Looking at Nigeria at 60, how would you rate the country’s contribution to affairs since independence?
Nigeria has made very vital contributions to foreign relations since independence in 1960. Even in 1960, Nigeria already worldwide in Congo. There is a primary crisis in Congo and Nigeria, one of the participants in the United Nations (UN) peacekeepers. , our current president, Muhammadu Buhari, an officer serving with the Nigerian contingent in Congo. Former head of state, division of Gén. De. Anguyi Ironsi, also one of the commanding officers in Congo. Therefore, from the outset, Nigeria has been very helpful in finding a solution to a foreign crisis.
Throughout its 60 years of independence, Nigeria has been a major contributor to United Nations peacekeeping efforts around the world and has made a significant contribution to the promotion and security of peace in several countries around the world. , which in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and other outdoor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Nigeria and Nigerian army contingents have played a key role in maintaining and guaranteeing peace in many countries.
Nigeria has also played a role in the global denuclearization effort. We have been at the forefront of countries that advocate for a nuclear-weapon-free world, signing a large number of foreign conventions. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Nigeria took the ambitious resolve to break diplomatic relations with France when France tested an atomic bomb in the Republic of Niger, near Nigeria. Since then, we have been at the forefront of combating the denuclearization of the world through foreign organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations.
Nigeria has played a vital role in the sale of human rights at the Human Rights Council. He has played a vital role within the United Nations for the past 60 years, selling and pushing for global peace and justice between countries and for a more important role at the United Nations for African countries and small nations. Nigeria has also played a vital role in social progression around the world. Many Nigerians have held vital positions in foreign organizations, adding the United Nations, and have had a primary effect on, economic and cultural progression around the world.
Nigeria has therefore had a strong presence not only in Africa, where it has played an important role in the African Union, starting with the Organization of African Unity (OAU) which has become the African Union, in respects. In the economic field, Nigeria has played a vital role in the creation of an African continental loose industrial zone. Nigeria played a leading role in the creation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and promoted greater integration not only in West Africa, but also in Africa.
Nigeria has also struggled in the context of human rights and the coverage of the rights of the average African. Nigeria also struggled when various African countries lobbied for African countries to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. Nigeria opposed the initiative and supported the International. Criminal Court because Nigeria believes that it deserves to have a forum to protect the average African from the excesses of its leaders. Therefore, Nigeria was in the aspect of giving this voice and shield to the user in Africa.
I would therefore say that Nigeria in 60 years has made lasting contributions to world peace, economic progress towards fairer African cooperation and integration, peace and smart governance on the African continent. We have noticed that Nigeria has interaction in the status quo of a Democratic regime in The Gambia, for example. He’s also concerned about Mali, so smart governance is a domain in which Nigeria has also made very vital contributions. With regard to the fight against corruption as well, Nigeria has this time promoted Smart Governance and Anti-Corruption Table on the African continent. Nigeria has played a vital role in the United Nations in driving a solution to the factor of illicit monetary flows from emerging countries whose wealth is illegally mined and invested in all kinds of secret accounts around the world and those interested in Africa’s extractive industries do not pay taxes.
Nigeria has championed more transparent mechanisms and architectures for doing business, especially through multinationals, on the African continent. Nigeria at age 60 has been a pillar of the world for governance, social justice, peace, economic progress, cultural cooperation and the advancement and promotion of multilateralism. You know that many wonderful powers have imposed their will on global affairs, but Nigeria has played a leading role, pushing forward, strengthening and strengthening the role of the multilateral formula as a fairer mechanism to provide a just global formula.
Despite the country’s achievements on the foreign scene, Nigerians have recently faced serious attacks by so-called partner nations How do you plan to solve this problem, especially since the role of the older brother does not seem to be a game in our favor?
I will not say that Nigeria is facing aggression by countries, I do not think that this is an accurate description, there is a desire to distinguish between state and non-state actors, so where there have been safe movements against Nigeria and Nigerians, xenophobic attacks, etc. , those are occasional movements of non-state actors. Therefore, we are firmly committed to states to ensure that Nigerians are protected, that lives and assets are protected in those countries.
In some countries, it can be said that there is participation of state actors, but very often, these states would say that Nigerians are not a consistent goal with se, but that they are legislation that we have all, but again, involved in those countries. And increasingly, we are developing a more competitive and physically powerful policy of reciprocity. Therefore, we are making this transparent now that when we feel that Nigerians are not being treated fairly, we will look at all the measures at our disposal to respond in a similar way in the future. reciprocal option.
