The Managing Director, Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Mr George Uriesi,  has said in Abuja that the organisation would be financially self-reliant by 2015.

Uriesi, who had managed airports in South Africa before returning to Nigeria, said that FAAN was striving to be self-reliant in order for it to stop depending on the Federal Government for its finances.

According to him, the FG has given a directive for the authority to be self-reliant instead of depending solely on it for its finances.

Uriesi also said that FAAN had written off some of the bad debts owed it by some dead airlines in order to enable it to have a straight record on its balance sheet and forge ahead in the development of the aviation sector.

He said that the authority would from now on, not tolerate debts, adding that it would chase after its debtors aggressively to ensure growth of the business.

“Over the years, FAAN operated from a government, public service point of view and therefore, bent over backward and allowed many of its customers to owe it and also did not chase after them as aggressively as a business ought to; that shows that it depends on the revenue it gets for it to survive.

“Right now the Federal Government invests in FAAN’s capital projects because the organisation is not able to generate money to take care of its bills and still invest in capital expenditures, so the capital comes from the Federal Government.

“But we are saying that by 2015, the investment that the government has made now in the remodelling will begin to yield the returns that will allow us to invest from our balance sheet in the future, instead of asking government to come and invest when we need to build infrastructure or purchase very expensive equipment.

“So by 2015 FAAN is going to be fully independent and self reliant financially.’’

Uriesi also said that FAAN needed to recover monies owed it to clear the debtors’ notion that the agency was a government-owned organisation that could not be bothered about who owed it what.

He stressed that the non-aeronautical revenue services the authority provided included commercial offerings like restaurants, shops, hotels, bank facilities, and other kinds of businesses that go on within the airport environment.

Uriesi said that FAAN had been on aeronautical revenue for about 90 per cent of its income, but that it was poised to change the regime to include non-aeronautic commercial offerings.

Aeronautical revenue according to him is the money FAAN earned from the landing and parking of airplanes and passengers service charge.

He explained that revenue generated from both aeronautical and non-aeronautical services at airports across the country was enough for the organisation to be self-reliant if  properly it managed.

“What we are doing now is  maximising the non-aeronautical revenue potential of FAAN, for example in all the airports that we are remodeling, we are now designing them to maximise the commercial offering.

“So in airports like Benin, Owerri, and Enugu, what you will have after the remodelling is four times more commercial offerings than they were before the remodelling.

“The Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMA) which is the flagship which is about plus or minus 80 per cent of FAAN’s revenue, it will generate a lot of revenue for the orgnanisation.

“But then because of the emphasising of commercial offering at all the other airports, we will reduce the dependency on the MMA across the network of the airports; with every airport becoming more viable or less dependent, FAAN becomes much more financially solvent and stable.