23rd April, 2023
By Kazeem Ugbodaga
The Federal Government on Sunday said the only alternative left to evacuate 5,500 Nigerians stranded in war-torn Sudan is by road which is also risky.
Foreign Affairs Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, in an interview on Channels TV’s Sunday Politics, said the government had been working around the clock in the last two days to try and get stranded Nigerians out.
“We have an embassy there so that’s already a good thing and our embassy, we’ve told them to put up a platform where all the Nigerians in the Sudan can log on to so information will be available and to coordinate the process obviously; what you need in a situation like this is a place where everybody can congregate before you start moving them out and because the airport is out of commission the only viable way out is by road.
“And but of course, it’s not totally safe. So you’re going to require government to provide some security and a safe corridor out. Our situation is particularly challenging because the numbers are so great. We’ve heard that the US and some other countries, the European countries have started evacuating, but what they’ve been evacuating are actually the diplomatic staff. They haven’t been able to start evacuating their citizens there,” he said.
According to Onyeama, “We can’t evacuate all our diplomatic staff from Sudan at the moment because they need to also coordinate the evacuation of all those students that we’re talking about, but we’re going to also evacuate them. So essentially, where we are at the moment is trying to get the authorization from the Sudanese government to undertake this long convoy on a journey and for them to provide some security.
“Now, we don’t want to take any risk and risk the lives of any Nigerian because we saw yesterday for instance, that the French, in trying to also evacuate their citizens came under fire, the convoy came under fire and they had to turn back, so we also don’t want to expose our citizens, brothers and sisters, to that danger as well.”
He added that the Nigerian government would try to get the requisite approval from the Sudanese government at the very highest level.
“I was in touch. I was put in touch today with somebody in the office of the president and made a formal request to have a safe passage corridor. They said that they received it, and they will now be giving it their attention, but we’re not going to stop at that, we’re going to keep on the options available to us, Egypt the Egyptian border is close ports.
“Port Sudanese is another place where we understand that some of the international diplomatic people have been congregating and the Philippine border. There’s a border with Chad as well. But the three that we’re looking at from Khartoum, those three-the Ethiopian border, the port Sudanese and Egyptian border,” he said.