Going back to the Covid-19 lockdown evacuation procedure, how would you describe the fun and the classes learned the procedure?What did you have to do behind the scenes to make sure the stranded Nigerians were evacuated?
The first thing was that when we started Nigerians outdoors, the country was not noticed as a component of the immediate challenge we were facing. We had what has become an imminent pandemic in Nigeria, so all eyes were on how to protect Nigerian airspace, our other people and everyone else in Nigeria, so all the strategies, the medical care, the structures we needed to install. position was where the target was, and that’s where the investment was headed. Only later did it become clear that a significant number of Nigerians around the world were stranded outside the country in a closure; our airspace in componenticular. We had no precedent for paintings. It was an absolutely new scenario and there was no investment.
Ideally, it would be an emergency and we would have brought them for free. We have an agency, the Nigerian Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), which is there on budget to help Nigerians in emergencies. It was a new situation. The investment just wasn’t there to bring them back. In addition, we had to make arrangements with air carriers to ensure logistics, locate carriers, organize with countries the arrival of air carriers and establish mechanisms with missions to interact with Nigerians in those countries.
So it was a logistical nightmare to put the whole layout in position to fix it. We were learning on the fly because we had no idea. We had never experienced anything like this and with minimal resources, we had to temporarily expand a protocol that allowed passengers to move on to missions and then the fitness protocol component. We had to locate hotels here as they had to be quarantined for two weeks. So another big challenge.
Initially the hotels did not want to become isolation centers, then, of course, all medical processes in those hotels had to be launched to suit them to involve other people who can be simply contagious. I challenged to locate the hotels, and because we had no financing, passengers had to pay themselves to enter, at one point we didn’t have the budget to pay for the hotels, but in the end we managed to locate the budget to pay the hotels so that Nigerians wouldn’t have to bear the cost. And it turned out that those Nigerians had been outdoors for a long time and many of them had exhausted their budget before we could begin the evacuation process.
The call for much greater, that is, the number of other people who sought to return much higher than the flights we had on site. So, of course, the protocols on arrival were such that we may not take them all. at the same time, but only in small batches because many of our medical and human functions were deployed across the country, managing the instances that emerged. But we needed airport and port fitness staff to control arrivals and get to hotels, so he sees it’s a massive operation and we didn’t have the human resources to deal with it, so it’s a major challenge. But over time, we begin to perceive more and more what to do. The embassies themselves have also begun to perceive what they want to do.
We found some tricks. Some of our carriers were not allowed to move to certain countries to pick up Nigerians who were stranded there, so we had to look for alternatives. It wasn’t easy at all. We did our best in very difficult circumstances. And then other people came to help us, and that’s what stopped us at the end of the day, because we got to the point where we didn’t have the budget to pay for two weeks of hotel accommodation. given low costs for hotels in Lapasss and Abuja and this was a small problem. I need to explicitly support here our deep thanks to CBN and its passenger who agreed to locate the investment to continue and allow us to pay for quarantine equipment to quarantine everyone who arrived here in 14 days at the hotels. Moreover, I cannot thank the NNPC GMD enough which also provided investment to accommodate CBN, and also did not keep it on suspense. Otherwise, it could have been a widespread disaster.
Many other people said they had no cash in return; they had spent all their cash outdoors to pay for hotels. We will also have to thank Aliko Dangote and Herbert Wigwe and others. Because even though the NNPC and CBN saw what the charge would be for paying frequently for all the other people who arrived at the hotels, they saw that it was not sustainable and now we had to replace our protocols to say that other people deserve that they are no longer necessarily quarantined in hotels, but that they can now isolate themselves in their homes. that, they had to be tested but the government did not have the ability to launch the PP to do this test, Dangote, Wigwe and others in the personal sector met and brought together joint corporations that can simply take out the evidence. He’s stored the cost of paying for the hotels. People went straight home and absorbed the test charge for them.
So, thanks to God’s grace, we were able to pass the evacuation phase, and now, of course, we have moved on to the limited opening of our airspace, the evacuation phase is over and now, in principle, it is for everyone but also in the midst of all this, we had to deal with other realities, unfortunately, women and other trafficked people around the place , then deported, convicted and former Nigerian detainees. We had to bring them back. Of course, those categories of other people had no money, however, we have moved forward and brought them from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mali by road, and some are waiting in Ethiopia and Tanzania. another type of challenge, which continues because we still bring others from Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and those from other countries.
