[ 2017-02-09 ]

Cecilia Abena Dapaah, Minister-designate of Aviation

Heathrow’s handling of Ghanaians beyond me - Cecilia Dapaah
Minister-designate of Aviation Cecilia Abena
Dapaah has said addressing the bad treatment meted
out to Ghanaian passengers at Heathrow airport in
the UK is beyond her Ministry, but has assured
Ghanaians that the government will find ways of
dealing with the problem.

Her comment follows concerns raised by Minority
Leader Haruna Iddrisu with regards to the
treatment meted out to Ghanaian travellers at
Heathrow.

During Wednesday’s vetting by the Appointments
Committee, Mr Iddrisu said: “Ghanaian passengers
on British Airways have some treatment that many
are unhappy about and it’s been reported widely.
The way they are treated on arrival at Heathrow
defies what is dignifying for a respected
international traveller. Relative to that is the
charge on kilos. If you are flying a certain
airline to Nigeria, you are treated differently
and in the Ghanaian case you lose off in terms of
kilos. Can you assure this committee that you will
take urgent steps to address this poor treatment
meted to our passengers and then also to rectify
the deserving kilo thing to our passengers.”

Responding to this, Mrs Dapaah said: “This same
problem was handled in Nigeria differently. They
signed a petition to the airline and they
succeeded in getting more kilos when they were
travelling. So that is one option.”

“The other option is to break the monopoly of
the British Airways flights. I am not against
carriers coming in, but I think some airfares are
outrageously high and because we don’t have any
direct flight to the UK, they (British Airways)
have the monopoly, so I believe the competition
that can come in can take care of the lowering of
fares.

“With regards to what happens in Heathrow, it is
a bit beyond me or the ministry in the sense that
once you are out of our Flight Information Region
(FIR) and beyond the shores of Africa, I don’t
know how it is going to pan out, so I will do some
more enquiries and see what we can do about it. If
they had the problems here at Kotoka, I can assure
you within a week or two I would have a meeting on
it, but in Heathrow, I don’t know the locus to
travelling all the way there to deal with that
issue but we will have a look at it.”

Source - classfmonline.com

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