Industry stakeholders have called on the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority to identify and develop additional revenue streams that will stabilise its finances and reduce its dependence on the five per cent Ticket Sales Charge — a levy whose collection has been systematically undermined by airline non-remittance, creating a funding crisis that threatens Nigeria's hard-won aviation safety standards.
Additional revenue sources, stakeholders argued, will stabilise the NCAA even when airlines face operational challenges and cannot meet their financial obligations — creating a financial resilience that the current TSC-dependent model does not provide.
Former DG Capt Nuhu's Warning
A former Director General of the NCAA, Captain Musa Nuhu, warned directly against any reduction in the NCAA's current 56 per cent share of the five per cent Ticket Sales Charge. Speaking to THISDAY, Nuhu said reducing the NCAA's TSC allocation would harm the quality of the agency's personnel and ultimately compromise aviation safety oversight. "Such reduction would affect the quality of the agency's personnel," he said — framing the TSC sharing debate not as an abstract funding question but as a direct safety risk.
His position reinforces arguments made by NAAPE, whose branches warned that the proposed National Assembly bill to redistribute the TSC formula would undo years of hard-won safety progress. Nuhu also made a critical technical distinction: the NCAA is a regulator, not a service provider like NAMA or FAAN — meaning commercial revenue strategies available to those agencies are not straightforwardly available to the NCAA, whose regulatory functions do not naturally generate commercial income in the way that infrastructure operations do.
What Additional Revenue Streams Could Look Like
Stakeholders pointed to several potential areas: expanded fees for training organisation approvals, aircraft type rating certifications, and aeronautical data services; charges for regulatory consulting provided to other African states under bilateral cooperation agreements; and the development of aviation training materials and technical standards that could be licensed to other aviation authorities across the continent.
The broader point is that the NCAA cannot continue to depend exclusively on a single revenue stream whose collection is subject to the financial health and compliance behaviour of the airlines it regulates — leaving the regulatory system vulnerable to precisely the kind of non-remittance crisis that the current TSC dispute, the 14-day union ultimatum, and the ANAP debt warning have together made urgent.
