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Sirika Unfolds Vision for Nigerian Aviation

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Senator Hadi Sirika, minister of State, Aviation has unfolded the vision and strategies of the President Mohammad Buhari administration for achieving a quantum leap forward for the Nigerian Aviation industry. First, he made it clear that Aviation” is pivotal to the growth of key economic sectors, certainly not limited to travel and tourism. Agriculture production and distribution, rural development, trade and commerce, manufacturing, oil and other non-oil sectors.”

In what could be termed a comprehensive mission, Sirika had quite some surprises and a handful of seemingly simple solutions to longstanding problems and issues. One surprise: Government plans to concession four major airports to the private sector.

The Minister believes that by bringing in the private sector, the country can achieve better infrastructural development and improve the efficiency of service delivery at these airports. The airports in question are the international airports in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Kano.

And it’s also the month of May, 2016, which makes it one year since this administration came on board, it was an opportunity for stock taking.

Sirika said that some of the challenges facing the country’s airports were that of obsolete equipment and dilapidated infrastructure; obsolete equipment and inadequate capacity. These challenges, according to him, are expected to be addressed by the newly initiated concession programme, the much awaited completion of five new, world class, ultra-modern airport terminals in Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Enugu and Port Harcourt later this year.

On the focus, the Minister said that “ the present administration is focussing on issues that will rapidly develop the aviation industry within the shortest possible time.” These issues, include aviation safety and security, infrastructural development, the establishment of a national carrier, lack of a world class aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul,(MRO) facility in the country.

Others are: How to quickly develop our air cargo capacity in order to participate actively in multi-billion dollars global agro-allied export trade.

The restructuring of the country’s aviation agencies and the setting up of an aerospace University in the country.

In his usually forthright manner, Sirika states the administration’s position on all of these tough issues, perhaps, leaving no one in doubt about the policy direction of the Buhari administration as regards the aviation industry.

On safety and security at our airports, the minister was of the view that government’s response should include the development of a new security strategy framework in partnership with international security organisations, the determined implementation of a certification programme for all our airports and a comprehensive security threat and vulnerability assessment of our airports. The Minister of state recently inaugurated a technical committee with the mandate to look into security at the country’s airports.

On the vexed issue of a national carrier, Sirika was emphatic that the administration will establish a national carrier because of the benefits that the country would derive from it, especially from the various Bilateral and Multilateral air services agreements signed by the government with other countries, worldwide.

It would also help stem current capital flight due to foreign airlines exploiting the current absence of a Nigerian national carrier.

He said however, that the carrier will be floated on the stock exchange and listed whereby Nigerians can buy its shares and own it. Furthermore, to realise this laudable goal, he said that government would engage the services of a transaction adviser “to develop an appropriate business model and framework to establish a national carrier using a public/private partnership concept.” When in place, the national carrier would be expected to form alliances and joint ventures with other carriers, in order to increase its reach and routes, Sirika said.

There is also the issue of national prestige and national pride when talking about a national carrier, as some smaller African countries such as Ethiopia proudly fly their countries colours on their national carriers, many of which have become successful ventures, the Minister said.

On the appalling lack of a world class aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul, (MRO)l facility in West and Central Africa, the Aviation helmsman challenges Nigerian investors to key into the bountiful opportunity.

He said that the current administration was determined to create an enabling environment that would provide an impetus to willing investors.

He hoped that such investors could go beyond only MRO but actually initiate the local manufacturing of light aircraft spare parts in the country, which would help save foreign exchange and create more jobs for Nigerians in-country.

The issue of air cargo facilities ties with the country’s hopes of generating more foreign exchange from agricultural produce and other non-oil exports.

As the Minister noted the country is current losing a lot in potential income from export of perishable agricultural produce including fresh flowers and vegetable as a result of the absence of adequate air cargo facilities.

Apart from generating forex, it has far reaching socio- economic impact as it will improve farmers’ income significantly and help stem rural to urban migration. Government is therefore working hard to meet this challenge, with several of the required facilities under construction in strategic areas round the country, Sirika noted.

The country’s target is to get 40 per cent of the market for agro-allied and perishable agric produce export coming from Africa to global markets, he said.

A thoroughbred and experienced air pilot himself, the minister noted, howbeit sadly, that many well trained professional aviators, especially pilots are unemployed. Whereas, on the other hand, their foreign counterparts are having a field day in the country working for foreign airlines operating in the country.

Not mincing words, the minister said that government would henceforth vigorously enforce expatriate quotas for staffing of foreign airlines operating in the country, so that foreigners do not continue to take jobs meant for Nigerians. And review the policy on validation of foreign licenses (no aviator left behind policy.)

The Minister said that it is a policy of the All Progressives Congress, APC administration to set up an Aviation Development Bank, which he said, will offer Nigerian aviation entrepreneurs long term, low interest loans in single digits to help finance their airline businesses. This, accordingly, will boost the growth of the industry and help create stability.

Other salient industry issues which the Minister addressed are that of the supply and pricing of Aviation Jet A-one fuel, sourcing of foreign exchange by airlines for their operations and aircraft leasing. On Jet A-1, Sirika said government has made arrangements to start local production of the fuel which is currently 100 per cent imported.

Discussions are also in top gear with the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN to ease forex supply shortfall to airlines, especially foreign airlines because they operate and pay for several services in foreign exchange whereas, tickets are sold in naira locally, putting airlines at a disadvantage.

Sirika said that the administration will continue with the current policy of granting duty waivers on imported aircraft and spare parts, so as to support the industry. Further, government is well aware of financing difficulties faced by Nigerian airlines in the leasing of aircraft. They have limited access to capital even then at high interest rates of about 27 per cent currently. They are also faced with inadequate numbers of aircraft, while they have high debt profiles. The Minister said that the government intends to set up an aircraft leasing company to assist these Nigerian airlines, to have better access to leased aircraft for their operations.

Then, it was time to highlight some achievements of the Ministry of Transportation in the area of aviation, since last May(2015).

The Minister noted with pride that Nigeria passed the recent ICAO security audit of the country’s airports with flying colours at a score of 96 per cent.

The aviation industry similarly passed the ICAO Universal Safety Oversight Audit of the country, reflecting the enormous hardwork and expertise of Nigerian aviation authorities.

The Buhari administration has been able to provide bomb containment vessels at the Malam Aminu Kano International Airport Kano and at the Port Harcourt International Airport. The administration has also installed solar-powered field lighting systems at 10 airports round the country including Port Harcourt , Sokoto, Akure and Enugu. In addition, Air traffic control tower operations at the Malam Aminu Kano Airport have been automated, allowing for more efficient services.

The Minister of State rounded off by promising that the Nigerian aviation industry would soon have a master plan in place, which he said will be integrated into the National Integrated Infrastructure Masterplan, NIIMP. He said that the development of Nigerian aviation is “a joint responsibility of the public and private sectors.”

Above all, Sirika is confident that the Nigerian aviation industry” can become profitable, self-sustaining and beneficial to all stakeholders,” with our concerted efforts and cooperation.

• Yakubu Dati, spokesman of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, wrote from Lagos


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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