Minister of Aviation, Babatunde Omotoba, has disclosed that the new terminal the Federal Government planned to build at the Murtala Muhammed Interna-tional Airport, Lagos would cost about N150 billion.
Speaking to newsmen in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, yesterday at an aviation conference, Omotoba said that the plan of the Federal Government was to build four major airports in the country that would be models in Africa.The vision of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua is that these four airports should become the models for Africa. If we want to build the state-of-the-art terminal we have in mind for Lagos, it will cost about N150 billion.
Let's take Heathrow Terminal 5 (in London) for example; it was built at the cost of $10 billion. So you can't compare it if we need to build the kind of infrastructure that we are talking about. If we are to build Lagos alone, you won't spend anything less than $1 billion. That is N150 billion as at today. And that is about five or six times the 2009 budget for aviation (N29 billion), so you will agree with me that government cannot do it alone. That is the reason why we have to concession the project, he said.
He said that the terminals in Kano, Port Harcourt and Abuja would also be capital intensive. Added to this, he noted, is the cost of providing safety critical items to those airports.The Minister said that the plan is that the new Lagos airport would be expanded to have non-aeronautical facilities like conference centres, tax free shops and other business facilities where people could fly into Lagos, shop and do businesses at the airport without going to the city, so the airport would be all encompassing.
On the General Aviation Terminal (GAT) in Lagos, he said that because it is not an international terminal government would soon get concessionaire to build it after going through Due Process.
The Minister said that besides the building of new terminals in the four major airports which would be concessioned, government has to provide safety critical facilities and equipment at the airports and the nation's airspace so it has voted money to carry out these projects.
