About 7000 nationals, including Nigerian evacuees, are stranded at the Egyptian border as a result of the ongoing crisis in Sudan.
Chairman/CEO of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NiDCOM), Honourable Abike Dabiri-Erewa, stated this in a release e-signed by Gabriel Odu of the Media, Public Relations and Protocols Unit of the Commission.
She also disclosed that the Egyptian authorities are making things difficult by insisting on visas for the affected African nationals before they can have a passage to their respective countries.
She therefore called on those concerned with passages and movement of persons and services along contiguous borders of Sudan to create a humane condition for the affected nationals to have unfettered access to their various destinations.
Dabiri-Erewa said over 7000 nationals, including Nigerians, are not being allowed to cross the border into Egypt since their arrival late Thursday evening .
She added that the Nigerian Mission in Egypt has been working tirelessly on this as the Egyptian authorities are insisting on visas by fellow Africans to transit back to their countries.
She appealed to the Egyptian authorities to kindly allow the already traumatised nationals to transit to their final destinations in various countries in Africa.
The development is a negative twist to the envisaged relatively easy passage of the stranded nationals, especially the Nigerian evacuees, to their various final destinations.
Recalled that the Nigerian government had released 40 buses to evacuate stranded Nigerians from the war-torn Sudan to the Egyptian border.
The NiDCOM boss, on Thursday, disclosed that 13 out of the 40 buses were sent to Sudan to bring the Nigerian evacuees to the Egyptian border from where they will be brought back to Nigeria today.
She had also assured that no harm will come the way of the evacuees as she had disclosed that the two warring factions in the Sudanese crisis had assured that no harm will come their way.
