Festus Keyamo, the Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, explained his decision to sanction the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria's move of its headquarters from the Federal Capital Territory to Lagos State on Wednesday. Recently, Keyamo issued an order for the FAAN headquarters to be moved from Abuja to Lagos. FAAN's Managing Director, Olubunmi Kuku, gave the agency's Director of Human Resources and Administration instructions to consider the relocation order's ramifications in an internal document dated January 15, 2024. Kuku asked that the FAAN headquarters' activities be moved from Abuja to Lagos in a document headed "Relocation of FAAN Headquarters From Abuja to Lagos."

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He added that senior agency officials approached him and asked for the agency's headquarters to be moved after considering the logistical expense of FAAN employees traveling from Lagos to Abuja every day to sign paperwork or attend meetings. "After seeing the book, I realized that every day in a year, staff members traveling from Lagos to Abuja would spend over N450 million on plane tickets," the man stated.

The minister went on, "So, why do we decide this way? It's not as though I decided to do this when I woke up one day. With the data in hand, the new management came up to me and stated, "This is our problem." When I questioned them about the issue, they said that while some directors were present, the departments and support personnel working for those directors were located in Lagos and had nowhere to stay. It is implied that FAAN is a customer service organization and that staff members must meet, make decisions, and do other things regularly.

The staff of these departments, whose directors are in Abuja, will be seen traveling daily by plane from Lagos to Abuja and back to obtain a simple signature or have a document approved for a small meeting. This situation is made worse by the fact that FAAN has not yet been digitalized, which I observed when I was on the ground because they cannot exchange digital documents at this time. Thus, they travel back and forth every day. When they showed me the book, they had bought plane tickets for simple trips between Lagos and Abuja for over half a billion naira in a single year. I yelled at them after they spent over N450 million naira only on airline tickets.

The MD has an office here, but she would want four employees, each of whom would require a daily flight from Lagos to Abuja. "Let me just give a bit of background to this so that Nigerians would understand clearly," the minister stated, providing background information on what led up to the decision. My predecessor in government issued an order in 2020 directing the relocation of the headquarters from Lagos to Abuja. The headquarters have always been in Lagos.

However, I'm not sure why sufficient arrangements weren't made for all of the senior officials who were meant to relocate to Abuja at the time that direction was given; as a result, there were no offices to house the principal officers. The directors of the agencies and the department under those directors are referred to as the senior officers, and collectively they number around 132 people.

"I merely added one more directorate when we already had ten. Under the directorates, we currently have other major executives as well as general managers and deputy general managers. However, it should be understood that the headquarters in question does not necessarily refer to the location of the main operations. In any arrangement, headquarters refers to the location of the decision-makers—it does not refer to the largest structure. Not where the majority of workers are located.