Chinedu Eze
Aviation industry stakeholders have acknowledged that Nigeria is experiencing a severe shortage of technical personnel, a development that has prompted the federal government to recall and retain retired experts on contract to bridge critical operational gaps.
Some of the factors identified for the shortage include massive retirement of old personnel who are not easily replaced because of paucity of young successors, as local aviation training schools are struggling to meet demands.
Recently, the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT) in Zaria raised the alarm regarding critical shortages of functional infrastructure, including times when only six aircraft were airworthy, forcing the school to ration training hours for student pilots.
Industry analyst and second Vice President of Aviation Round Table (ART), Dr Alex Nwuba, said Nigeria would never fill its aviation job gap. He quoted major aircraft manufacturing firm such as Boeing, which projected global demand for 674,000 new pilots over the next twenty years, plus hundreds of thousands of technicians and cabin crew.
Nwuba said Nigeria, a country of over 200 million people that should be a natural supplier for that demand, instead sits on a workforce pipeline broken at both ends.
According to Nwuba, “Those we’ve trained cannot get a job. Those who need training cannot afford it, here or abroad. I don’t say Nigeria will never fill the gap out of pessimism. I say it because I have watched the pipeline fail from both directions, and neither end is being fixed. Start with entry. NCAT and the private academies now charge upward of N20 million for a licence, in a country where that sum is well beyond what most families will ever see. Industry insiders have warned this is turning aviation into, in their words, an elite club for the super-rich.
“Compare that to the United States, where becoming a pilot or an aircraft engineer is not a university-gated process at all — it runs through general aviation: flying clubs, small airfields, affordable time-building, instructor routes that don’t require a six-figure dollar sum before you’ve logged an hour. And the US still has a shortage. If a country with cheap, accessible (admission process) still can’t fill its cockpits, a country with almost none, and a training bill most families can’t touch, has no realistic route to closing its own gap. Nigeria offers no inroads outside an expensive, degree-adjacent pipeline, and prices most of its own talent out before they start.”
He also pointed out that Nigerian airlines, which should be the first port of call to give the trained pilots their first after-training practical experience, is rejecting them. It was learnt that this is because after the airlines have helped to train them in the past, and after gathering the required flying hours to get a bigger job outside the country, they leave. Also, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) over the years, has been ambivalent about bonding, which is a process whereby a pilot is trained by an airline and the pilot will sign a bond that he will work for the airline for certain number of years before he will leave the company.
NCAA ought to ensure that if an airline signed a bond with a pilot both parties must abide by the agreement, but when disagreement came up over such bonds in the past, the regulatory authority was not firm; rather, the Director General of the agency then said pilots were free to leave. That ended an opportunity young pilots would have secured to further develop their skills and acquire dexterity to become captains over time.
In his recommendation, Nwuba said: “We revive the flying schools properly, and we build staged time-building into the system the way the US and Europe do — hours that accumulate through structured, affordable routes rather than a single expensive credential. We open entry-level observer seats, cabin crew, and dispatch to pilots, crew, and dispatchers who have already paid for training and have nowhere to use it. And on the hardest question: most of these young people would work for free to build time. That would be unconscionable, and we should not accept it. What we should build instead is a special, regulator-set training wage—protected, capped, and supervised so it cannot be abused as a loophole for cheap labour, but real enough to let someone build hours without going backwards financially.”
However, commenting on the issue, the Chief Executive Officer of Omni-Blu Aviation Limited and pioneer Director General, Nigeria Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB), Akin Olateru, remarked that training to become a pilot, aircraft engineer, or other aviation professional was not cheap.
He recalled that there was a time when the federal government provided scholarships that enabled Nigerians to pursue these careers at little or no cost, noting that sadly, many of those opportunities no longer exist.
“When I served as CEO of the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) and later the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB), I made it a priority to invest in our people. We sent more than 20 members of staff for ab initio pilot training, aircraft maintenance engineering programmes, and air traffic control courses at the Nigerian College of Aviation Technology (NCAT), Zaria. Some of them are now fully licensed professionals.
“I know personally how much such support can mean. I benefited from a federal government scholarship myself. I may not be where I am today without that opportunity, because at the time, my mother simply could not afford to pay my entire school fees. That experience is why I strongly believe we must do whatever we can, through whatever means available to us, to support and encourage those coming behind us,” Olateru said.
He further stated that aviation needs the next generation of pilots, engineers, air traffic controllers, investigators, and other professionals.
“If we have the opportunity to open a door for someone, provide a scholarship, mentorship, internship, or simply offer guidance, please, let us do it. Someone once helped us get to where we are today. It is now our responsibility to help others get there too,” Olateru urged.
Olateru explained that most often the emphasis was always on the training of pilots, engineers, cabin crew, even when there are other professionals that ought to also be trained, noting that an airline is ultimately a complex commercial enterprise.
“It needs people who understand commercial strategy, revenue management, network planning, finance, treasury, procurement, operations, safety, digital transformation, technology, data analytics, customer experience, sales, distribution, marketing, product development, fleet planning, airport management, cargo, partnerships, loyalty, corporate affairs, human capital, risk management and business development.
“These are not supporting functions sitting behind aviation. They are the capabilities that determine whether an airline survives, scales and creates economic value. You can have the best pilots in Africa and still run a commercially disastrous airline,” Olateru further said.