train and qualify Aircraft Maintenance Engineers for the development of local content, which commenced from 13th May 2019.
Agreement with NCAT management to donate additional aircraft valued at $5m to NCAT for practical training of its students, sponsorship of 25 qualified Nigerians for pilot training at the Bristow Academy in Florida, U.S.A at a minimum cost of $210,000 USD per trainee, signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the International Aviation College (IAC), Ilorin with the purpose of increasing the number of trained and qualified Nigerian pilots.
It also said it sponsored an International Safety Conference/Seminar in Lagos with aviation safety professionals in attendance and for the purpose of improving the safety awareness and standards in the Nigerian aviation sector, introduction of a new flight simulator to make relevant training readily accessible to Nigerians, sponsorship of Nigerian senior management team for leadership training programme at the Lagos Business School and other Bristow Group training locations in Europe and the United States of America.
Though Daily Sun could not immediately substantiate all the claims made by Bristow Helicopters, especially as regards an agreement with NCAT management to donate additional aircraft valued at $5m to the school, a very reliable source revealed to Daily Sun that the airline donated a Robin R22 aircraft to NCAT over 10 years ago valued at $400,000.
NAAPE reacts
The National Association of Aircraft Pilots and Engineers (NAAPE) has frowned at domestic operators’ indescribable ‘addiction’ to foreign talent when there are qualified local hands willing to be engaged.
The body described the development as worrisome, alleging the deep-rooted bias against qualified Nigerian pilots and engineers.
While insisting that the ugly trend should not be encouraged, NAAPE asked local operators to look inwards to recruit capable hands to replenish their depleted manpower stock.
Speaking to Daily Sun on claims by the operators that there is capacity deficit among indigenous pilots and aircraft engineers, the president of NAAPE, Abednego Galadima, said: “When Nigerian Airways was still functional, most of the pilots and engineers got training on the aircraft in the fleet. But these days, when airlines are looking for local talent, they don’t do their due diligence. They don’t advertise, you don’t see the vacancies in the dailies. At best, they put it on their social media handles. As a union, we have always advocated that young pilots who just left school should be given the opportunity to be employed but the airlines will say they are not rated and don’t have experience. There is no succession plan because the airlines hardly train, they just poach talent from each other.
“The airlines feel that they would be saving cost by bringing in expatriates instead of hiring Nigerians and training them. If you are a company that has been in existence for many years and you know the type of aircraft in your fleet, if you are implementing the expatriate quota law as it should be and you have a Nigerian understudy, it means that the need for expatriates should be reducing. “Are you saying that if a Nigerian is an understudy, he or she cannot be trained in two years? The most important point to note is that airlines are not training Nigerian pilots and engineers because these trainings are not cheap especially for pilots as most of the training is done abroad unlike the training for engineers that can be done in Nigeria.
“On the reason Overland is giving, it is just an excuse. Nigerian pilots and engineers are very responsible people. If anyone knows he is on bond, they try to meet up with the terms of the bond. But in the case of Overland, I am aware that he has cases where some of his staff took him to court because while they were working for him, he was not paying them.”