Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) at Murtala Muhammed International Airport Lagos has received another mentally-challenged female Nigerian from abroad and reunited her with her family members; just as it has denied about 20 intending travellers who couldn’t give convincing details and reasons for their proposed travelling abroad.
African Business Travel News (ABTN) reliably gathered at the Lagos airport that the returnee, Motunde Oluwatobi Victoria, 29 years old was brought in to the country from Saudi Arabia on Tuesday aboard an Egypt Air flight at about 13:30 hours (West African Time).
ABTN learnt further that Morunde who had been in Saudi Arabia since 2018 where she worked as a house maid, was discovered to be incoherent in her speech and statement while she was undergoing profiling at the immigration office.
This however prompted the immigration personnel at the Airport Command to go into further investigation about her until her true identity was established; leading to establishment of contact with her family members.
It was disclosed, “The passenger who was born in 1992 came from Saudi Arabia. She came back and was looking very troubled, not cohesive in her statement. Because of the state she was, immigration decided not to let her go on the streets just like that.”
Our Correspondent leaent the personnel had to go through social media to locate her immediate older sister, Titilope Deborah Babatunde.
“They had to take time to search frantically for the family members through the social media because she had no phone number of any of her siblings. She was not in a stable condition. In fact, the immigration had to play the humanitarian role by reuniting her with her family members,” a source stated.
Titilope, the sister of the returnee who came to the immigration office to identify Motunrayo lauded the immigration personnel at the airport for reuniting her with the family.
Titilope confirmed that Motunde had been in Saudi Arabia where she was engaged as housemaid since 2018. She stressed that the family got wind of her health challenge about two weeks ago through another Nigerian based in the Arabian country.
“I am very grateful to the immigration service, MMIA Command for reuniting me with my sister. Initially when I received the call, I thought that it was a scammer at work. What immigration has done has further reinvigorated my belief about Nigeria. It shows that to some extent, we are still secured in Nigeria. If not for the immigration, I wouldn’t know that my sister has been brought back to Nigeria. We will still believe she was in Saudi Arabia,” she said.
Meanwhile, in a move to forestall the reoccurrence of cases similar to that of Motunde and others, the Nigeria Immigration Services Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, has in the last one week denied departures to no fewer than 20 Nigerians intended travellers who could neither give tangible reasons for wanting to travel out of the country or give details of their travels.
A source close to the airport said, most of those stopped could not provide documents to support their claims, while it was observed that some of them used travel agents to perfect their papers to travel out of the country by all means.
The source disclosed that the intending travellers were denied departures from the country after thorough interrogations and could not convinced the service that they were not going to soil the image of the country if allowed to travel abroad.
While it is becoming a thing of regrett that most of such travellers end up returning to Nigeria with complicated medical and health issues, the Comptroller General of the Nigeria Immigration Services, Alhaji Muhammed Babandede, has been advising Nigerians willing to travel out of the country by all means, to get proper education on job availabilities in any country they intend to go and should have deep knowledge about such environment, maintaining that most of them are not knowledgeable about their travel plans.
