“The NAIA has always been a beehive of many illegal activities that continue to tarnish and embarrass our country”
LAST week, the news was all about a NAIA passenger being charged P1,260 by a taxi driver just to go from one terminal to another.
The only reason why the public knows about this embarrassing incident is that the passenger was smart enough to video the whole incident.
As it now turns out, it is just part of the many money making rackets going on in NAIA but, this time, it is being run by the NAIA airport police.
But make no mistakes about it, the many agencies operating there have their own rackets. Some of these are the escort services for illegal aliens and the tanim bala operation that still pops out every now and then.
The NAIA has always been a beehive of many illegal activities that continue to tarnish and embarrass our country.
As if those were not enough, one website falsely identified the Philippines based on a very dubious survey to be the most dangerous country to visit which does not help at all and will take time to counter and disprove.
This, in spite of the fact that the Philippines has never been identified as one of the top 10 most dangerous places for travelers by any reputable studies before.
The website later replaced the country with another country but the damage has been done, giving the DOT a lot of headaches on how to repair the country’s image.
Right from the start, that so-called study was dubious because there are other countries undergoing civil wars considered more dangerous.
The 2025 Peace Index report for instance, places the Philippines 105th out of 169 countries compared to the United States which is in 128th place. That is far from being the most dangerous country.
Why some of our people whether they are in government or private industry would choose the premier entry point to our country to exhibit our worst traits is mind boggling.
Instead of trying to present the very best of the country at the NAIA, they show and display our very worst.
No wonder we have deteriorated so low that we cannot even graduate to become an upper middle income economy which we have been trying to do since the late 1970s.
What could be so wrong with us?
Another example of people displaying their worst are those who went to the whole trouble of covering their car plates simply to avoid apprehension when the NCAP policy was implemented instead of simply following traffic rules as everybody should be doing in order to help improve traffic.
Is it any wonder that we cannot put any heads or tails in improving our horrendous traffic problems?
No matter what the government will do if the people do not do their part, not much is going to happen.
In the recent heavy rains last week, it took longer than usual for the water to subside due to too much garbage.
This is because many residents simply throw their garbage anywhere that caused the flooding which they then blamed on the government proving that many of the daily problems that we have are basically self-inflected.
To solve all the problems related to the NAIA from corruption to making our premier getaway a truly world-class international airport comparable with the best, a lot more will have to be done.
As I have always written in the past, the NAIA is a complex and must be treated as such.
Constructing modern terminal buildings surrounded by an enormous squatter colony is not enough to make the facility world class.
Charging a passenger P1,260 taxi fare for a trip of less than a kilometer is really just the tip of the iceberg of the problems in NAIA.
Just getting to the airport for a trip abroad and exiting it upon arrival is always like having to undergo an obstacle course.
Unless the government can find a systemic solution and succeed in professionalizing the personnel assigned there by selecting the best and giving them the best training so that the corruption culture will disappear, NAIA will always be what it is: A bastion of enterprising shenanigans always giving the country a black eye.
