To be fair, after the Air France incident at Port Harcourt they finally banned the grazing of cattle next to the runway and promised to put up a fence. I think the airport is now closed for extensive renovation and it is about time. Every time you made a night landing in the rain you could see the 'temporary' wiring for the runway lights (there for 25 years, at least) glowing with short circuits in many places.
We had reported the cattle the previous evening on takeoff and landed back there around midnight. Lucky for us, since we were operating a much smaller aircraft, that the cattle must have still been grazing before going off to sleep on the nice warm runway before their rude awakening. That A-330 had a broken titanium beam in its main gear; our aircraft would probably have had a cockpit full of beef in a layer about two feet thick on the aft bulkhead with us forming the bottom six inches.
The last time they had a bad run of accidents the response was simply to ban the BAC 1-11 from passenger service, ignoring the underlying fact that standards were simply not being kept up. The Kano BAC 1-11 accident that was the 'last straw' killed a guy I had flown many hours with whom I had a lot of time for. It would have been much fairer to really dig into the problems and fix them before more people had to die, but that's just not the way Nigeria works.
Pretty much all the new guys look around in shock, wondering why no one has fixed obvious problems. Often they think, 'Hey, black people are stupid!' A smart person would see and fix the problem, is their mistaken assumption.
It can take a long time to understand the mad way everything really does function there; it's a perverted reality. Usually it comes down to someone screwing a few bucks out of finally, sort of, fixing something so that it can break again in six months, when more money shall be spent. Fix it 'propah' and the money tap is shut!
The pilots often end up pawns in this game. That's not right, perhaps, but it is arguably so. You don't want to operate shabby equipment into marginal airports? Fine, step aside, because there are guys stood in line for work there!
How many of you reading this have ever been hungry? Not 'hungry' as in, 'Gimme a Big Mac and a large fries,' but 'hungry' as in 'not enough money to live on.' You have to factor that in to a lot that goes on in Nigeria, I think. Life is lived close to the bone.