“How can we entice foreign tourists to come and love the Philippines if our airport personnel steal their money?”
Whether that OTS airport employee swallowed chocolates or dollar bills is not what is important anymore.
It is the huge embarrassment that she has brought to the country that matters the most.
Add the fact that the victim was apparently a Chinese national is a double whammy to our already fragile international airport reputation which unfortunately will take us a long time to erase.
But how bold could that OTS employee be?
With all the CCTVs in the airport, she still had the temerity to do what she did.
How can we entice foreign tourists to come and love the Philippines if our airport personnel steal their money?
This kind of petty corruption especially in our premier international airport will actually do more damage to the country than stealing a million.
This is because it is our country’s brand and reputation that suffer which should matter to any self-respecting Filipino.
In the final analysis this and other airport incidents like the bullet extortion incident a few years ago all boils down to our standard of management.
It seems all these years, we still have not progressed to international standards.
People who have traveled internationally understand this all too well.
Travelers for instance will almost certainly not experience this kind of incident in an airport like Changi Airport of Singapore because the standard of management there is topnotch.
There could be other problems but stealing $300 will not be one of them.
That airport has a well-developed and efficient management system.
The airport staff there are also well trained, motivated, professional and most of all, well compensated. They also understand very well what is at stake – That committing petty crimes in the airport like the one that happened at the NAIA will greatly damage the Singapore brand.
Unfortunately, that is something even our middle level government executives fail to appreciate.
This is the reason why we often read incidence of corruption being committed by government officials involving foreigners.
To some public officials, they even target foreigners because as they say, they are the ones who have the money until they realize the consequences of what they have committed like perhaps what happened to that OTS airport employee.
Remember those officials involved in the so-called pastillas operation?
What happened in this case, however, may have a bit of a silver lining because the last two cases may finally make our transportation leaders realize that modern buildings alone do not make a first class airport.
There are other factors that contribute to this.
First and foremost are the people who run the facility.
If we continue to employ the kind of people that we currently have in our airports today, we might as well forget investing so much money into a new airport because it will only be a continuation of the same.
Since the NAIA is the premier getaway of our country, we should have the finest people there that we can recruit to give our international visitors the best first impression of the country instead of the worst. We must also give them the best training, a work ethic that is second to none, an efficient management system and most importantly, just compensation.
Only then can we have an international airport that we Filipinos can be proud of.
After the two airport incidents, a lot of the problems plaguing the Ninoy Aquino International Airport started to come out for the nth time to try to find answers as to why our airport employees continue to commit these embarrassing offenses.
But all these are already known by one and all in the transportation industry.
What remains to be done is for all the solutions to be implemented.
But considering that we have a culture of reacting from incident to the next, it is doubtful if we can expect any meaningful changes anytime soon.
We will just have to be satisfied with all the discussions that have taken place and wait for the next incident.
No responsible official seems to want to grab the bull by the tail and try to come up with the needed long term solutions so this problem can be solved once and for all.
In fact, a little over a week after the swallowing incident, everything is beginning to return to “normal” at the airport as if nothing happened which is a shame.
How long before the next incident?
We will just have to wait and see.
But with the Christmas season already upon us and with the hundreds of thousands of overseas Filipinos coming home for the holidays, we probably are not going to wait very long.
This is because the practice of Christmas caroling in whispers by airport employees might just result in another embarrassing incident or incidents.
To be fair to the people running the NAIA airport, catering to tens of millions of passengers at the three NAIA terminals is a complicated operation and it is unavoidable not to have management problems. True enough, but these problems should not involve stealing or extortion cases.
The truth of the matter is that there are money making groups operating at the NAIA that needs to be dismantled permanently.
This is the reason why government agencies working at NAIA try to rotate their personnel there as often as possible without sacrificing the efficiency of the agency to prevent the formation of such money making operations.
As we can see, it is obviously not enough.
It is, therefore, left to the DOTr which is the government agency that manages all our airports to once and for all find a permanent solution to this recurring problem.
Let’s hope that it is equal to the job.