Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, has said the travel ban on Nigeria and other African countries will not work.
He spoke at the Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa while reacting to what some African leaders said about the recent travel ban on some African countries by the United Kingdom.
Although the Forum focuses on peace and security, this year’s edition buttresses the impact COVID-19 pandemic had on peace and security, and post-COVID recovery.
Onyeama said: “We follow the World Health Organisation’s advice and what they consider not to be the best practice on COVID-19, which is travel restrictions, don’t achieve anything as such.
“Our position aligns with the World Health Organisation’s position. The Director General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom, is saying that these travel bans are not the solution and that your standard protocols should suffice to address the situation.
“Wearing masks, testing, contact tracing, distancing and other measures are more than enough to address that.
“Travel bans will not work because some countries putting up these bans already have the Omicron variant in their countries and it doesn’t make a difference.
“We should rather be coming together to look at ways we could solve this issue as a global community rather than segmenting.
“The United Kingdom said the increasing number they got was what drove their decision on the travel ban on Nigerians.
“We have to also check our numbers because they don’t tally, they are talking of 21 cases that originated from Nigeria and our people are saying we don’t have anywhere near the number of cases.
“We are working with the UK government so that Nigeria will be removed from the red list.
“They have told us that they are very keen to remove Nigeria as quickly as possible from the red list and we are going to continue to work with them and encourage them to do that.”
On vaccine production, he said: “Having spoken to our medical people, Nigeria has the basic architecture in place to produce her own vaccine.
“All we need is cooperation from experts.”
