Robbed in plain sight

The Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, has degenerated to a glorified railway terminus where area boys and sundry shady characters conduct a bazaar of luggage rifling and pilfering. I had just disembarked from a 14-hour flight. All I wanted now was to collect my luggage and head home to refresh and rest. The wait at […]

The Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, has degenerated to a glorified railway terminus where area boys and sundry shady characters conduct a bazaar of luggage rifling and pilfering. I had just disembarked from a 14-hour flight. All I wanted now was to collect my luggage and head home to refresh and rest. The wait at the carousel lasted some 40 minutes after which my two suitcases showed up. Relief!
On getting home, I discovered that the suitcases had been tampered with. All the gift items (wristwatches, leather wallets, ties and other small items) had been stolen. Some of the gift boxes were discarded to ensure that the stolen items would not be easily noticed in the pockets of the thieves.
I felt violated. I made a few frantic calls to some contacts within the aviation industry and they all told me not to get unduly worked up and simply accept that I had been robbed. There was no way, they counselled, that I would recover anything. The thieves had had a good day at the office: Almost $2,000 worth of loot.
I reviewed the arrival scene again. At the arrival terminal, there are all sorts of characters in reflective jackets. You can’t know who is doing what. Typical of a corruption-ridden system, everyone is milling around. A trolley-pusher solicits patronage. Another one of indeterminate vocation generally offers to assist with taxi or something else. Welcome back home, I told myself. No airport in Europe or America would have so many people who have no business being at the airport actually lounging and calling the shots there.
Why would there not be such ugly incidents when our international airport has been reduced to a night-bus motor-park? With the allocation of the real local airport to private jets during the ill-fated regime of Stella Oduah as minister, there is only a glass slab separating local and international passengers. It is easy for the thieves allowed into the airports to target the cargo of international flights.
Even as one emerges from the arrival hall, the desperate cries of all kinds of hustlers trying to take over one’s luggage is a national shame.
Taxi drivers, kabukabu operators, musclemen, FX dealers, all howling for business at the highest decibel. The Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos used to be described as the roughest in the country. Abuja has now taken over.
One of the urgent tasks of the new aviation minister in the Buhari administration is to restore our local airport to us. Physically separate the local airport from the international. The Nnamdi Azikiwe International
Airport named after the Great Zik of Africa should no longer be allowed to be a den of robbers. Sweet ought to be the memory of Nigeria’s first ceremonial president in whose honour that airport was named.
It is not poverty that forces people to go to the airport and pilfer things from passengers’ luggage. Crime thrives when the environment condones it. When simple devices like CCTV cameras and guard dogs around the loading bay of the carousels, ubiquitous in other countries but repeatedly sabotaged here so that stealing can go on unabated – when such provisions are absent, we have no business pretending that we are running an airport in the proper sense of the name.
Hear Joe Igbokwe
Talking about the renewed agitation for secession, I found Joe Igbokwe’s bare-knuckle commentary on the subject quite interesting:
“Yinka Odumakin, Iyiola Omisore, Olu Falae etc are miserable election losers. They are yet to come to terms with this crushing defeat. Look at Chief Olu Falae telling the whole world that there would have been civil war if the kidnappers had killed him. MKO Abiola, Bola Ige, Kudirat Abiola, Elegbede, Suliat, Rewane, Omotosho, Onagoruwa, all died in the days of locust and Yoruba did not go to war…  When they fail in national politics they go back to play ethnic politics and they resort to blackmail, primordial sentiments, ethnic preoccupation, intimidation, harassment and subterfuge.
 “Look at them. Look on their faces and see the mark of defeat. In the East the same miserable losers are shouting for Biafra. Biafra my foot! Did these efulefus see or witness the civil war?
I was booed in an Igbo church in Lagos when I told them Buhari had won the election. I told them that 11 states cannot defeat 25 states. I told them that two zones cannot defeat four zones but Goodluck Jonathan’s dollars and pounds … beclouded their sense of reasoning. Now these shameless losers are shouting for Biafra. Other leaders from other zones in Nigeria wisely strategize for position but shameless Igbo leaders … strategize for money.”
…And Mahmud Usman
Thank you for a most illuminating piece on the current posturing of those that qualify to be called troubadours of tribalism as they serially threaten Nigeria’s unity. These irredentists are really those who have lost out in the current dispensation, which loss they share amount their ethnic groups and therefore call for secession, etc. I particularly like the description of Femi Fani-Kayode as “a wannabe Yoruba irredentist” and opportunistic commentator on public affairs. Rear Admiral Mike Onah’s contribution is one which resonates with all reasonable Nigerians who believe in the essential goodness of a country as endowed as ours – subject to the leadership always striving to do what is right.
E-Visa/E-Passport
Visiting Kenya? You don’t need to bribe any consular or immigration officer. Just apply and pay online. I did mine and the visa was processed in two hours. You print out the visa and present it at the airport of entry in Kenya and your passport will be stamped.  Kenyans renew their passport, that way too. When the human interface in the process is eliminated, there is little room for corruption. The Buhari administration should follow the Kenyan example without further delay.