Federal govt suspends Emirates Airlines’ flights into Nigeria

The federal government (FG) has disclosed the suspension of flights by Emirates Airlines from midnight of Wednesday, March 17, 2021.

This was after the airline insisted to have PCR tests for passengers embarking from Nigeria within 72 hours of their flights in addition to the Antigen Rapid Test at Nigerian airports and another PCR test on arrival in Dubai.

Senator Hadi Sirika, the Minister of Aviation, disclosed the FG's decision yesterday while giving updates at the Presidential Task Force on Coronavirus briefing in Abuja.

According to him, the FG considered it as unacceptable and devoid of any sense of reasoning the grounds advanced by Emirates.

He added that Nigeria rejected their request to subject Nigerian passengers to three PCR and a rapid antigen test 72 hours before the flight and after arrival.

He stressed that the Coronavirus itself will incubate at least in or after 72 hours, adding that most of the time, PCR results were also being faked in most of the countries.

“Therefore, we give the options to the airlines you either have a PCR test 72 hours before departure or have a PCR test on arrival or a Rapid test before departure and you have a PCR on arrival but not a combination of all the three because it makes no sense. It makes facilitation of passengers very cumbersome and our work very difficult. That passengers are going through unnecessary hardship not acceptable.

“We have given them the options to do what we believe is safe and current and KLM has accepted to bring passengers in and out with the conditions we agreed on to have a PCR Test with 72 hours. Emirates did not accept that position so we have asked Emirates to be banned from operations midnight of Wednesday and that has been communicated to them since yesterday,” Sirika said.