Watch infiltration into KIA baggage claims hall
Talking about a thorough overhaul at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) in the wake of the infamous Nayele 12.5- kilogramme cocaine saga which has cast a dark shadow over our international airport and created a bad image for the country in the last month, we should not forget to look at the baggage claims area.
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Currently, we have non-passengers entering the baggage hall for all kinds of reasons, yet, as a reserved area, the infiltration going on there could easily be used to perpetrate unlawful deals.
Arriving at KIA last week, I noticed a dramatic improvement at the immigration hall. Renovations had been made since early March when I last passed through. We now have a more spacious hall for arriving passengers to go through immigration processes.
Quite impressive, especially when I had had cause to complain through this column about some sections of the airport in an article entitled: “KIA needs a make-over”, published in the Daily Graphic issue of January 22, 2014.
Bearing in mind the practices in other international airports, however, we seem to have opened the baggage claims hall to non-travellers, at some risk. The hall, as a restricted area, gets crowded with non-passengers, purportedly helping arriving passengers to claim their luggage Why don’t such passengers needing help route their request through the airlines at the time of booking their flights?
We give too much room for too many unwarranted liberties in our systems. Consequently, serious business is played down and gets diluted with unnecessary pleasantries. Certainly not in these days of airport security consciousness around the world.
Some of these non-passengers enter the arrival hall of the KIA through other exits other than the main one where official customs inspection points are situated. Therefore, for anyone who is bent on entering the country with unwanted items or who wants to get away with dutiable items, this is a clear avenue for a person to cheat the system.
In the face of all kinds of crimes and security alerts, not to mention something as petty as pick- pocketing and stealing of handbags, airports around the world are kept on alert and quite rightly so. Do we need people wearing whatever tags to be inside the baggage claims area to help passengers? No, because those who need genuine assistance would have done so with the airline at the point of boarding the aircraft and they would have been taken care of accordingly.
Inside the baggage claims hall of the KIA are two unwanted groups. There are those who hang on to trolleys asking if anyone needs assistance and those who are there to pick their “masters’s’’ luggage. Searching for the bags of those who have sent them, these men push and shove past legitimate passengers, removing bag after bag from the carousel based on the descriptions they have been given . In the process, they end up creating more confusion and disrupting the flow of bags on the carousel.
We do pride ourselves as a friendly and helpful country but when it comes to serious security business, we should be able to separate niceties and conform to what is the convention.
We do not need these young men to hang around mixing with arriving passengers in an already crowded baggage claims hall, where one’s eyes are constantly feeding on one’s handbag as well.
As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (responsible for the VIP Lounge), the Ministry of Transport and the authorities at the Ghana Airports Company go through the process of reviewing the security and misuse of restricted areas at the airport, the baggage claims hall must by all means appear in the checklist of areas to be looked at.
Elsewhere, there would be customs and other officials walking around at the arrivals and baggage claims, profiling and stopping arriving passengers at random for security checks as part of their instituted measures. And quite rightly so. Unfortunately, we care less so people are taking advantage of a lapsed system.
For all one knows, by opening up the baggage hall as pertains currently, we could possibly be allowing people in to rather help suspicious passengers exit with dutiable items and perhaps contraband to evade the system. Seriously speaking, we do not need hangers-on at the baggage claims hall for whatever reason.
We should keep the baggage claims area of KIA also as a security zone as is done at other international airports so that arriving passengers with contraband and dutiable items could be properly monitored. The overlays of exits and needless rooms for assistance should be checked and monitored.