Foreign Affairs Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, has said that the evacuation process of stranded Nigerians abroad due to the coronavirus pandemic will be paused for now as the country needs to sort out those already airlifted into the country.
The Minister, who stated this at the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 Control in Abuja, said the airlifting will resume when there is accommodation.
He noted that there are still many Nigerians out there who are willing to come back home from China, India, France, Canada, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan and other countries.
The Minister, however, said, “In regards to Evacuation Flights, we are getting to the maximum capacity we can cope with in terms of services and care at this time. We will therefore be staggering our evacuation flights, and dealing with the evacuees in place first before bringing others”.
He also made know that local airlines will be used subsequently.
“The Nigerian Government is mindful of the need to use local carriers. Arrangements for airlines for the first batch of Nigerians abroad were not done by the Government. Flights being arranged henceforth are all Nigerian carriers”, he said.
The Minister apologised for the logistic and delay issues that occurred with previous airlifts, “Once again, I would like to apologise profusely for what went wrong with the transfer of passengers from Lagos to Abuja on Friday and also the logistics issues faced in Abuja. We have put in place mechanisms to ensure that no such thing occurs again.
“We’ve seen the benefits of those new mechanisms put in place because the flight that came in yesterday from the US, everything went seamlessly and that’s how we will want to keep it going forward’, he said.
So far, 678 Nigerians have been accommodated in the evacuation process in three batches: 265 from United Arab Emirates (UAE), 253 from United Kingdom (UK) and 160 from the United States (U.S.).
