Drivers evacuating Nigerians, mostly students from Sudan, have halted the journey over the failure of government to pay them in full. The evacuees, it was learnt, are now trapped in the desert before getting to Egypt.
“Can you believe that we have been stuck in this desert for five hours? We don’t have water…our money has finished. Can you imagine? The drivers said they are not moving their buses because they are not being paid.
“We are stuck in the desert. And before we started this journey, we experienced different things. We are in an unknown location and in a very big danger. We don’t have anything,” a female student was seen raising her voice in the one-minute video clip.
Also, in an audio file, another student was heard saying their location in the desert was almost 1,000 km from the capital, claiming their present location has poor mobile phone coverage.
However, Chairperson of Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM) Mrs Abike Dabiri-Erewa said the evacuees are expected in the country tomorrow as the issue has been resolved. She said she had got in touch with the Director-General of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) to resolve the issue.
On Wednesday, the Federal Government said it would spend $1.2 million to deploy vehicles in evacuating Nigerians stranded in Sudan.
It also said the amount would be spent on 40 luxury buses to move at least 2,400 Nigerian citizens out of the crisis-ridden country by road to safe places where they can be flown home.
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, who disclosed this at the week’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari, in Abuja, said the high cost of the evacuation was to provide security cover for the eight-hour journey from Luxol to Cairo and the eleven-hour trip from Aswan to Cairo, Egypt.
The Minister explained that talks were ongoing on alternative plans for continued education especially for the students among the evacuees.
According to him, once the stranded students were safely moved to Egypt, other arrangements would be made to airlift them back to Nigeria. He added that no Nigerian had died in the fight between the rival forces in the Sudan crisis.
Also, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Zubairu Dada, said the government was confident that no Nigerian being evacuated would die as the journey to leave Sudan starts.
“We are confident we shall not lose any life in this exercise to evacuate stranded Nigerians,” he said, adding that the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) Director General and members of staff of the Nigerian Commission in Egypt and Ethiopia are on the ground at the Egyptian border in Aswan to receive those already evacuated from Sudan.
He explained that the government was leveraging the 72 hours cease-fire window given by the Sudanese government to evacuate as many Nigerians as possible.
“So, women and children would be given priority before diplomats who were equally involved in the evacuation logistics,” Dada said.
