The Managing Director of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Captain Rabiu Hamisu Yadudu has attributed reasons why the authority has not deployed weapons to its aviation security personnel to its resolve to put in place necessary infrastructure that will accommodate the arms.
While disclosing that FAAN had already received approval from the federal government for AVSEC to bear weapons, Yadudu declared that though the programme had reached an advance stage, but however added that a lot of works still needed to be done in the areas of recruitment and profiling of such operatives that will bear the arms.
Dropping this hint at the sideline of the ongoing Nigerian Airports Security Week with the theme: ‘Promoting Security Culture at Nigerian Airports’, the FAAN MD said: ‘’approval is the most important aspect of arming the security wing but FAAN is a government enterprise, we must follow due process and ensure a lot of accountability and transparency, as of now, we are at very advanced stage but as part our due diligence.
“Once we get the approval, we have to do a lot of works to make sure that by the time we give the arms, even when you get the arms, we prefer not to deploy until we have all the necessary infrastructure on ground to accommodate the arms, the training, before you do the training, you have to get the people and even when you do get them, we have to do proper profiling, there are a lot of things to be done.’’
Speaking on potential threats to the airports following recent bandit attacks on transports infrastructures; the FAAN MD said ‘’I want to assure Nigerians and the traveling public that the airports are save. We are doing a lot of things in terms of security around the airports that we cannot make public at all time, but the most important aspects; we are fully on top of them.’
“We have done a lot of training and it is continuous, our security programme is approved by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), which is not an arbitrary approval, it is a regulated approval from the NCAA which is competent and appropriate.’’
On the issue of FAAN being up to date on its security architecture, Yadudu remarked: “Security is a living process, we might have an airport that is fully protected with the architecture of the security appropriate, then suddenly, it doesn’t have to be something in our airport, something might happen in another airport or in town or a new technology even might render your up to date security arrangement vulnerable.“So that is why I said it is a living process and that is why we keep working to ensure that our architecture for security, the trainings, awareness, we do this daily as the airports security committees have their meetings weekly, we do an overview, deliberate and also communicate with the airport communities to always ensure we carry along all our stakeholders.’’ (Tribune)