The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria has announced that it has finalized plans with the Office of the National Security Adviser to decrease the amount of security stops where staff physically interact with passengers and their luggage at the country’s airports.
PUNCH Online states that passengers have been expressing frustration about long waits when passing through Nigerian airports due to multiple physical security checks.
In a conversation with reporters on Saturday in Lagos, FAAN's Managing Director, Mrs Olubunmi Kuku, mentioned that the agency and the NSA have agreed to implement short and long-term measures to tackle the issue. This includes establishing a shared coordination room where all the agencies can monitor CCTV cameras to identify what they are searching for.
Kuku described the situation as alarming but confirmed that she made it a priority upon taking office. She also stated that she had discussions with the National Security Adviser, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, on ways to streamline the facilitation processes.
The FAAN MD stated, “Regarding the baggage checks, it greatly concerns me, and it was the first thing I inquired about when I assumed office. As far back as 2011 and 2012, when I was in the industry, I have worked on this with the former minister.
“It 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.”
Referring to her agreements with the security agencies, Kuku stated, “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 observe 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.”
Nevertheless, she clarified that opening passengers’ baggage was for a specific reason and added 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.”
