Nigerians always complain about how hard it is to do business in Nigeria because of bureaucracy, high cost and much more. Inventors must now face the same struggles to benefit from their inventions also as a drone cannot be flown without receiving approval from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). That’s rather acceptable, that is, until you hear the factors that guarantee you authorization to be a visionary.
On May 8th, Vanguard Newspaper reported that the NCAA had banned the unauthorized use of drones in Nigerian airspace. In a statement released on the day, the regulatory body stated that a necessary security clearance was essential before a drone could be used in Nigeria. It read “In recent times, RPA/UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are being deployed for commercial and recreational purposes in the country without adequate security clearance. Therefore with the preponderance of these operations, particularly in a non-segregated airspace, there has to be proactive safety guidelines. The development of the use of RPA nationwide has emerged with somewhat predictable safety concerns and security threats.” They then went on to state that a prerequisite permit must be acquired before a drone could be flown in Nigeria.
All this made sense until yesterday when a Kayode Muyibi sent out an interesting tweet on some of the things needed to acquire the said prerequisite permit.
Want to fly a drone in Nigeria? NCAA fee of 500k, 6 months processing period with an annual utilisation fee of 100k for a 3 years permit.
— Kayode Muyibi (@kazey) May 22, 2016
Soon after, an Ndubisi Arinze published a LinkedIn article titled “Managing NCAA Airworthiness and Certification For Your Commercial Drone Business” where he gave guidelines on what to do to get a Permit for Aerial Aviation Services (PAAS).
Essentially, to fly a drone for a year, your business needs to have 20 million Naira in shares as well as 600,000 Naira to dash NCAA. In the US, all you need is to be older than 13 years old, have a credit card, email address, physical address and $5. Let that sink in $5. That’s somewhere between N1000 and N2000 but yeah NCAA want to extort inventors.
Nigeria must go the route countries like Tanzania and Rwanda have gone employing technology to make impact in their countries.