The House of Representatives Committee on Aviation has decried the exclusion of Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) from 2023 budgetary allocation. It requested the Minister of Aviation to offer clarification on the matter.
Chairman of the Committee, Hon. Nnolim Nnaji, while describing NAMA as a critical safety arm of the aviation sector, expressed fears why the airspace agency should be ignored.
Nnaji disclosed this during the committee’s 2023 budget defence meeting with the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, who led the Ministry officials to the National Assembly.
The Chairman’s remarks were prompted by the omission of the agency in the 2023 Appropriation Bill which according to him would be corrected.
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He however stressed the need for the Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika to give clarification on the exclusion of NAMA in the 2023 Federal budget even as he added that his Committee was already deliberating on the issue with Senate committee counterpart to ensure that the anomaly was rectified during appropriation.
Nnaji noted that the prevailing security challenges have put enormous pressure on the available infrastructure in the industry, saying the country could not afford to neglect the needs of a safety agency like NAMA.
The committee chairman said the committee would critically examine the performance of the Ministry’s budget from 2020 to 2022 because some of the projects had been on-going since 2020.
He stressed that the committee expected that the current budget performance report should comprise the full implementation details of the two previous budget years.