Civil Aviation Amendment Bill H.B. 4, 2017

This Bill amends the Civil Aviation Act to do one structural thing and several regulatory ones.

The structural change is the split. The Authority's objects are narrowed to civil aviation safety, security and related matters, and the running of airports and aerodromes is spun off to a new entity, the Airports Company of Zimbabwe (Private) Limited. The Authority's existing function to establish, develop, operate and own aerodromes is qualified accordingly. This is the change that matters commercially: the regulator stops being the airport operator.

Most of the rest implements the 2008 ICAO audit of the Authority. New sections mandate expanded State Safety and State Security programmes in civil aviation, and establish a National Civil Aviation Security Committee to coordinate security activities and advise the Minister on reviewing and adopting security measures. The audit's point was that these principles needed to sit in primary legislation rather than only in the Authority's manuals.

On governance, appointments to the Authority's Board must observe gender balance, holders of public office — including Cabinet members, the judiciary and members of other public entities — are disqualified from the Board, the period for the Minister to fill a Board or chair vacancy drops from three months to one, and penalties for concealing a conflict of interest are stiffened.

The chief executive is retitled from "General Manager" to "Director-General", with better-defined qualifications, a mandate to establish civil aviation training centres, and devolved authority to appoint, promote and develop staff — though the Board still fixes the staff establishment and certain senior posts need the Minister's prior approval. The Bill also expands the Authority's sources of funds, adds grounds for cancelling an air operator's certificate, and replaces the Chief Inspector of Accidents with a Chief Investigator of Accidents, still a civil servant appointed independently of the Authority.

A note on this copy: the scanned text is noticeably degraded, with character corruption throughout, and the extract available here stops before the end of the Bill. The clause-by-clause memorandum is legible and is the basis for this summary, but the precise wording of individual amendments should be checked against the printed Bill.