TheCable

The federal government says 1,625 citizens have been evacuated from Ukraine, following the Russia invasion.

Russia had, on February 24, 2022, invaded Ukraine, with millions of persons now displaced as a result of the conflict.

President Muhammadu Buhari had, in March, approved $8.5 million for the immediate evacuation of 5,000 Nigerians stranded as a result of the Russian-Ukraine war.

On March 4, the the first batch of evacuees arrived at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja.

Speaking at a media briefing on Thursday on the statistics of refugees and evacuees in the country, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, federal commissioner of the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI), said over 1,600 Nigerians have been evacuated from Ukraine.

“I’ll take you through the statistics of persons of concerns in Nigeria. According to the UNHCR matrix index, we have 3.2 million IDPs and on the ProGres v4 platform which we run with the UNHCR,” she said.

“We have registered 84,803 refugees in Nigeria. We have 1,570 asylum seekers, over 7,000 urban refugees.

“We’ve been able to voluntary return about 7,234 Nigerians back home and during the recent evaluation. We have been able to record 1,625 evacuees from the Ukraine-Russia war.”

She added that efforts are ongoing to build “resettlement cities” for IDPs to help them reintegrate properly, especially for those who cannot return to their homes.

“When displacements happen — flood, communal clashes — people lose their homes and means of livelihood. So, we started the pilot phase of our project resettlement in 2020,” she said.

“The project, ‘resettlement city’, will entail building small cities because persons of concern (POCs) have three options of doable solutions.

“They can either locally integrate, resettle or they can go back to their homes. But sometimes, they are unable to go back home and that is why there is a need for building of new communities or strengthening the capacity of their host communities.

“We are in the third phase of our resettlement city project, but the pilot phase is in Borno, Kano, Katsina, Zamfara, Nasarawa and Edo states. Most of them are now at between 70 to 90 percent completion, but that of Edo state is about is about to take off.”