Read first part...

As soon as you come into the arrivals hall, you are greeted by indifference from airport officials that have attended to millions of pilgrims on that day’s shift. You will be left there for hours on end unattended.

You cannot protest or complain to anyone even where you can speak the lingua franca. Here, nobody cares who you are in your country or what type of package you paid for; it is a shocking status leveller for the most arrogant. You are just a pilgrim like other millions from around the world.

Here, poverty stricken officials who can be bribed with a trifle will not be found like we have at home; you just have to swallow your pride –provided you don’t choke on it.

In this arrivals hall, you will be administered fresh immunisation injections like the one intending pilgrims have and be given certain tablets that you must swallow in the presence of the officials; medics here do not believe in what is contained on our ‘yellow cards’ as if they knew that you can buy one, with genuine department of health’s seal of approval, even at the point of boarding your flight for only five hundred naira, write your name and passport number on it and you are free to travel; your immunisation is complete!

The queue at the Immigration counter is endless. It is like the siraat over which all must pass on the last day. VIPs are no VIPs here until they have their passports stamped, and move out of the arrivals hall where they may be received by protocol staff from the Nigerian Embassy or Consulate, or their hajj tour operator. Do not think that your wait has ended. It has just begun! You still have two to four hours more of waiting if your destination is to Makkah depending on what options are at your disposal for an exit strategy.

If you choose to go out with your passport illegally and you happen to arrive in the morning, you have to wait until night when evil things are easier to commit. For a price, you are smuggled out of this dungeon in jeeps with tinted classes. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself lying down motionless in the roomy luggage compartment with a former this and a former that from Nigeria. If you succeed, you are free, and with your passport in hand you can go to Makkah on your own arrangement or travel to Madinah at your convenience; if you are caught, the car, its driver and illegal cargo are consigned to sijin (prison); your hajj would not be possible that year; you may watch the hajj live on television screen with other inmates. Thus, a few hours wait has transmuted to months or years on end.

This piece is not on the implication, to states pilgrim authorities or private hajj operators, of the above scenario of people absconding with their passports out of the Hajj terminal. But why will otherwise honourable people subject themselves to the humiliation of lying under the seat of vehicles to be smuggled out of the airport? Going out through the legal means is torturous and inhumane. The buses are old, most of them; if you see new models they are hardly assigned to any Nigerian pilgrims. Hajjis are made to form queues; passports are sorted out and once you are on board for a three or so hour drive to Makkah (such pilgrim airport shuttles have a designated lane on the highway and a speed limit of 60 kilometres per hour that must be observed for the safety of the hajjis), every movement you make is monitored by the hajj ministry official in the bus who is charged with the task of taking you to the field office in Makkah where all passengers and passports are checked; the number must tally with the original figure at the time the bus left the airport.

Your ordeal does not end there. The field office will register the passports while the pilgrims remain seated in the bus for another hour at least before a guide is provided to take them to their hotel or pilgrim apartment. If you happen to have ‘luxurious’ buses in your group, you begin to realise the wisdom behind the ‘exorbitant’ rates you were charged for fully air-conditioned buses. Your mind begins to appreciate the necessity and not luxury of that arrangement.