Since May 15, Musbau Ibrahim has finished his exams at the Islamic University of Madinah, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he pursues a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
He would have travelled to Nigeria a day after his exams but for some constraints that are beyond his control.
But this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the airline requested that the students should obtain a letter of “request for evacuation” from the Embassy of Nigeria in Riyadh before they could be flown to Nigeria. Ibrahim added, “We stopped physical learning in March and started online classes due to the pandemic and since then, we have been trying to reach our embassy to request the evacuation letter but we’ve not got any response. When we finished the semester on May 15, we were supposed to travel home anytime from May 16.
“We contacted a representative of the students from another country and he gave us a sample letter that they wrote to the Saudi Arabian Airlines. We presented the sample letter to the embassy but still, they have not written the letter. So we are stuck here,” he said. To say Ibrahim is frustrated by this development is to state the obvious, as he said he did not know when the embassy would write the required letter or arrange for another evacuation flight.
“In my school alone, we are about 165 who want to travel home from the list we compiled. But from the general list of students in various schools, we are about 315. The Saudi government is ready to pay for our flight, and it has always been like this,” he said. Meanwhile, a Nigerian who travelled to Saudi Arabia for a contract job, simply identified as Modupe, complained that she couldn’t afford the evacuation fee, hence she was still stranded abroad.
However, on the plight of students stranded in Saudi Arabia, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr Ferdinand Nwonye, said the Nigerian Embassy had nothing to do with their evacuation process since the said Nigerians were on the invite of the Saudi government. Although email enquiries to NIDCOM since last Wednesday had yet to be responded to as of press time, the Chairman of NIDCOM, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, recently said in a tweet that the embassy was already arranging for the evacuation of stranded students in Saudi Arabia.“A bit behind schedule but will be done,” she said.
But on March 23, as the reality of the coronavirus dawned on Nigeria and the number of COVID-19 cases was increasing, the Federal Government suspended all international flights into the country except emergency and essential flights. This move was barely four days to Adeosun’s planned return to Nigeria.
She added, “I’m missing home. My children are anxious to see me. Sometimes they wake up in the middle of the night and call me just to tell me they are missing me. They also chat with me regularly to emphasise this. We also do video calls and I try to assure them that I will be home soon.” “Many fun places are locked down, though some are now reopening. When you travel to the US, the expectation is to have some fun after finishing with any assignment you came for, but that is not the case now. For instance, where I stay in North Carolina, there is a gym and a swimming pool close by, and I would have loved to use them, but they are locked down. I’ve been at home, sitting, sleeping and eating. There is no church activity and no social gathering.
“Also, we observe all the necessary protocols; we wear face masks if we are going out to the grocery store. We also carry hand sanitisers, even though they are mostly available everywhere we go.”
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