By Harry Awurumibe, Editor, ABUJA BUREAU
Nigeria’s aviation services giant, Air Peace will on Friday deploy no fewer than three 777 jumbo jets to evacuate the stranded Nigerians seeking ways of escape from the troubled Sudan. The airline will use Egypt as pick up point.
This is even as Mr. Allen Onyema, Chief Executive Officer, Air Peace has expressed his sadness over reading of ethnic meaning into his nationalistic gestures in evacuating Nigerians trapped in Sudan following the struggle by two armed factions over the control of the Sudanese government.
Speaking on Arise News breakfast programme ‘The Morning Show’ monitored in Abuja on Wednesday, Onyema said his airline will send three 777 Boeing aircraft to Egypt bring Nigerians who fled from war-torned Sudan back to Nigeria.
The Air Peace boss who was interviewed on his decision to once again evacuate Nigerians in Sudan back home to avoid being caught in the fighting by armed factions, said he could have deployed his aircrafts earlier but there were delays due to the safe place to land the aircrafts.
Said he: “I will deploy three 777 Boeing aircrafts to Egypt on Friday to bring back home Nigerians who escaped from Sudan. I would have deployed aircrafts earlier to Sudan but it was not possible due to safety and security reasons. But I am deploying three 777 jumbo jets on Friday. I think no country stops us this time around”.
Asked who is picking the bills for the evacuation of Nigerians in Sudan which his airline is undertaking, Onyema said he is doing the evacuation Free of Charge (FoC), adding, “I am doing this on my own. Nobody is paying me. I have not demanded money from anybody and nobody has offered me anything”.
On what motivates him to keep helping in bringing Nigerians stranded abroad home in difficult times, the business mogul said it is his own way of helping humanity, pointing out that: “I am an adherent of the mantra of what you can do for your country and not what your country can do for you”.
Air Peace had in the past years rescued stranded Nigerians in the foreign countries including from war-ravaged Ukraine and South Africa during the xenophobic attacks against Nigerians in South Africa without charging any flight fares.
But Onyema has expressed his sadness over the attempts by some unpatriotic Nigerians to drag his gesture into ethnic arguments especially in the social media, saying those who are now ethnicitising his patriotic gestures.
Said he: “I am not happy what is happening in the social media. I am doing what am doing to help humanity. We are a nation of about 378 ethnic nationalists but it pains me that we are not maximising our diversity rather it has become an albatross.
“I laid down my life in the Niger Delta during the troubled years to bring about the peace everyone is enjoying today, it could have been worse than Boko Haram but everybody have forgotten about it. Yet, I have continued to contribute to the national development”.
Speaking further he said: “I will want to use this platform to tell those who are bringing ethnicity into what I am doing with Air Peace to stop. For those who are for and against to stop forthwith. I am going ahead to help Nigerians because I am a Nigerian”.
