Federal Government has announced new travel rules for passengers coming in from South Africa and United Kingdom, where a new variant of COVID-19 has been discovered, as from Monday.
National Coordinator of Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, Dr Sani Aliyu, who disclosed this at the PTF’s briefing in Abuja on Thursday, said penalties, including passport or visa suspension for at least six months, would be imposed on violators.
He also said the passport numbers of the first 100 violators of international travel protocols would be published.
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Aliyu expressed that the imposition of fresh travel requirements on passengers from the two countries was due to the emergence of new strains of the virus in UK and additional mutant of it discovered in South Africa.
He said;
There are new travelling requirements for people coming from the UK and South Africa effective from Monday, December 28, 2020.
It is the responsibility of those passengers to make sure they familiarise themselves with these new rules, and airlines will be informed accordingly.
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He noted that international passengers were generally required to visit the Nigerian international travel portal to upload their negative COVID PCR result, generate a permit to travel document, referred to as QR Code, and also pay for the second PCR COVID test that would be conducted on them by their seventh day of arrival in the country.
In addition, the coordinator expressed;
We will open a special register at the airport for all passengers arriving from these two countries. We will have an enhanced surveillance so that these passengers will be contacted after they have arrived home.
We will be checking on them to see if they are having symptoms.
But even more importantly by Day 7, we expect these passengers, just like any other passengers coming from outside the country, to unfailingly go for COVID PCR test which you must have paid for before boarding the aircraft.
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He said President Muhammadu Buhari at a meeting with PTF members on Tuesday approved the penalties for the violators of the protocols and that special attention would be paid to “those coming from the UK and South Africa”.
Aliyu expressed;
If you do not do your Day 7 test by Day 10, you will automatically go on to the suspension list and your travel documents, your passport will be suspended for a minimum period of six months.
If you carry a foreign passport with a visa, we will revoke your visa. And because it is easier to track a smaller group of persons than a large number of passengers which has always been the challenge that we have, we are now able to enforce this specifically for passengers coming from these routes until further notice.
He said the same penalties would be meted out to “people presenting fake PCR results at our airports when exiting or if they have found to have presented a fake COVID 19 PCR result on arrival”.
Aliyu warned against non-essential movements and discouraged those of age 60 and above from joining large crowds.
