COVID-19: How UK plans to evacuate its citizens from Nigeria, lists those eligible
The United Kingdom like United States, France and Canada, looks set to evacuate its citizens from Nigeria over COVID-19 pandemic which is increasing daily in the country.
In the past weeks, U.S, France, Germany, Israel and Canada have evacuated hundreds of their citizens from Nigeria back to their countries as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the world causing lockdown of activities and borders.
British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing, revealed the plan to evacuate UK citizens in a video address on Friday, a week after the High Commission announced that 4,000 UK citizens residing in Nigeria have shown interest in being evacuated to their country.
The evacuation, according to Laing, will not be for all UK citizens willing to return home, but only those who are permanent residents of the UK but only visited Nigeria.
"The Central Charter Programme that the Foreign Secretary announced last week is now coming to Nigeria. I can't give you the exact date of the flight today, but I hope to be able to do that very shortly," Laing said.
"These flights are targetted at British citizens whose primary residence is in the UK who are travellers to Nigeria and who have got stuck here."
She added that among this category of people, priority would be given to vulnerable people.
"I also want to stress that we will be prioritising vulnerable people within that group. So by vulnerable I mean for example somebody who may have an underlying health condition which could make them vulnerable to contracting COVID-19," the High Commissioner said.
On the arrangements put in place for the evacuation, Laing said flights to the UK would be departing from the International airports in Lagos and Abuja and "we are discussing with the Federal and State government to ensure people can get to the airports despite the lockdown".
The High Commissioner added that there will be a price for the tickets, but the High Commission is "aiming to make them as affordable as possible".
According to the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC), Nigeria has 305 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at 9:30pm on Friday, while UK on the other hand has 78,991 confirmed cases with 9,875 death toll, according to Worldometer.
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