While Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) today said it has sanctioned four airlines for different degrees of safety violations, two of the aviation unions which have its members working with the regulatory authority have threatened to ground its activities if it failed to comply with labour rules within its jurisdiction.
The threat followed a long ranging trade dispute between the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and two aviation unions comprising Air Transport Services Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (ATSSSAN ) and National Union of Air Transport Employees (NUATE ), who vowed to declare a state of emergency in the agency by January 2, 2019, should their demands for staff promotion not met.
The unions which disclosed their plans at the weekend in Lagos, claimed that the management of NCAA has taken them for granted with regards to the issues of promotion of NCAA staff.
Speaking on the issue, Chairman Joint Action Committee, NCAA and chairman NUATE, NCAA branch, Comrade Lucky Izebhokun made it clear that NCAA management would be courting trouble if members of the unions in its employment are not promoted by the last day of this year.
Comrade Izebhokun who hinted that the anxiety is so high while a lot of workers are losing morale in the system, said that there is the possibility that the aggrieved workers would pour out their minds on January 2, 2019.
According to the union leader, “now the Management has so much relegated the staff of NCAA so much so that they will be employing, doing secondment and transfer of people from other organizations to come and boss us, we have had issues with people being transferred from Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) especially, because there is no promotion in NCAA, you will see now bossing the people in NCAA, we have told Management that we can no longer accept that.
“We have to do due diligence, we wrote them and told them that within the next three weeks, if our members are promoted from levels 14 to 15 and 16 that is senior management cadre, there would be serious issues”.
He noted that if the union failed to curtail this excesses for this senior cadre, it would spiral down to the lower cadre, and the time would come when there would be no vacancy for levels 12, 13,
Stating that the union had written NCAA management on the issue without any response, Izebhokun who threatened that the workers would pass a vote of no confidence on the leadership of NCAA come January 2, 2019, queried how other parastatals in the aviation industry were promoting their staff while the regulatory authority could not follow suit.
On his part, , Chairman ATSSSAN NCAA branch, Comrade Ayodele Sofolayan confirmed that the issue of staff promotion in NCAA which has been delayed for a very long time is generating a lot of anxiety in the industry.
Comrade Sofola said “we have been on this issue for the past one year and we have not seen any good result, we have given the Management of NCAA ultimatum to either get this promotion done or we declare a state of emergency.
“How do we go about this state of emergency? We have discussed with a lot of people but what we are going to do now, we have to force Management to conduct promotion exam without the Organogram, that’s what we will do, we will force the Management of the NCAA to conduct the promotion exercise without waiting for the Organogram because the Organogram is long over due, so we cannot be waiting because Ministry can write letter for some other things but the one that concerns us here they cannot write letter, so if Ministry want to give somebody acting promotion, the letter will come quick but when it comes with the issues of promotion letter, the letters are not forth- coming, so what is the issue?
I have asked the management, we have asked the Ministry, what is the issue, we needed to know the issue, why are the letters not coming out, so we want to know”., Sofola said.
He lamented that a letter of ultimatum was given to the NCAA management to follow it up in Abuja but up till now, the unions have not seen any result while the ultimatum had elapsed on December 21.
In his reaction, General Manager, Public Relations of NCAA, Sam Adurogboye said NCAA is known for industrial harmony and that management and the unions have always been on the same page,
According to him, he believed that both parties will reach a compromise very soon because from 2000 till date unions and management always sit down together and discuss.
Adurugboye said “The good thing about NCAA management is that they appreciate that the human resource …we do not award contract, no capital project, the capital project of NCAA is the human resource, so we spend about 70% of our budget annual on human resource, so if for once they are raising an issue, I believe they will resolve it as we have always done, so to me, it’s not a threat, they will definitely sit at a point and reach a conclusion”.
On why the management allowed the promotion to take this long, Adurugboye said “this issue arose from change also, because promotion in NCAA even public service generally before used to be automatic thing sort off, three years you are automatically promoted until the management felt No, let do some innovation, let people sit for exams, let them pass, let them justify that they can cope with the next stage apart from that its not automatic also let there be a vacancy, for example, if you are moving people to the next stage, is there vacancy and all this are in black and white, so if there is vacancy and you did not promote people is a different thing and if you have about 10 people that are due for promotion maybe to a General Manager level or a Deputy General Manager level and we only have two Deputy General Manager office there so, how do you promote people there? So, there has to be vacancy, is not that its automatic, it’s stated in the condition of service too, so these are the issues that they will sit down and discuss, it’s not a question of maybe pay, pay is not an issue now but again, its also an issue”.
“If you are promoting people, you calculate what it will cost you, meanwhile NCAA is not a revenue generating agency, its only cost recovering and its is the passenger, the more people fly, the more we have 5% and this 5% is not only going to NCAA other agencies are sharing in it as spelt out in the civil aviation Act, so whatever comes, if it goes up, we have more and will be able to take care of the anticipated increase, so for me, I believe that the management will definitely sit down and discuss because we don’t have any other thing we rely on apart from our human resource and NCAA staffers have been carried along to the point that they know what is coming in,” Adurogboye said.
