Laraba MUREY
After weeks of efforts leading to the evacuation of 2,518 Nigerians from war-ravaged Sudan, the Federal Government says it has officially shut down the Sudan Committee Committee rescue situation room.
Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Dr Nasir Sani-Gwarzo, who is also the Chairman of the Committee, announced the closure during a press conference in Abuja on Monday.
Sani-Gwarzo described the closure as a milestone, stating that the committee has reached a very critical point in the assignment given to it by ensuring that every Nigerian that is willing to come back home is returned alive, safe and with dignity.
He said, “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.
“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 recurring in our discussions. And I’m happy to say that we have achieved all those three.
“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.
“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 N’djamena 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 evacuation, 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.