Experts Call for Inter-agency Collaboration to Improve Safety at Nation’s Airports
Aviation security experts have called for collaboration of security agencies at the airport in order to create synergy and effective coverage of airport facilities in Nigeria.
In a paper presented at the on-going National Aviation Conference (FNAC) of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) in Abuja, the General Manager, Aviation Security Operations at FAAN, Dr. Anne Otibor Egbadon, said: “Aviation security is the combination of measures and the marshaling of various human and material resources at the international, national and airport levels for the protection civil aviation against acts of unlawful interference. There is urgent need to ensure good working relationship among all the agencies that are involved in aviation and national security.”
She said that no single government entity could unilaterally fulfill national safety and security, noting that national sovereignty is a function of interagency unity, remarking that very threat against aviation is a threat against national security service and vice versa.
“Aviation security is the combination of measures and the marshaling of various human and material resources at the international, national and airport levels for the protection of civil aviation against acts of unlawful interference,” she said.
According to Egbadon, threat to aviation remained the probability or likelihood of an attack on a target and these include sabotage to aircraft, sabotage of airports, hijacking of an aircraft on the ground or in flight and armed attack on/off airport facilities.
She explained that terrorists and others target aviation and its facilities because the industry is a high profile sector, which attracts global attention when there is serious security breach like the hijack of aircraft, attack at the airports or related insecurity.
“An attack will force governments to react. An attack is likely to cause many deaths and injuries and an attack on aviation can have a huge impact with limited risk to the attacker,” she said.
To fortify the security apparatus at airports, Egbadon said there should be synergy among security operatives who come from the Nigerian Air Force, Aviation Security from FAAN, the Nigerian police, the Nigerian Immigration Service, the Nigerian Customs, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency and others.
To improve their operations, she urged that government should increase allocation to security.
“The government is encouraged to increase the budgeting allocation to aviation and national security. There should also be establishment of good, social scheme for the citizens and equal employment opportunities for the citizens. There should be provision of employment opportunities at equal rate.
“National security is a factor of internal or external influences. Internal security relates to the political, economic and social factors, which affect a country from within, example, political strife, ethnicity, and control of resources. Also, external security on the other hand is influenced by foreign policies and no country is free from insecurity in spite of all the measures put in place by governments,” she said.
Expressing similar ideas, the CEO of Centurion Security and Safety Consult and former Commander of the Murtala Muhammed International
Airport, Lagos, Group Captain John Ojikutu said that for the different layers of security at the airports to have synergy they must collaborate.
“One would have thought that these airport security layers have been integrated and should be effective so that they would be able to detect any breach, but because they are uncoordinated they become gaps through which criminals slip through some times with the connivance of the airport officials,” he said.
Ojikutu has severally recommended that FAAN should review its security apparatus in the face of homegrown terrorism and also improve ways