AIRPORT PROTOCOL: IS NIGERIA REALLY OPEN FOR BUSINESS?

Joshua J. Omojuwa argues that Nigerians have no sense of time

When you think of Nigeria and its challenges, you may believe that they are because the country is poor. That is also true. However, it does not tell the whole story. If you have ever heard the saying, Time is Money, when you reflect on it, you will come to appreciate why we are such a poor country. Without prejudice to the other causative factors of our collective reality, we are poor because we burn time. Every facet of the Nigerian experience is designed to waste time. We burn more money wasting time in this country than there is enough money to be stolen.

If you assume that Nigeria is open for business, your assumption is more based on the expectation that a country ought to, by design, be open for openness. In practical terms, Nigeria is not open for business. This is not hard to tell. I have more than enough data to make the points I will be making. If you as a reader have ever been to any country where you had to be on multiple queues to have your passport stamped on entering the country, please do share.

Every country that is open for business is designing systems at the border to ensure a seamless entry and exit process for visitors. Some have done away with exit passport protocols altogether, whilst designing systems where you need not even interact with any officials, except when necessary. Ours is the only country I know where you join a queue to have your passport examined by one agency of government, then you join another queue to have that passport stamped by another agency. If as a Nigerian who has traveled around the world you aren’t irritated by this, chances are that you do not care, or you stopped caring. If as a public official you see this and you don’t acknowledge how inefficient and abnormal it is, you are in the wrong job. You do not really care about your country.

The inefficiency does not end there. You have officials of multiple agencies waiting to run through your luggage, as a matter of some protocol, as though the scanners the luggage just passed through aren’t working. Just because we have little appreciation for privacy, we believe that it is normal for officials to have people open their luggage and have it searched through. Not because they found something on the scanner or because of some suspicion, but as a matter of some obsolete protocol.

How? Why do countries have signs for those who have things to declare and those who have nothing to declare? Why is ours the only country I know where everyone is forced to go through a process that suggests everyone must have something to declare? How can we look at all of these, before one mentions other things, and then believe that our country is open for business? Open for business how? Business for who?

We took certain security procedures, reimagined them, and then deployed them without even wondering why we do them. Take the endless traffic across the country, especially in the evening, when police officers mount check points primarily to obtain money from motorists. You end up burning time in traffic that is several times the amount of money it would have cost you to hand them a note so they’d just get out of your way. We do not build with love. If we did, we would build in such a way that the user will spend the littlest of time to get through our processes and platforms. Our agencies do not exist to make our lives better, at least, that is not a priority if at all it is an objective.

We may not know it, but it does come at a cost. Time is money. Every money that has been made in the history of our species was made with time. There is no money that was made, is being made and will be made that was not made with time as a central factor of its earning process. The richest countries in the world move the most number of citizens, goods and services around in the shortest possible time. The poorest countries have no sense of time. The former continue to look for even more efficient ways to ensure the smooth flow of commerce, the latter is not even aware of the factor of time on their economic process.

Is Nigeria open for business? Does traveling the world and looking for investors mean anything if those investors arrive at your airport and the only thing they really would love to do is go back to wherever they are coming from? I am a Nigerian, I was born here, I live here and I am irritated by our exit and entry protocols at our airports. They just should never be. Why is no senior official bothered about this? Why do we do things a certain way for several decades and never return to ask why we still do them and whether we can do them better and or differently?

What is in a passport that requires four people to look through it over one complete visit? How is that an efficient use of our security resources?

I have been through Nigerian International Airports in Abuja and Lagos about 40 times this year, on virtually all those occasions, I am asked what’s my phone number and where is my address. Other times, you get to fill a small form and still get to be asked those questions. I often wonder, what is the point of a biometric passport containing my NIN if this officer has to ask me about the data that is meant to be on my passport, and they still have to go through the hassle of typing the information as I share? What really is the point if someone else is going to be asking the same question next week and typing it into these computers that clearly have no storage capacity? We are not open for business. Really.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing