With the arrival of the last flight and 15th Batch of Nigerians evacuated from Sudan last weekend the Committee of the Situation room has been officially closed.
The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development who is also the Chairman of the Committee, Dr Nasir Sani-Gwarzo announced the closure at a media parley in Abuja, the nation’s capital.
He, however, noted that a standby team will be left behind to continue to respond to any emergencies that may arise.
“And we also have a mop up mechanism where any Nigerian that is found in need of help in that country will be brought home back.”
According to him, the Committee has reached a milestone with significant success recorded.
“I call it a milestone because we still have some journey left. But I must say that we have reached a very critical point and an important point in the journey so far, the assignment given to us.
“I would like to iterate it so that we can clearly understand the magnitude of the assignment following the outbreak of war in the Republic of Sudan. Nigerians like any other country’s citizens, found themselves trapped, or stranded in the middle of the crisis and the federal government of Nigeria gave us the assignment to put in place a mechanism to ensure that every Nigerian that needs to be brought back home must be brought back home, alive and safe and indignity.
“These three words kept reoccurring in our discussions. And I’m happy to say that we have achieved all those three.” Sani-Gwarzo restated.
The Permanent Secretary further stated that there’s no other category of Nigerians that still remains behind.
“There are people that are recent travelers who wanted to come back home and were acquitted. There are people that have been in Sudan for several years, getting back to hundreds of years, from family to family, from generation to generation. So, for such we have some of them who want to come back.
” And currently, we have a committee that is profiling them in Sudan. And they will be brought back home to safety. Just like the students have all been brought back home. For that reason, we thought it is necessary for us to reprioritize our efforts.
” And it is in one of our efforts we discovered a young girl. One of the students who was left behind as a result of being in hospital on admission. She had chronic asthma and when she woke up, she realized that she was all alone. We sent a team to look at her in Khartoum. She came back, she was taken to port Sudan and I’m happy to announce that she was in the second to the last flight and she has been received.
” So we’re happy to announce that our mop up exercise is working”.
He also stated that the Committee has sent a word again, through all its mechanisms and contacts especially the students to make sure that none of their colleagues whom they know who may not have been in the evacuation exercise, would still benefit from the opportunity.
“We have also sent wards across other border towns in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. We had an initial personnel number of travelers who went through Jeddah as 45, today only 13 are remaining there. The 13 will also join us in Nigeria very soon through a mechanism that we have activated today. In Njamena Chad, we had 3 persons and those 3 have all found their ways back home to Nigeria. I’m Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we had 31 and all of them are back except 9 persons and all those nine will soon be home
“We have officially opened Port Sudan as our collection center, so anybody who wants come back home should go to Port Sudan to be profiled then we get them back to Nigeria”.
On the continuity of their education, the Permanent Secretary said all the necessary arrangements are in place to ensure that they are incorporated into the system.
“We realised that many of these students are in their final year. In fact, some of them were supposed to write their final exams in the last few days in April, unfortunately, the war broke out.
“We will not allow these students to their fates. We’ll support them. We’ll establish a Consultative forum under the leadership of various agencies that are here and co-opt other agencies here to take part in the decision-making.“
He said preparedness is their next moto noting that lessons learnt have been catalogued for the future.
Dr Sani-Gwarzo commended the unrelenting efforts of the media in ensuring that every aspect of the evacuation was properly publicized.
PIAK
