Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, has disclosed that the Federal Government is working to meet United States’ requirements to remove Nigeria from the list of countries affected by the U.S. immigration ban.

Onyeama said this on Tuesday, February 4th, 2020 at a joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in Washington.

The expanded ban on immigration visa officially announced by the U.S. President, Donald Trump, on Friday, January 31st, 2020 affected Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan.

News agency, Reuters, quoted the minister as saying:

We’ve identified all those requirements and we had actually started working on all of them.

It was very gratifying to come here, speaking to U.S. officials and to understand more clearly the reasoning behind this.

With regards to lost and stolen passports, we’re putting in place the architecture that will now make the information immediately available to the U.S. and all the member states, the member countries of Interpol.

Onyeama further expressed hope that once Nigeria meets all the criteria, the country would be taken off the restriction list.

Justin Nwosu

Justin Nwosu is the founder and publisher of Flavision. His core interest is in writing unbiased news about Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. He’s a strong adherent of investigative journalism, with a bent on exposing corruption, abuse of power and societal ills.