The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority has suspended a controversial enforcement directive that would have withheld regulatory services from 11 domestic airlines over alleged unpaid obligations, but the move has done little to resolve a deeper dispute over what the airlines actually owe and whether the authority has the right to collect the charges in the first place.

NCAA said the suspension was a deliberate decision taken to avoid destabilizing the aviation sector while structured conversations continued with individual carriers. It stressed that the suspension was not a waiver, cancellation, or forgiveness of any debt, and that airlines remained fully responsible for settling all outstanding statutory obligations.

But the Airline Operators of Nigeria pushed back forcefully, denying that member carriers owed the authority anything for regulatory services. The association said NCAA issued invoices for every service it provided, from crew license validation to aircraft inspections, and that all such invoices were settled in full before services were rendered. It described suggestions that airlines were indebted to NCAA for regulatory services as factually inaccurate.

What the airlines acknowledged were unpaid remittances of the five percent Ticket Sales Charge, a levy collected from passengers by airlines on behalf of the aviation ecosystem. The AON said that charge had become the subject of ongoing discussions given the financial pressure created by the Iran-US conflict, and that it had formally requested the federal government suspend all statutory charges temporarily to help airlines manage cash flow. President Tinubu had already approved a 30 percent concession on outstanding charges as an interim measure, and the airlines said they were still awaiting a meeting with the president to request further relief.

The association announced that from June 1, 2026, it would stop collecting the passenger service charge on NCAA’s behalf, instead calling on the federal government to amend the Civil Aviation Act so that NCAA could collect whatever fees and charges it was owed directly from passengers, without routing the collection through airlines.

The AON used the dispute to make a broader argument about the structural unsustainability of Nigeria’s aviation tax regime. It said domestic airlines made payments to NAMA, FAAN, NCAA, and multiple other statutory bodies, and that the cumulative burden of these charges, all applied to gross earnings rather than profit, was incompatible with an industry that globally operated on margins of between 1.5 and 2.5 percent. It said the industry was being crushed by fees introduced under entirely different economic conditions, some dating back to General Yakubu Gowon’s government in the 1970s, that had never been reviewed despite decades of sector deregulation and structural change.