Chinelo Obogo
The management of Air Peace has said that it would evacuate the second batch of Nigerians from South Africa Tuesday, September 17, confirming Daily Sun‘s earlier report.
The chairman of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, said that the flight would leave Nigeria after midnight on Tuesday and arrive OR Tambo International Airport in the morning, departing South Africa midday, with the estimated time of arrival in Lagos 7:00 pm on the same day.
Onyema also disclosed that of over 600 Nigerians that are willing to return, 360 of them have been cleared for the evacuation, saying that the airline would airlift 320 in the second batch, which is the capacity of the Boeing 777 aircraft that would be deployed for the flight.
Daily Sun had earlier reported that the second batch of evacuation of Nigerians will ‘very likely’ take place on Tuesday, September 17.
The Consul General of the Nigerian Consulate in Johannesburg, Godwin Adama, told Daily Sun last Sunday that they are still contacting Nigerians who are willing to return one after the other and processing all the required documents to prevent a repeat of the delay during the first evacuation.
“We are almost done but we are trying to overcome the challenges we had during the first evacuation. We are calling those interested in coming back one by one, because the last time some of them complained that they didn’t get the text messages we sent to them. This time around, we are being painstaking in order to forestall what happened during the evacuation of the first batch, so tentatively we are looking at the evacuation taking place on Tuesday after the documentation would have been completed,” Adama said.
However, there are indications that despite the diplomatic efforts started by South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa to reach out to other African countries, including Nigeria, many Nigerians still want to leave the country because of uncertainty and lack of assurance that the hostility could be stopped by South African authorities.