*To cut military, paramilitary personnel at baggage points
From Suleiman Amagbor, Lagos
Relief is on the way for international travellers who go through harrowing experiences of having their baggage go through multiple checks by security personnel at international airports in Nigeria.
This comes following the decision of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) to streamline the process to allow for a single check.
Both government organs will reduce the numbers of military and paramilitary personnel at the airports who have physical contacts with passengers’ baggage that result in waste of time and inconvenient passengers.
Complaints are rife over such officers’ misconduct by officers who rather than carry out their duties diligently often demand bribes and accuse passengers unjustly.
Managing Director of FAAN, Mrs Olubunmi Kuku disclosed at a forum at the weekend in Lagos.
FAAN and the NSA have reached agreement to carry out sweeping measures both in the short and long term to address the disturbing phenomenon.
In the long run, she said that such measures will include the creation of a joint coordination room where all the agencies can view CCTV cameras to ascertain what they are looking for.
Mrs. Kuku explained that the issue was her first inquiry when she assumed office having worked with a former Minister between 2011 and 2012 on how to curb the menace.
She said “It actually goes beyond FAAN, a lot of those agencies, Customs, NDLEA, Quarantine, Agriculture, we now have EFCC, we have almost everybody at the airports, we had Executive order 001 during the Buhari administration to move them out under the then Vice President office, now we have the National Single Window, I have personally sat with the NSA over the last five weeks to have conversations with him as to how we will streamline the facilitation.”
According to the FAAN Boss, “We have agreed on a few things, the first one is a short term intervention where we reduce the number of agencies at the airports because we have some that were doing just sort of routine checks, just moving around to observe rather than disturbing passengers.”
The second is the longer term, a joint coordination room, we do have cameras, so we are asking all of those agencies, depending on what it is they are looking for to move to the joint coordination room to look at the cameras and observed and for those that are more concerned with the baggage, they can move down to where we load the bags, that way they have better visibility than disturbing passengers.”
However, she explained that the opening of passengers’ baggage was for a reason adding that “I believe that came about a couple of years ago, a lot of countries had issues with scanning devices that were coming from certain countries and as such they require secondary screening. You will see that some of the airlines have companies doing secondary screening on their behalf but a lot of passengers will think that it is FAAN because we are the face of the agency and the airports.”
“But that doesn’t take away from the coordination room that we have, so we take responsibility, we are trying to solve it. We are trying to have dual view cameras and put them and explosive devices a bit farther so that we are doing a secondary check without opening your bags.”
“If you go to Frankfurt for example, even after you get off the aircraft and go through security, for any flight that is departing for the US and certain countries, you will see that a secondary screening happens, is just that they are dipping their hands in your bags. Please bear with us, it is coordination that is required not just with FAAN, the NSA has stepped in and is now helping us vigorously.”
