From about 300 meters away, an elderly man carrying a heavy luggage, tottered along the road to the domestic terminal of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja. He needed to be at the airport in less than 30 minutes, in order to catch his flight, so he decided to pass through the toll gate that ushered vehicles into the airport more than one hour before. The on-going international terminal construction had brought airport traffic to a standstill and the taxi conveying him to the airport had been standstill in the traffic for 18 minutes.
The passenger weighed staying in the taxi and missing his flight or making a run for it. He was extremely angry with the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), which did not envisage that the on-going construction would disrupt vehicular movements as the construction site cut into the road. He did not know where to lay his complaint; at least to ventilate his rage.
But checks by THISDAY at the airport last Sunday showed that it was not just the construction that was disrupting flight; the situation was worsened by chaos and recklessness. There are no guidelines to parking system and there are also no designated areas for parking. Motorists park arbitrarily to suit their whims and selfishness.
There are many empty spaces around the terminal but airport users prefer to crowd in front of the terminal, causing unprecedented gridlock that result in many passengers missing their flights.
Truth is that anyone who is not abreast of the latest traffic jam at the airport may want to come to the airport at the initially advertised one and half hours or two hours before a domestic flight and as he leisurely and sanguinely drives into the airport he would be confronted by a Berlin wall of heavy traffic. The traffic begins to build up by 2:00 pm and by 4:00 pm, the road has become impassable. Anyone who has a flight by 6:00 pm and is still at the toll gate by 4:00 pm will need a miracle to catapult him to the terminal. This is because the passenger can only trek to the terminal. It becomes herculean if he has a heavy luggage.
Airport users observed that there is no controlled entry to the airport from the toll gate. The motorist may choose to drive through the tarred smooth road, which runs across the front of the terminal and exits at the major road off the airport. One may also choose to take the gravel covered wide road at the centre, which is the newly designated road under construction, but undulating and frustrating. People seem to prefer the new road because the smooth road is always clustered by vehicles, but whichever way the motorist chooses, he must be held back by gridlock at peak hours.
There are things FAAN allowed to happen that cause the gridlock. One is indiscriminate parking. People park their cars at any available spaces, because there are no parking rules. At the exit end of the road, they parked their vehicles at the two sides of the road, narrowing the three-vehicular ways to just one lane.
The second problem, they pointed out, is that motorists get no directive from the entrance of the airport till the front of the terminal where Federal Road Safety Corp (FRSC) officials are doing eye-service control of the traffic. They just ensure that the narrow, single lane of the road is not blocked by vehicles.
Three, FAAN should have directed motorists to park at the empty large space adjacent to the former domestic terminal, which is now the VIP lounge. The agency should have placed signs directing motorists where they could drive through and park their vehicles.
So, many passengers have reasoned that it was not the ongoing construction alone that causes the gridlock but the inability of FAAN to manage vehicular movements. With proper directive and deployment of personnel to direct the traffic, the gridlock will definitely be addressed. They also said that even if temporarily, FAAN should designate and mark parking areas in front of the airport and if the areas are not big enough to take in as many vehicles as possible, it should create more spaces a little away from the terminal.
But this view seems to contradict that of the Managing Director of FAAN, Saleh Dunoma who on Monday told THISDAY that the agency would do everything possible to ease traffic at the airport and therefore craved for the understanding of the travelling public. Dunoma said instead of coming to the airport two hours before, the passenger should come four hours before his flight. He also noted that the traffic jam would be over by the time come the construction work end in June next year.
“The problem with Abuja is that where we have operating terminal is where we have the new terminal, unlike in Kano where they are separated so you must have that traffic problem and I am appealing to the general public to bear with us and I ask them to come to the airport in good time so that they will be able to process their flights without missing their flights,” Dunoma said.
On what FAAN can do in the interim to reduce the traffic at the airport before the construction was ended, he said: “There is no concrete step FAAN can take except it has the cooperation with the general public. The concrete step we are taking is that we provide enough parking spaces and allow free flow of traffic. There is the only thing we can do. Once there is construction in a place you have to also operate, so you have to combine the two together, we know these inconveniences will come so we just appeal to the general public for understanding and this may continue until we finish the project; maybe the middle of next year.”
