The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, has threatened to deal decisively with individuals illegally gaining access to restricted areas.
The agency further disclosed that plans are in progress to install access control to all the restricted areas to address International Civil Aviation Organisation, ICAO-identified security gaps across the country’s airports.
Director of Aviation Security Services, Afegbai Igbafe, revealed that no fewer than 20 cases of intrusion are experienced at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos every night.
Addressing newsmen in Lagos, Igbafe said, “Most of the issue we have has to do with the fencing and a lot of the fences have been destroyed by the neighbouring communities. I will tell you there is a big challenge because we will get as many as 20 to 30 intruders every night. And the problem we are having is our court system. When we hand them over to the police before we know, they are released. The legal department of FAAN is collaborating with the Attorney General of the state to help us get mobile courts so these things will be handled swiftly.
“When we came on board, we had the ICAO audit and they gave us their own marks. We met a lot of issues when we came on board. We tried to fix a lot of them by providing some of the amenities like the CCTV cameras, we upgraded them. Presently, we are trying to do access control whereby every individual that is coming to the airport will be properly checked because we found that we have a lot of concessionaires, we have a lot of security people who are not supposed to be at the airport that come in and out. Right now, we will put the access control in place. I think it will help us a great lot and we have a lot of gaps during the ICAO audit, so we are trying to fix up those gaps.
“If you are talking about the perimeter fencing, it’s an issue in the sense that first of all, when we came on board, we had a lot of encroachments in the perimeter areas because it’s a vast land. We have been trying to put in place measures with the little resources we have, mostly on patrol measures. We have patrols at night. We have observation posts, which are manned by the aviation security, AVSEC personnel. Then we have joint patrols with the military, the Air Force, and the AVSEC personnel. And because of the perimeter area too, we just recently launched the armed unit of the AVSEC.”
