Nigeria is cooling its rhetorics and threats against countries that have placed the most populated African country to their COVID-19 “red lists”.
USAfricaonline.com has learned that Nigeria has decided to follow their realistic capability and explore diplomatic approaches to the escalating complications for flight all over the world caused by the pandemic problems.
Aviation Minister Hadi Sirika had on Sunday informed the media that he recommended to the Nigerian government to retaliate and place Argentina, Britain, Canada and Saudi Arabia on Nigeria’s COVID-19 “red list”.
“We have given our input as aviation that it is not acceptable by us and we recommend that those countries, Canada, UK, Saudi Arabia and Argentina be also put on red list, just like they did similarly to us,” Sirika stated. The major consequence would be a ban on flights coming from those countries.”As they did to us, if they do not allow our citizens into their countries…They are not supposed to come in. I am very sure in the next three days, on Monday or Tuesday, all those countries will be put on the red list of COVID-19.”
However on Monday, Sirika took the path of diplomatic appeal, aware of the relatively weak capacity of Nigeria, at this time, to go tit-for-tat against some of the countries who are trying to protect their citizens. The relatively popular Minister Sirika noted that “Nigeria has initiated diplomatic steps to make these countries reverse their course…. This is ongoing in the interest of all parties concerned and we expect that positive results would emerge within the next one week.”
Meanwhile , Sirika’s ministry and Emirates Airlines are in an aggressive and testy showdown over the issues of COVID, omicron and the reciprocal schedule frequency as it concerns the slashing of Air Peace licensing into Dubai, UAE.
