The Federal government says it would suspend electronically for six months, passports of international passengers who fail to show up for COVID-19 test upon entering the country.
The Secretary to the Government of the Federation and Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, Boss Mustapha stated Thursday at the 8th Anniversary Lecture of RealNews Magazine in Lagos.
“We have tried to make sure that we don’t have imported cases from international airports. We opened up the international airports because of the impacts it was having on our economy. When we opened it, we do double testing for a reason but there was a lot of noise on how the testing was being done” he said.
Speaking on the Theme “Managing COVID-19 pandemic in Africa: the Nigeria Experience”, which discussants include the Group Managing Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC Mele Kyari represented by the Managing Director of National Engineering Technical Company Limited, a subsidiary of the NNPC, Usman Baba, the Chief Medical Director of Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Luth, Chris Bode, Alero Robert’s of the Department of Community Health, University of Lagos and Michael Ihemaguba from the United States, the PTF chairman represented by national coordinato Dr. Sani Aliyu, noted that the passport suspension would ensure people do the right thing.
The Nigerian government has mandated every traveller on entry into the country to observe Covid-19 protocols which include Covid-19 test on arrival, 14-days isolation as well as social distancing as part of measures to curb the spread of the pandemic.
“We do not test st the airports, because it is unfair on the passengers who have had a test pre-boarding within 72 hours. It is a waste of resources and it’s not going to impact our intervention and that is why we don’t test at the airports. On why people have to pay and that we can’t do it for free. We can not do it for free because Nigeria is a large country”, he said.
He stated that a large number of passengers, up to about 7,000 a day and such will require huge test kits if they are to b tested at the airports.
“Almost about 300,000 kits or so. So if that is the case, over nine months we will have used 700,000 tests kits which means we will exhaust our test kits within two months. We proposed a million test kits in our budget, and also one million test kits for travellers which is at N18 billion”.
He hoped that the linkages created with the private sector through COVID-19 will continue so as to help to strengthen other parts of the health system adding that “COVID-19 has stimulated local production of face masks and shields, other PPEs, sanitizers, etc and this has helped many SMEs, and if scaled, will contribute to the recovery of the overall national economy”
He noted that prolonged enforcement of the Covid-19 could not be sustained owing to financial hardships, crime and domestic violence during the lockdown as he lamented the low sample collection/testing rate in many states despite great efforts towards optimising laboratory capacity.
“Poor response from some State Governments, failure to provide adequate and complementary funds and the required leadership. Some denied/downplayed the existence of the disease in their states at the beginning. Large populations do not believe that COVID-19 is real. Some who believe that it is real have low risk perception resulting in poor adherence to interventions such as use of face masks and physical distancing.”
[…] “The malaise of corruption is deep-seated, needing concerted efforts to tame, and so efforts at Nation-building should be continuous with all hands being on deck to achieve this success.” […]