Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, says the country’s limited resources and poor medical infrastructure has left the Federal Government with no option but to request quarantine fees from potential evacuues.
This comes after outrage trailed the FG’s order to its Mission in Thailand not to evacuate any stranded individual who fails to pay for accommodation and feeding charges ahead of repatriation.
This was contained in a letter to the evacuees signed by the Head of Chancery, Nigerian Mission in Thailand, Nicholas Uhomoibhi, and dated May 14, 2020.
As stated in the letter, the evacuees are to pay N297,000 for their accommodation and feeding ahead of their arrival in Nigeria.
However, in response at the Presidential Task Force briefing on Friday in Abuja, Mr Onyeama said the FG regrets the development and not by any stretch of imagination something the government is “happy to do”.
“If the resources were available, we would evacuate everybody and if our medical infrastructure were solid and caseload was much lower, we could revisit our protocol,” Onyeama wrote on his official Twitter account.
” But the fragility of our health infrastructure, the trajectory of the increasing numbers of the positive test being what they are, we have to take the greatest care with regards to the protocols adopted.
” It’s been decided after long discussion and evaluation by medical experts, that it’s best for the interest of the country that there should be a period of quarantine when any of our evacuees come home. This has a cost to it.
” It has been suggested that we should use the NYSC facilities and also school facilities which would be less expensive, the answer by our medical experts is that the quarantine has to be one person per room.
” We’ve brought in upwards of 620 evacuees who have to be managed, there are human resources needed to be present, to monitor and manage the evacuees apart from other administrative arrangements needed to be put in place.
“So we want to take some time to process the ones we have at the moment before we admit others coming back because we don’t have the capacity at the moment. This is a challenging situation especially because the funding resources are not available.
” But we are doing everything humanly possible to evacuate under terms and conditions that are acceptable and manageable for the evacuees.”
