LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has said it made a progressive agreement with the Office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) to limit the number of physical contacts of security agencies at the nation’s airports.
It stated that all checkpoints that agencies usually Interface with people and luggage would drop drastically, adding swift and uniformity to operations
This, was stated by the Managing Director of FAAN, Mrs Olubunmi Kuku, whilst engaging newsmen in Lagos on Saturday.
Kuku said that the agency and the office of the NSA have agreed to implement a short measures, which is reducing the physical contacts while the long-term approach is joint coordination room where all the agencies can use CCTV cameras to ascertain what they are looking for.
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She described the development as disturbing but affirmed that solutions emerged on how to streamline the protocols after weeks of extensive discussion with the National Security Adviser, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu.
The FAAN MD said, “On the issues of the checking of baggage, it borders me so much, and that was the first inquiry that I made 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.”
Kuku explained that, “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.
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“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.”
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.”