Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, has revealed that he has denied five governors flight approval, since the closure of the airports and the lockdown order by President Muhammadu Buhari to curb the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to Sirika, three out of the four governors are members of the All Progressives Congress (APC).Two of the governors are from the South-east, two from South-south, while one was from North-central.Sirika disclosed this in Abuja on Tuesday, at the daily press briefing by members of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19.

“Every single flight that we approved and will be approved will be an essential flight and 98 percent of the essential flight will be connected to COVID-19.

“A few of them, maybe 1 percent may be either repatriation, requests from the diplomatic community, which must go through foreign affairs, or repatriation due to illness of another kind which will be medical-kind and those evacuations will also need a stamp of a teaching hospital.

“However, I want to share with you a discussion I had on Twitter with someone when I said we will not be able to open our airports and airspace as a result of the extension of the lockdown for normal operations and someone said;

“Kindly stop all the VIPs shuttle going on.It makes no sense to lock citizens up and allow governors to stroll in and out of Abuja. In the first instance, they carried this virus into Nigeria and now running around is not Okay.”

I said to the person that I agree with him but whatever is approved or whoever is approved to fly privately, governor or no governor is on an essential flight and it is addition and 98 percent is related to COVID-19.

“There is no exception to governors. I have denied several of such flights. Including two governors from South-south, two from South-east and by the way, three of them are members of the APC and I think one is from North-central.

“For a flight to be approved, it shows that it is diligently done. It must be essential, COVID-19 related or other essential flights like cargo that will bring in medicines or equipment or other things related to COVID-19 or our whole well-being like food.Please trust us and bear with us for this period but it will end soon by God’s grace,” he said.

In Nigeria, before coronavirus, when the rich were sick, they sought the best medical treatment abroad while the poor at home prayed for them to recover, but when the poor are sick, the rich tell them they are suffering divine punishment for their moral failings.

Why should ordinary people who are the victims of the callous ineptitude and lack of empathy of their leaders be invited to show compassion to their leaders now in their moment of helplessness? Why shouldn’t the poor celebrate that the rich are also crying and have nowhere to go but the same hospitals they allowed to rot for years?

The Progressive Governors Forum (PGF) has called for public investments in the health sector to manage and prevent Coronavirus from escalating in the country.

PGF Director-General, Mr Salihu Lukman, in a statement in Abuja on Wednesday,  said the investments should cover the provision of medical equipment and the development of healthcare personnel, medicine, and research.

“At this early stage of the manifestations of the threat of Covid-19 in Nigeria, we need to take urgent steps to recover our humanity.“We need to focus ourselves to ensure that our responses help in producing the needed changes that could protect the lives of citizens, guarantee quality and accessible healthcare services.

“All these can only be achieved through high public investment in our health sector, which will also be partly dependent on similar high public investment in the education sector that will be required to produce the medical personnel,” Lukman said.

According to him,  it is true that our leaders have disappointed us over the years.
“It is also true that our leaders have, with hardly any exception, piloted the affairs of our country with submissive compliance to the philosophy that discourages public investment in health and educational sectors, at least since the mid-1980s.

“Most cases of public investments in these sectors prioritise the construction of hospitals and schools or classrooms.In very rare instances, the limited investments cover provisions of medical equipment,” the director-general said.

He added that investments in the development of healthcare personnel, medicine, research, teachers and books were hardly considered.“Somewhat because the effectiveness of responses will be determined by the quality of services provided by the health sector, initiatives around healthcare service delivery should be the focus of attention.

“Given the terrible state of our hospitals in Nigeria such that almost every citizen believes that to find a cure for any sickness, major or minor, Nigerians have to go outside the country.

“Irrespective of our earnings or social status, it is a common belief across all divides in the country.

“As a result, everybody’s instinct, once faced with a medical challenge is to mobilise financial resources, which many have to achieve through donations by family members and well-wishers,” he said.

Lukman said with Covid-19 dangers facing all countries equally, most of the countries that used to be destinations for Nigerians in search of medical services had shut down.

“Therefore, part of what could be the challenge facing us as Nigerians may be the issue of initiating processes of developing our health sector such that it is able to mobilise our leaders and citizens to work in harmony,” he said. (NAN)