Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama has said that 200 Nigerians living in the United States have indicated interest in getting evacuated.
The United States is currently the worst hit country by the coronavirus pandemic which first broke out in China.
According to Onyeama who spoke at the Presidential Taskforce against COVID-19 press briefing, the Nigerians indicated interest after the Federal Government made the announcement evacuate its citizens.
“The presidential task force under the chairmanship of the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF) has actually been engaging with this when there was a closure of the airport. So, the response was not as a result of letters coming in from Nigerians in the diaspora as has been mentioned in some media houses.
At that time, we did not have all our isolation centres in place and all the other logistical arrangements in place. So for that reason, we’ve kept it in abeyance while we were putting all those things in place and hence now, we have sufficient beds and so forth and protocol is no well established, and we now feel much stronger and in a better position to undertake this herculean task of trying to see how we can bring Nigerians outside the country back into the country.
In that context, we’ve now started to get great numbers of Nigerians especially in the United States where almost 200 have now indicated and are willing to return. We are engaging with our embassies in China and the high commission in London and also in France to work out all the logistics. Things are now falling in place, and we are getting a sense of what needs to be done.” he said.
The minister added that 67 Nigerians from neighboring countries are currently on their way and traveling by land.
“We have 67 Nigerians including children and women. They were in Cote D’ivoire and we needed to engage with the government of Togo, the government of Benin for them to be able to go through. And they are now at the Ngerian border and we got the authorisation for them to come into the country and they would be in isolation for the mandatory 14 days,” he said.
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