National Hajj Commission of Nigeria boss, Prince Anofiu Elegushi, is one of the people you’d mention when the discourse is about HAJJ Operations in Nigeria. This is because of his strategic post as the Federal Commissioner for Operations and Licensing at the commission. How critical is his role to the successful handling of Hajj operations in Nigeria, and what has his experience been so far? What drives his passion? These are some of the questions City People put to him when we met recently.
Read on!
What are the specific innovations that you deployed over the years to make the operation successful, because Hajj operations in Nigeria had always been fraught with issues year in, year out?
Let me start with the States. Like, in 2012, I went for Hajj. When we got to Medinah, we struggled to get a bed for ourselves. In Makkah, it was hell. So, I mean, we even slept outside in the passage. Since that time, I had it in my head that I would change things. So, when I now got to work, I made sure that the house where people will stay is secured. I will get the floor plan of that house, first floor, second floor, you know, the number of beddings, we will do the statistics.
So, in Lagos, you will know your bed, you will know your floor, you will also know your roommate. That’s one of the innovations. So, from there, we will paste on the door the names of the people who will be in this room.
When you enter the room, you will see your name on the bed. For you to know the bed you are sleeping on. So, you won’t drag the room, you won’t drag the bed. That was what I did. And it was a success. And I made sure that I went with enough Ulamas and Hajj guides.
So, those are the things that I believe helped us. Apart from other things that we just improved upon.
Coming to where we are today, if you look at the Hajj operation from 2024, we will never have any left over. We have done over 30 flights just from Sunday till now.
Do you have the figures for pilgrims travelling this year, 2026?
We are doing almost 45,000. That is all over the country. But for Tour operators, they are doing about 9,000 or something. But most of them do steady flights. So, we don’t have much control over that.
 Again, they are saying that those who will be going in 2027 have been mandated to pay before November this year. Why the change in Policy…why the rush?
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If you have enough time to plan, you will get it done in a beautiful way. So if you don’t plan, you are planning for failure. So we want to have enough time to plan, we want to start working like a country like Indonesia, whereby for the 2027 Hajj, they already have their list. So that is the reason why they are not using projections anymore. In Nigeria, we always start by using projections.
Sometimes we project for 50,000, and at the end of the day, over 60, 000 will turn up. So we have to get to a standard that we know we are getting ready for 2027 by now, which will allow us to have our preparations instead of using projections to fix up our services. We must stop using projections because sometimes it doesn’t serve us right at all.
The reason why we want to close in time is so that Saudis will know the number of people they want to care for from Nigeria. You can’t just say, I just came on today and I discovered that you are 100,000, and my plan is not more than 60,000.. It’s going to create issues. But they want to know in time that this is the number of people who will be coming from a particular country. Â And the only way to know is by planning.
What determines the number they give to each country? Is it the country that determines, or Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia always determines. And I think they determine it by the percentage of Muslims in some of these countries. Like in 2023, we exhausted our 95,000 because what normally happens is that if they give 95,000, we give 20,000 to the tour operators and we give 75,000 to the state-owned operators. So in 2023, we exhausted all the 95,000. In 2024, they gave us 95,000, but we did about just 60,000. In 2025, we did around 60,000 or something. But this year, they first gave us what we utilised in 2025. It was around 60-something thousand, but they later slashed it to 50,000. So out of the 50,000, we gave 9,000 plus to the Tour Operators, and the state utilised about 40,000. So it is the standard practice every year.
