The luggage handling process at the departure hall of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, MMIA, Lagos, has been described as “very problematic.”

The Minister of State, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, said this on Tuesday during a one-day tour of the airport by officials of the Ministry of Budget and the Budget office.

Mrs. Ahmed, who expressed satisfaction with the state of the arrival hall of the airport frowned at the condition of the departure hall, noting that the hall needs to be upgraded.

“We need to do a lot of work to upgrade the departure area of the airport. The luggage handling process is very problematic.

“It is largely manual and as a result of that, customers spend hours before getting their luggage. That needs to be addressed.”

Commenting on the purpose of the visit, the minister said the team members were on ground to look at the challenges the airport is facing and check how funds are expended, in order to facilitate further allocation of resources.

“The reason why we are here is to inspect the projects under FAAN. The essence of this is to see how well government’s resources are utilised; to also see and understand the challenges that the airport is facing so that when resources are to be allocated or disbursed, we will do it with the understanding of how they are to be used.”

On the level of on-going projects at the airport, the minister said the team has seen a number of projects at different levels of completion.

“We have seen a lot of good work that has been done. There are some projects that are suffering as a result of number of different challenges. We have also seen the upgrade of the airport that shows an improvement in users experience, especially on the arrival of the
MMIA.”

The minister however expressed her disappointment at the progress of some projects.

“On the inspection, we found out that some of the information provided tallies with what we have but some do not.

“We are asking the authority to re-assess them and submit to us the correct state of completion. The completion rate of some of the projects were lower than what was reported in the reports,” she said.