Sinking to a new low

The list of problems besetting the Ninoy Aquino International Airport is beginning to sound like some modern version of biblical plagues; among others you have power outages representing three days of darkness, slowmoving queues representing a huge swarm of locusts, lack of airconditioning representing a rain of fire, then bedbugs and rats representing pestilence.

Yes, a rat. After the recent incident involving bedbugs biting some passengers using chairs in NAIA Terminal 2, a netizen spotted and recorded a rat nonchalantly moving around a light fixture in NAIA Terminal 3.

Can what is infamously known as one of the worst airports in the world get even worse? It would seem NAIA is doing --or not doing-- its best to find out.

The sooner a private company takes over operations of the NAIA the better, and San Miguel Corp. is poised to make improvements come true.

This should have been done long ago. While we don’t want to disparage how things are being done in the government versus how things are done in the private sector we have to admit that the private sector gets things done faster.

This is because in the private sector they don’t have to report to someone who has to report to someone who also has to report to someone else. That way decisions are made and carried out faster. The acquisition of any needed materials is also more expedient.

There is also less politics, and there is no risk of some policies getting changed shelved, or totally dropped with a change in leadership or administration. We have seen this before, how some plans totally change because someone new has been put in charge thanks to some political movements.

It’s about time the country’s main gateway gets better. Power outages, long queues, bedbugs, and rats don’t endear us to the travelers. We really don’t want NAIA to sink to even lower depths in terms of reputation. There is just no more depth to sink to; unless we are talking about a new low where the rats are actually supposed to be.