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Steve Agbota
The Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) has decried high rate of vandalisation and encroachment of the nation’s airports as 186 people were arrested for illegal entry across the country in the last two months.
Its Managing Director , Captain Rabiu Yadudu, who disclosed this at the 2019 Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Leadership Impact Programme in Lagos, said that security is a very difficult thing to manage; one needs to be proactive to sustain it.
According to him, some of the 186 people arrested played mad and mentally unstable, adding that arresting 186 people in two months is like almost getting close to four or five arrested each day.
He added: “A function of security is to be proactive. All the vulnerability we know, as we are trying to resolve them, cover it; but new ones will always open. There is no security that has no new challenges across the world. They always have new challenges.
“Secondly, our operation environments, we have issues of encroachment, people coming to the airport not for encroachment alone but vandalisation. I mean active vandalisation. FAAN will secure the airport, secure the fence and do everything, put surveillance but somebody will just come, destroy and go away. Active vandalisation and encroachment and this is not something I do believe happens in other environments when it comes to developed countries.”
However, he said that FAAN is putting everything in place to ensure the airport is secure, and that the security of the airport is not compromised. He promised that in the next 12 months, there would be change in the operations of airports. Earlier in his keynote address, the President of Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport of Nigeria (CILT), Mr. Ibrahim Jibril, who was represented by the Institute’s Deputy President, Alban Igwe, said that there are numerous investment opportunities in the Aviation sub-sector in the areas of developing perishable cargo terminals for export, development of Aerotropolis’, construction of facilities for Maintenance Repair Organizations, or more direct involvement in the operation of Maintenance Hanger facilities, and commercialisation of Aviation Training Organizations (ATOs) to deliver specialised trainings and capacity building of pilots, Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs), simulators, technicians, aircraft maintenance engineers and crew.