Let’s take a look at your private fun with Covid-19. When he tweeted he had tested positive after the third test, someone asked why the tests often. What was your first reaction when you tested positive?
No, I’ve had three checks before. The first check looked more like a plot, because the president’s chief of staff had it and I had attended meetings where he was present, so we looked at the contacts the user might have had, so I checked. He’s the first. The moment I checked when he very sadly passed away and had to be buried. I went home for the convenience of the family circle and there were a lot of people. We went to the burial site, so, of course, there was a cry saying it opposed social estating regulations and protocols, so I did a check after that. Then my third checkup because they then brought a protocol for TFP members to be checked regularly, so I did the third check as a member of the TFP.
One day I walked into the workplace in the morning and felt a tingle in my throat, almost like I was going to have a sore throat, so I asked for throat pills and I was in the workplace all day. at night I had a little shiver. I took a hot shower and had a little flat in my chest, which was another symptom I had. My head was a little heavy; it wasn’t really a headache, but it was a little cloudy and I also felt a bit of joint pain like malaria. So I Googled and discovered that each of them was a imaginable symptom of Covid-19. , it was Friday, to ask for a check on Saturday, but that Saturday all the symptoms had disappeared. The only symptom was this slightly congested throat, so I did the check and had the idea that it could be Covid-19, especially with all the symptoms I had the day before.
So when I woke up on Sunday morning, I saw a call I had missed Saturday night from DG NCDC. When I saw a message that said please call me, I knew something was wrong, because the last 3 times I only got a text message the next day saying “negative. “This time, for him to call the same day, he passed the check, and I mean fortunately, I missed the call because I wouldn’t have slept well that night. But when I saw him in the morning saying call me, he was 99% sure it was positive, so I called him, but I didn’t perceive him, I called him about 3 times, then he nevertheless called me around 11am and told me, unfortunately, that this was the case.
I was ready for that at the time, I knew it would come because of that message. Interestingly, I am still surprised to this day that I was not too worried, I think that for me what would have worried me a little was my breathing, however my breathing was very clear, I had no challenge to breathe. It would have been a little scarier if I could feel like I wasn’t breathing much, but because I was breathing perfectly and all the other symptoms had disappeared, I didn’t feel worried at all. I asked him if I was staying home and someone from the NCDC came and begged me to isolate myself, so I said don’t challenge me. They were starting to worry and I walked away.
Again, when I walked in that day, the first thing they did was check my oxygen levels, and it was 99%. They were surprised it was so old. The only thing that increased, which may have been simply because of the anxiety, was my blood pressure Then, as I said, because I was fine, I had no fever, I had nothing, I wasn’t coughing, just a little tingle in my chest, so I felt pretty good. I lowered my blood pressure with medication and it was fine. I went for a run about two or three days later and it was perfectly fine. No other symptoms returned. Those first few nights of chills were gone and it was, like I said, a throat scrape with a little mucus coming out, and that was it.
I was very comfortable in isolation. All my morning checkups and all the important symptoms were fine, so now it was just the consultation of the medications I was taking and, of course, that’s when I also discovered that many other people I knew had it, because everyone was calling me now to tell me they had it, do this, take this and all that. My doctor said everything was fine now, but the critical point was from 7 to 10 days, because you never know how the virus can replace address Although everything is perfectly fine, it’s only after day 10 that now you can be sure it won’t get worse and worse, so we did a check after day 7, which I think a little earlier because I still feel something in my throat and it was positive. Then we did another review on the 12th, and at that time, other people were recommending all sorts of things to laugh at and it was positive after the 12th. some other.
So after the checkup on the 12th, it’s usually 14 days, according to doctors, in any case, the virus would have died on the 10th and would no longer be contagious. Sometimes the checkup is done and only the dead DNA of The virus is taken. Some people, who were in worse situations than mine, came in and left after the 12th, but mine was still positive and had virtually no symptoms. Then I wondered what was going on. I did another check after 19 days and it was still positive. But on the 19th, I still had a little thing in my throat, just a tingle, and not all the time; Occasionally, I would cough again, so on the 19th, as he had not left at all, on the 20th I felt he was gone.
I said that after my 19th day I would stay a week because they came to see the 21st day of other people, I said let me do it because I had nothing to lose, I did it on the 21st and I was very surprised when it turned out negative.