Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has approved 10bn naira ($6.7m; £5.2m) in emergency funding to protect the country against a potential outbreak of the Ebola virus.
The swift financial intervention follows reports of renewed outbreaks of the deadly virus in parts of East and Central Africa, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.
A presidential spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, said the emergency funds would be used to rapidly scale up the response capacity of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC).
As part of the containment strategy, President Tinubu has set up a high-level presidential task force, headed by his chief of staff, to oversee the country’s multi-agency response.
Health officials are immediately tightening border controls, with mandatory temperature checks, crowd-control protocols, and health declaration forms being reintroduced at all international airports.
Isolation centres at Nigeria’s main aviation hubs in Lagos and Abuja have also been reactivated, while airport management teams have been ordered to regularly disinfect cargo zones and baggage areas.
The new task force has been granted powers to coordinate with diplomatic and aviation authorities to regulate flights arriving from high-risk countries, which may include routing specific planes to designated containment terminals.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, was widely praised by the international community for its rapid and successful containment of the Ebola virus during the devastating West African outbreak in 2014.
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