The Federal Government has said it will liaise with the Nigerian Mission in Malaysia to ascertain the veracity of the alleged plan by the Malaysian authorities to deport about 13, 000 Nigerian students in the country, who have presumably overstayed the duration of their visas following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama made this known while fielding questions during the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force on the containment of the Covid-19 in Abuja on Tuesday. He however, noted that so far the Nigerian government has not received any information in respect of the alleged planned deportation from the Nigerian mission in the Asian country.
He said: “I don’t know the reasons for such deportation. We have not in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs got such information. Ordinarily, if such a thing were to happen or to be considered, our mission would have informed us in respect of that.
“But the global practice at the moment is that every country knows that the airspace has been closed all around the world and that people in those countries through no fault of their own might be forced to overstay the duration of their visas.”
“So, it is not the practice at the moment for government to unilaterally embark on issues of deportation. That is certainly not how the matter will be dealt with if indeed that is the case with Malaysia. But we will get in touch to ascertain if that story is true,” the Minister further said.
On Nigerians, who are allegedly scheduled to come into the country from Cotonou, Republic of Benin, through Air France, the Minister said: “We have a protocol in place and we can only take people according to a number of the facilities that we have where they will be quarantined for two weeks and when we have adequate staffing to monitor them for that period of two weeks. So, that is really the pre-condition for an approval for anybody to come into the country from outside.”
He disclosed that almost 100 Nigerians have so far come in through the land borders from Togo, Cote d’ Ivoire and Ghana.
