President Bola Tinubu and Vice-president Kashim Shettima will now pay the required toll at any time they use the gates at Nigerian airports.
The minister of aviation, Festus Keyamo, announced this development to journalists after the federal executive council (FEC) meeting chaired by Tinubu at the presidential villa in Abuja on Tuesday.
Keyamo disclosed that he presented two memos and both were approved by the council.
The minister said airport users should no longer be exempted from paying this complusory tolls.
Speaking further, Keyamo said the initial tradition was to exempt only the president and the vice-president, but President Tinubu overturned it, saying no individual should be exempted.
According to the aviation minister, the federal government was losing over 82 percent of the revenue it should have earned from the gates access fee.
“No more exemption. When we came to office, we met a tradition on the ground where at the end of the year, all manners of VIPs would approach us for what they call complimentary e-tags or complimentary stickers. Whereby you see them coming into our airports nationwide,” he said.
“They don’t pay the access fees. They don’t pay for parking, they don’t pay for essential services at airports, and they are VIPs. And I told myself on my team, I said not under my watch. It will not happen.
“If this tradition has been existing for years, I will not allow it to happen. Because it is inconceivable that in our country it is the VIPs that don’t pay for services but it is the poor men that pay for services.
“The VIPs were supposed to have money to pay for services but they compel poor men to pay for services.
“Our memo says with the exception of the president and the vice president. And the president overruled me and said he and the vice president will pay, he said everybody.”
Keyamo also explained that the revenue generated at the tollgates has been relatively low as a result of exemptions and corruption.
“In one of the access gates based on the count of the barrier going up and down, we are supposed to be making 250 or 260 million from that gate every month,” Keyamo said.
“Because of exemptions, the returns to us are less than 100 million every month. And that also, of course, breeds corruption too because now you cannot track, you cannot have the audit trail of those free tags.”
The minister also mentioned that some people sell the tags at half the price.
He said the tags “we sell yearly, maybe a million or a million plus, that gives you access to parking, to assets everything, so nobody will tow your car”.
Keyamo said the habit of selling at half the price would be cancelled.
He finally stated that everyone in the judiciary, the legislature, the executive, and the military high command should then purchase tags for their personnel yearly so they do not have to pay tolls every time the airport gates are used.