Hajj Chairman Explains Challenges

Alhaji Abdul Rauf Tanko

The chairman of the Pilgrims Affairs Office Ghana (PAOG) Alhaji Abdul Rauf Tanko Ibrahim has explained that this year's operations have been bedeviled with challenges which are avoidable.

He mentioned that delayed payment, which has become more like an annual ritual, caused the Hajj processes to delay by over two weeks, adding that “the net effect was delay in the issuance of visas. It also led to a situation whereby prospective pilgrims handed money over to agents at a time the quota was exhausted, thus making it practically impossible to obtain visas much less, travel. And when this was communicated to them, some of them got a bit agitated initially, but later understood why it would be impossible to process them at the time they paid. As a matter of fact, there has been over subscription this year.”

The importance of early payment, he said, has been hammered over and over again to agents but such entreaties have not been heeded to.

He also hinted that yet another challenge was the backlog of pilgrims from last year which exerted a little pressure on this year's quota and had to be cleared.

Alhaji Tanko intimated that “because of the huge desire to travel this year, albeit all slots are filled, some unscrupulous individuals are taking advantage to defraud unsuspecting Ghanaians.

He therefore called on all aspiring pilgrims to desist from giving monies to people who promise to procure Hajj visas for them through other means.

There are still over 270 visas to be issued from the Saudi Embassy, which with the support of the Office of the President, should be done by close of day on Monday 29^th August, 2016.

When these are done, I am sure we would have succeeded in lowering the anxiety of those whose passports have been submitted for a while now,” the chairman said.

The delay in releasing the 270 passports from the Saudi Embassy, we gathered, was due to some technical challenges.

The chairman therefore called on pilgrims and families to exercise restraint.

He also urged the Muslim Ummah to continue to lend the Hajj Office their maximum cooperation.

There is still one more flight from Ghana and we have also made some special arrangement for an aircraft to come through Senegal to collect the remnants of our pilgrims who for one reason or the other missed their flights, he added.

By A.R. Gomda