Louis Ibah
It was a chaotic scene at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, yesterday as hundreds of passengers were left stranded for hours following the temporary shut down of the airport with its attendant flight delays to allow for the landing and movement of President Muhammadu Buhari’s entourage currently visiting Lagos State.
With vehicular movement into the airport restricted by security, most airport workers and early morning passengers had to trek long distances to the airport terminal. But the greater burden was on passengers who had early morning (6.45am – 7.30am) flights as they arrived the airport and without any prior notice were told that their flights had been delayed indefinitely.
A senior airline official told Daily Sun that the chaotic scene was primarily caused by poor communication by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) on the president’s itinerary, which hampered their ability to relate with passengers on the possible changes to their flight schedule. “This is not the first time a visiting president or high profile personality will be passing through Lagos airport. The problem is that we didn’t get the right information on the president’s itinerary to pass on to passengers so as to mitigate some of the ugly scenes we witnessed today,” said the official who wouldn’t want to be named.
“We saw chaos and high level of anger in passengers as we tried to delay our flights just to accommodate them.
We had to reschedule some flights and in the process, we had backlogs and we also re-accommodated some of these passengers on any next available flight and I guess the passengers are now happy.