The Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 on Monday announced it will ban all inbound and outbound flights of Emirates airlines.

The ban is expected to take effect from midnight on Wednesday.

The bans comes as a result of the continuous refusal of Emirate airlines to fly out passengers from Nigeria.

Emirates and KLM had in the past few weeks flown passengers into Nigeria but refused to fly passengers out owing to the new guidelines it introduced as part of measures to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, while speaking during the weekly briefing by the PTF on Monday, described the actions of the airline was discriminatory and devoid of scientific reasons.

He however noted that KLM has rescinded its decision on the guidelines for intending international passengers.

Sirika said: “We gave the two airlines options of either have a PCR test 72 hours before departure or within 72 hours before departure and repeat the PCR test on arrival or have a rapid test before departure and have PCR on arrival but not the combination of the three because it doesn’t make scientific sense.

“It makes the facilitation of passengers very cumbersome and it makes our work difficult and passengers are going through unnecessary hardship, which is not acceptable.

“Both airlines decided to carry only inbound passengers and not take outbound passengers but their reasons are adverse which doesn’t make sense.