The National Hajj Commission has begun preparations for the next pilgrimage to avoid problems encountered in the just concluded hajj operation, an official said in Abuja on Tuesday.
Dr Saleh Okenwa, the Commissioner for Planning Research, Statistics Information and Library Services in the commission, said the commission decided to take proactive steps to avoid hitches.
Okenwa said the commission studied the challenges in the previous exercises and decided to introduce a new policy every year to reduce the problems faced by pilgrims while in Mecca.
He said the commission had begun to make new pilgrim-friendly programmes to ensure that the next hajj was successful.
“Each yea, the commission comes up with a new policy. In 2011, so many things were introduced and each was introduced because of problems the pilgrims had previously,” he said.
According to him, the National Reception Team was introduced last year and more than 40 officials from the country were sent as receptionists to Jeddah to welcome pilgrims.
“When pilgrims of a particular state are arriving, some officials of the state will be there to assist them, show them the way from Medinah to Mecca and secure good accommodation for them.
“In previous years, the commission noticed that when large states were involved, there were lots of problems encountered by the pilgrims.
“We therefore introduced the team, mainly concerned with national issues to receive all Nigerian pilgrims and assist them in all necessary steps to be taken,” he said.
Okenwa said command and control was also introduced last year to monitor air craft from different places to reduce delays in flights.
“In previous years, we used to depend on air carriers to tell us flight time, but we noticed that they give wrong information and delay pilgrims for many hours and we decided to monitor it by ourselves,” he said.
Okenwa added that permanent accommodation was introduced in Medinah in 2011 to solve the problem of sharing space with other countries.
“The permanent accommodation we had last year made Nigerians to hire the whole building where we did not have to share the building with other nationalities.
“Though it was expensive, it worked to the satisfaction of the pilgrims and we were able to accommodate more than 73,000 Nigerian pilgrims before Arafat,” he said.