The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama has explained why subsequent Nigerians to be evacuated home from abroad will have to pay for their isolation accommodation and feeding within the period.
Onyeama said the government would have loved to pick the bills but for paucity of funds. He spoke during the daily briefing of the Presidential Taskforce on Covid-19.
There are well over 4,000 stranded Nigerians abroad awaiting evacuation following the global lockdown occasioned by the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Returnees have been asked to pay about N297,000 apart from their flight tickets for their hotel accommodation for the period of isolation/quarantine on arriving the country.
In the last one week, the country had evacuated 678 Nigerians from United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States. These sets of returnees are under the care of the Federal Government.
He said the government was not happy that subsequent returnees would have to pay for their 14 days compulsory isolation and feeding within that period.
He said: “This gives me the opportunity to really communicate to you the challenges we are having with respect to evacuees.
“There has been quite a lot in social media, especially after the recent directives that we communicated to our missions indicating certain amount of money that anybody who wanted to be evacuated back to the country needed to pay.
“And it was not just for air ticket, but also accommodation for two weeks and two days and the cost of feeding.
“Now this is not by any stretch of imagination something that the government is happy to do.
“As I mentioned time and time again, if the resources were there, we will evacuate everybody, and if our medical infrastructure was solid and case load was much lower, we could look at other ways of revisiting our protocol.
“But they way things are at the moment, the fragility of our health infrastructure, the trajectory of the increasing numbers of positive test being what they are, we have to take the greatest care with regards to the protocol we adopt regarding to people coming home.
“So it has been decided after long discussion and evaluation by the best medical minds that we have that it is best for us, for the interest of the country, that there should be a period of quarantine when any of our evacuees comes home, that has a cost too.
“And you know one of the things people have been suggesting: why can we not house them in NYSC facilities, school facilities which would be cheaper? And the answer to that given again by our medical people is that the quarantine must be one per room so that you don’t have infections and so forth.
“So it has to be premises that provides for individual rooms. And the only one we could lay our hands on that are available are hotels.
“We went to great length to get these hotels at the best rate possible. And the amount we could get for Abuja is N15,000 and also negotiated as best as we could for the feeding.
“Now with regards to flight coming in, one of the real challenges we had was that we didn’t want to keep people out there any longer that they needed to be.
“So for us we put a lot of emphasis on trying to get as many people back as quickly as possible, and that means whatever flights are available, we will try and arrange with those flights and take them back.
“Now, there is a lot of uproar about the costing that we presented for those wishing to come back. But as I said, the resources are not there. But we are still looking for resources all over the place.”
“But knowing also that time is of essence and a lot of people will have to come back and so we are making this flight possibilities available for those who really feel they have to come back as quickly as possible while at the same time we are negotiating, we are trying to find what kind of health resources we can find them to assist as best as we can, and that is an ongoing process and negotiation.
“So this is really the situation we have and we hope we will be able to present a package possibilities that would be easier on our people who want to come home.”