The federal government said Tuesday that five governors have been denied access to fly out of their states due to the ongoing lockdown to contain spread of the coronavirus in the country.
Minister of of Aviation, Mr Hadi Sirika, disclosed this to journalists during the daily briefing by the Presidential Task Force on the Control of COVID-19.
He said reports that elite including governors were given special privileges to fly during the lockdown were false.
He said every single flight approved is for essential reasons which are either diplomatic requests, medical or food supplies or evacuation of patients not necessarily with COVID-19 symptoms, among others.
“Every single flight that you will see, every single one that we will approve will be an essential flights. And that essential flights, 98 percent of them will be connected to COVID-19.
“A few of them might be a diplomatic request from diplomatic community which must go through foreign affairs, or it might be evacuation due to illness of other kind and those evacuations may also need staff of a teaching hospital like I said before.
“On not reopening airports due to extension of lockdown, trust me, whoever is approved to fly privately governor or not governor is on an essential trip and 98 percent is related to COVID-19. There is no exception to governors, I have denied several of such flights including two governors from south-south, two from south- East meanwhile three of them are members of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and one is from north central.
“Just to say that once you see a flight approved, it is diligently done, it must be essential, it must be COVID-19 related or some other flights like essential cargo that will bring in medicines or equipments or something related to our own wellbeing like food and so on and so forth. So please trust and bear with us it while this last, it will be short,” he said.
