End this airport nuisance

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I am appalled that we have come to accept dripping pipes that cause flood. Some months ago, maybe early in 2018, I went to the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston to pick up someone. While waiting for the person to exit the airport building, I observed a man persuading arriving passengers to accept his help to load luggage into vehicles that were there to pick them up. I thought he was just lending a hand until his ‘foreigner(s)’ arrived. Over the course of time that I was waiting, I realised that this man was a ‘loader man’ similar to those who haunt public passengers at most of the main transport centres islandwide.

I was thinking that maybe he had just started and the authorities would soon have him removed. About ten minutes later my hopes fell as Humpty Dumpty did from the wall when I saw the loader man accompanying a female officer to the Scotia automated teller machine (ATM). She could have been at, or above the rank of inspector. I am assuming this rank because she was wearing khaki uniform. He waited on her outside and then strolled back across the road with her, both engaged in lively chit-chat. I was amazed.

DRAW A LINEI assume she works at the airport police post, and that she and others are well aware of this nuisance, but for reasons unknown choose to ‘see and blind, hear and deaf’.

I had an occasion to again visit the airport recently and was dumbfounded, bowled over like the stumps from a Courtney Walsh delivery, when I saw the same man, offering to load luggage in people’s vehicle for a ‘thing’.

Are we so immune to these things? Have we no vision? When will we stop this madness before it reaches a point of no return? Are we going to wait until there are more loader men at the airport than arriving passengers before we draw a line and decide that this is not a road we want to travel?

I don’t want to give anyone ideas but I am afraid that the next time I visit the airport there won’t be a loader man but loader men. These are some of the things that have the potential to become disastrous which prompt persons to go through the departure lounge at the same airport and for years do not use the arrival section. Please let us see beyond our nose and end those things that have the potential to stop us as a people and as a country.

ZAVION MATTIS