My first trip to Uganda and the drama at an African airport

I travelled to Uganda for the first time last week. I had two training sessions with reporters based at Nation Media Group, Uganda. One training was on impact measurement and the other on mobile journalism. As always, I was upbeat ahead of the trip. There is always something exciting and grown up about crisscrossing airport halls. There is also a sense of renewal that comes with being in a different country – especially for the first time. Also exciting was the fact that we would land at the Entebbe International Airport, and take a road trip to Kampala!

My trip started too early. I was traveling on a day the anti-Finance Bill protests were happening across the country. On such days, one is never sure of what the roads will look like and so, I worked with a lot of lead time. I arrived at JKIA four whole hours before my check in time. On hand, I had an old copy of The Notebook, a novel by Nicholas Sparks, which kept me busy.

Young adults

By the time I started making my way through the security checks, I was close to halfway through the page-turner story of Allie and Noah, who fell in love as teenagers and were now reconnecting as young adults, under very riveting circumstances.

The flight was smooth and took a cool 55 minutes. I remember taking a deep breath at touch down because I wanted to remember how it felt to see and inhale Uganda for the first time.

Going through immigration on arrival is usually a quick process from my previous travel experiences, and I knew that in no time, I would be out of the concrete and into space, taking pictures and videos of Entebbe as I settled for the 40-minute drive to Kampala.

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It was after I collected my bag and was back to my ‘Time-to-see-Uganda’ mood that I started paying attention to the environment around me. There was a crowd of people. Everyone who had collected their bags seemed to be lingering around. Huge trollies with sometimes up to five large suitcases, children impatiently saying things to their parents, in languages I could not immediately decipher, replete travellers standing in various forms of impatience… I was hungry and feeling claustrophobic.

Untrained eye

The Entebbe airport is not large. We also seemed to have arrived at the same time as a long-haul large plane carrying hundreds of passengers. This explains why the lobby was teeming with many people who, for the untrained eye, looked like they were assembled for a political rally.

The scorching afternoon sun was making everything hot and unbearable. I spotted one of my colleagues, a regular traveller on that route and asked him why we were not moving at all.

“Shouldn’t we be heading out of the airport?” I asked. Then my heart was broken by his response. “We are on a queue; our luggage has to be checked again on the way out.”

And that is the story of how we spent 55 minutes to fly from Nairobi to Entebbe, and then end up spending about an hour going through the airport clearance.

As you would expect, tempers started rising. At some point, there was an altercation between a traveller and one of the airport staff. The exchange was a welcome distraction from all the drab. A traveller whipped out their phone and recorded part of the squabble.

Being exposed

An airport official who saw him insisted that he deletes the video. The crowds protested against what was seen as gagging by the airport official. In this day and age, when people walk around with secret cameras and can even record without your knowledge, my advice would be put your house in order if you are not comfortable with being exposed.

We moved slightly and I could see the scanning machine. Just one machine! The other machine had broken down. Several questions were going through my head – if they were going to insist on these seemingly pointless checks, why did they at least install enough scanners? Did they ever do an impact assessment of what this exercise achieves, apart from irritating and exhausting travellers?

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My colleague, Bernard, who was ahead of us on the queue seemed to have read my mind.

“This thing is like a conveyor belt. I have been standing and watching this process. No single bag has been intercepted. In fact, no one is even monitoring the bags as they go through the scanning machines. The bags are simply put through on one side to come out on the other side.”

What is your worse experience travelling through an airport in Africa?

The writer is the Research & Impact Editor at NMG, [email protected]