Alhaji Iddi Sumaila
Preparations for Hajj 2026 have commenced with local managers of the annual religious activities concluding two zoom conferences with Saudi officials.
This was disclosed by the Director of Administration of the Hajj Board, Alhaji Iddi Sumaila in an interview with a community television, Sharabutu TV in Accra.
He told his host that “we must prepare for the annual pilgrimage and not wait for the President to appoint new persons first. That would not be the right thing to do given that such assignments are continuous.”
Speaking about the luggage left behind during the last Hajj, he explained that each pilgrim was given two official bags but some decided to buy extra bags, “and this created problems for us because they had to leave these behind. Some of them left their luggage in the care of their friends, and since airline rules demand passengers should be on flights with their luggage, these could not be carried by the flights.”
“We had to do containers for these luggage. Since these were not enough to fill a container, we had to share the space with an agent in Saudi,” he disclosed.
The luggage left behind, he said, have arrived and cleared.
He called on stakeholders to be patient with managers of the Hajj and not to quickly turn to insults and attacks.
Hajj is a religious affair and so those entrusted with managing it will not do anything to undermine their assignments. Being the first operation of the new managers there were bound to be mistakes, he said, adding that these would be corrected in subsequent operations.
He recalled that “one man who claimed to have lost his luggage subsequently found it and went back to social media to reverse his initial complaint.”
Calls are being made for the few uncleared luggage, their owners not residents of Accra, he added.