The Nigerian Government on Sunday insisted that it earlier said it would cost to transport stranded citizens from warring Sudan to neighbouring is only for hiring buses.
Nasir Sani-Gwarzo, the Permanent Secretary of the Humanitarian Affairs Ministry and Chair of the Situation Room on the evacuation of Nigerians from Sudan explained this after a closed-door meeting of the ministry in Abuja, as seen in a video posted online by Channels TV.
Sani-Gwarzo said $30,000 (N13.8 million at the official exchange rate of N46 per dollar) was paid per bus and that 40 buses were hired for the trip from Sudan to Egypt, where the stranded Nigerians will be airlifted to their home country.
He said, “It’s ($1.2 million) only for one item, for the buses. Do you know how much it takes to hire a bus from Khartoum to the border? $30,000 per bus. $30,000 per bus times 40 uses.
“That is where $1.2 million comes into. We now sent first tranche approved by the Federal government out of this, which is $400,000 and transferred it. If you take out $400,00, what does it come to?
“Once they give you 13 buses. 13 buses times $30,000 is how much- $390,000. They stopped giving us. You remember I told you they gave us 13 buses. They kept the $10,000. When you are travelling in Sudan, you don’t just enter bus and start going, you must load it with water and biscuits.
“Believe me, I just became an expert on Sudan overnight because every day we discuss with them. And they told us our money is finished, being another money. We now transferred the balance in tranches. Believe me, you don’t transfer money to Sudan directly.
“You have to get somebody who knows the country, who will transfer and give cash. Then you go into an agreement. You sign an MOU. And at every stage, I report to the DSS (Department of State Services) and NFIU (Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit) so that they can monitor the movement of the money.”
Explaining the delays experienced by Nigerians in the evacuation process, he explained that the bus owners demanded complete payment and that any money being sent out from a government account would first be flagged.
“Do you that in Nigeria if you transfer money from government account, it does no click because it has a dashboard that can be seen? They will stop it so we had to alert them and we sent this money and it got delayed,” he added.
It was earlier reported that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffery Onyeama said the Nigerian government would be spending $1.2 million to hire 40 buses to be used to evacuate Nigerians trapped in Sudan.
Onyeama disclosed this while speaking to State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council on Wednesday. Onyeama said the Nigerian government would evacuate citizens within days amid the 72-hour ceasefire agreement between the warring factions in Sudan.
Last week, some Nigerian students being evacuated from the war-torn city of Sudan were trapped in the middle of the desert by the bus drivers.
According to some of the students who shared their experiences on an online video shared by @diisa2002 on his twitter account, “The bus drivers said they are not moving their bus because they didn’t give them money.”
According to some of the students who shared their experiences, “The bus drivers said they are not moving their bus because they didn’t give them money.”
The student complained of going through a lot of ordeals before they embarked on the journey, and were not happy that their government would expose them to such risk of being stranded in a desert where they could not even find water to cool their thirst.
“Before we started this journey, we had to go on several fights; can you imagine, now we have been in this place for over five hours.
We are stuck in the desert, we don’t even know where we are and we don’t have a compass to even know our location.
We don’t have water, we don’t have money, everything has finished, why is Nigeria treating us this way?” she said.
Many Nigerians have however condemned the development which they ascribed as bad governance.
Annie prayed that the students get back to the country safe, insisting that bad governance knows no tribe nor religion. “Bad governance knows no tribe or religion.”
Someone else was worried that the bus drivers might have gotten wind of how much was approved for the journey, and compared it to how much they were paid. Hence, the anger and sudden resolution to stop on the way.
However, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, chairman of Nigerians in Diaspora Commission has said through her Twitter handle @abikedabiri that the issues between the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the transport company have been resolved, as they have started moving.
“They have started moving and the issues between NEMA and the transport company have been resolved,” she tweeted.
The evacuation of 2,400 Nigerian students and other citizens trapped in the ongoing conflict in Sudan started on Wednesday, April 26, 2023 with only 15 out of the 40 buses promised by the federal government for the exercise being made available.