By Ahmad Muazu
In the midst of the debate roused by a recent commentary describing NAHCON’s new tour-operator guidelines as “a portrait of confusion” and the Commission as “a serpent biting its own tail,” I confess to genuine admiration for the prose and genuine discomfort with the conclusions. It is a fine piece of writing. It is also, on nearly every point where being right actually matters, wrong.
I have spent years inside this industry, close enough to the machinery to know how it grinds and close enough to the pilgrims to know who bleeds when it fails, so permit me to respond, not as a defender of any office, but as my father would insist I must: when good men keep quiet, injustice thrives, and evil is handed the gift of complacency.
Let us start where the critic lands his heaviest blow, the ₦250 million bank guarantee, presented as a fifty-fold escalation engineered to strangle small operators. Here is what the writer conveniently leaves out. The old regime demanded cash, real naira, deposited into a NAHCON account and locked away from the operator’s business for the entire Hajj cycle. The new regime abolishes that arrangement entirely.
A bank guarantee is not money surrendered; it is credibility demonstrated, and the distinction is not a technicality; it is the whole argument. The operator’s capital remains the operator’s, working, while the guarantee simply asks one Nigerian bank to vouch for what the operator has always claimed about himself. I have sat with families whose deposits vanished into thin air. I have watched people weep at the airport over money that was never coming back, and the Dan Dubai affair, which swallowed nearly a billion naira of unsuspecting pilgrims, is a story for another column entirely.
The writer calls the guarantee a wall. I call it a firewall, and there is a difference between the two that no amount of elegant prose should be allowed to blur. On the celebrated “closed shop,” in which one needs Hajj experience to be licensed and a licence to gain experience, the writer constructs a lovely paradox and declares the industry padlocked. It also bears reiterating what the requirement is actually for.
Slot-utilisation evidence exists because of a racket everyone in this industry knows and almost nobody will name in print: operators who collect allocations they never intend to fill, sit on them, trade them, and let genuine pilgrims absorb the consequences.
This past Hajj season, pilgrims who had paid early were quietly dropped by their own operators the moment a higher bidder showed up. Asking an operator to prove he used what he was given is not exclusion; it is the most elementary accountability imaginable. And the door for newcomers is not welded shut; it opens through Umrah, the year-round proving ground where a company builds its record, its Saudi relationships, and its discipline before it is trusted with the far heavier responsibility of Mashair. This is reminiscent, in its logic if not its scale, of how no airline is handed a wide-body route on its maiden application. No new company should be handed pilgrims’ safety in Mina on its maiden outing either. That is not monopoly. That is a regulator refusing to gamble with other people’s mothers.
There is a reason this history matters, and the critic skips past it too quickly. It was a body of the Tour operators that first proposed raising the Hajj caution deposit, well before NAHCON’s review turned the proposal into policy. I was in the room for the post-2026 review season, and the associations were in that room as well. Here is the irony worth sitting with: several of the provisions now mocked as regulatory overreach, mandatory price disclosure, a clear refund policy, the crackdown on fraudulent advertising, the ban on banners in Mashair, were demanded by the Saudi authorities themselves, who had simply grown weary of Nigerian operators undercutting and embarrassing one another on foreign soil. The writer frames this as NAHCON versus the industry. The more honest frame is the industry versus its own parasites, with the Commission, for once, holding the pen instead of looking away.
To the “paper Commission” jibe, I concede half the point, and only half. Yes, parts of the Umrah licensing process still move on paper. Yes, digitisation remains unfinished, and yes, there is a genuine irony in demanding Nusuk alignment via photocopy. But a journey still in progress is not the same thing as a hypocrisy, and I would ask the writer plainly: when last did tour operators apply for a Hajj licence on paper? This is reminiscent of Saudi Arabia’s own trajectory, which did not suspend regulation while it built Nusuk. It began with Mutawwif, an analogue system, long before Nusuk existed, and what started as scaffolding has since become the platform others now study and envy. The same NAHCON leadership being lampooned stood up after the 2026 Hajj and admitted publicly, on the record, that the operation had fallen short and required urgent reform, a candour rare enough in Nigerian public administration to qualify as exotic. An institution that names its own wounds is not a serpent devouring its tail. It is a patient finally willing to get on the table. If the writer believes digitisation should have come first, he and I are not adversaries on that point. But nobody suspends the traffic police because the lights are still being wired.
Which brings us to the gravest charge, that NAHCON is manufacturing monopoly and abdicating its duty. Let us be honest about what the circular actually does. It publishes uniform, objective criteria and applies them to everyone, incumbents included. Not one existing operator is exempted from a single requirement. Every company that clears the standard is licensed, whether there are fifty of them or five hundred. A monopoly protected by regulation looks like grandfather clauses, discretionary waivers, and unpublished exceptions whispered about in private. This is the opposite of that. The rules are printed, the bar is visible, and the only companies with anything to fear are the ones who cannot clear it. A market in which anyone can collect a widow’s last eight or ten million naira on charisma alone is not competition; it is a hunting ground with a marketing budget.
The Hajj is not a normal market, and the pilgrim is not a normal customer. She is a woman who sold land. He is a trader, a farmer, who sweated and saved and postponed comfort for years for a journey he or she will make once, before their Lord. Between that pilgrim and that journey, my sympathies are settled, and I make no apology for it: I will take a demanding regulator over a devouring operator every day of the week, and twice on the Day of Arafah. The essay I am answering was, again, a fine portrait. It simply hung in the wrong gallery, because the confusion it painted so vividly belongs less to the Commission that wrote the rules than to an industry that spent years profiting handsomely from their absence. May God save the pilgrim from all of us who claim to be serving them. I come in peace.
And this is my humble opinion.
