Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo
By Sade Williams
Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, on Tuesday visited and assessed the level of damage at the terminal one (old terminal) of the Murtala Muhammed International airport MMIA) Lagos after a fire broke out at parts of the termina building l on Monday afternoon.
He lamented the loss of weather equipment belonging to the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) saying there are plans to make temporary arrangements to move some equipment to Lagos for weather forecasting.
Keyamo, who ruled out sabotage said the building had been marked for demolition and reconstruction adding that the incident would hasten the process of relocating operators and users from the terminal.
“But let me first of all clear a few points. One, it is not the new terminal that was affected. It is the terminal that we are about to pull down. I won’t say fortunately because there is nothing fortunate about fire. So even though we are trying to pull down this old terminal, there were certain equipments that we also needed to retrieve.
“There are certain persons that also needed to leave the old building for us to start work on the old building. So let me assure Nigerians that even before this fire, if you look behind, we had already made temporary arrangement to move most of the airlines, most of the entities in that space to the temporary place provided by the CCEC. What this has just done is to hasten our move away from the building.
” The building was about to be pulled down anyway and totally rehabilitated. However, a lot of our equipments were damaged. Where we went up to at that time, you saw, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
” Because it is still not safe to go to the 5th and the 6th and the 7th floor. I mean, so many, equipment for example, our Nimet equipment, our Nimet office where they read weather is totally gone. I’m sure you saw most of the air traffic controllers who were also, our air traffic controllers were trapped up there yesterday too.
“Many of them had to be rescued by crane. So, some of our equipments are damaged, but mostly, like I said, for the building itself, we were about to pull down the building anyway. For conspiracy theories, we won’t go into all of that for now.
He said the contractors were already on site as the pulling down would soon start.
” They are on site already, I’m sure. You have seen that the bridge is down already, this bridge, linking up this part of the river. They are reconstructing the new bridge to the new terminal. They are on site. The CCC is on site already. We are just waiting for people to evacuate.
” This place would have come down anyway. We are just waiting for people to evacuate. So, this fire actually helps to just, well, not help, but this fire will hasten our movement away from the place. We just want to thank God that there was no single loss of life. That is the first gratitude we have to God. In this kind of situation, we first look at the loss of lives, but between you and me, work will start in earnest to start clearing the rubble. And then, of course, it will hasten our process of the reconstruction.”, he added.
He assured the public that flight activities will not be disrupted in any way as normalcy as temporary tower was on ground for air traffic controllers.
On the probable cause of the incident, Keyamo said: ‘I cannot guess. At my level of minister, I cannot begin to speculate and get involved in conspiracy theories. But we should just have to do what we have to do now because what we are hearing from other sources, they are saying probably there was an inverter installed somewhere. So, I don’t know. That is what the feelers are getting.
He pledged that safety will continue to be the watchword of the Ministry.
“Well, like you said, we will improve. People were questioning the discretion of this government, especially Mr. President, in actually making a decision to reconstruct this gateway to the nation. This is the gateway to Nigeria. And I am sure everybody has seen the benefits and the wisdom behind it now. Most of the equipments were obsolete.
” This is like a 50-year-old building that was never maintained. There are other buildings in the world that are 100 years old, but because of constant maintenance, they still look good. It’s just that this building was abandoned. Infrastructure collapsed. The traffic overpowered the capacity of the building over time. So, that is why the President took a decision that this gateway to Nigeria… 67% of travellers into Nigeria come through this gateway. That is our official statistics.
“Over sixty percent comes through here. And all the other international airports share the other percentage. So, there is no reason why this place should not reflect the health of Nigeria and how healthy Nigeria is.”, he added.
