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THE Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) announced on Tuesday the
consular team that will monitor the developments involving an
abducted Filipino engineer has arrived in Nigeria.
The DFA said that the team was sent to Nigeria
to talk with the employers of electrical supervisor Alfredo Bacani
Jr., who was abducted by armed militants last Thursday. The team is
also expected to make representations with Nigerian authorities on
Bacani’s welfare.
But Esteban Conejos Jr., foreign affairs
undersecretary for migrant workers’ affairs, admitted that the
team has so far not gained any clue on the identities and motives of
Bacani’s abductors.
Conejos said that what they can assure for now
is that Bacani was still alive. He added they still don’t know
what the abductors’ demands are.
The DFA earlier appealed to Filipinos working in
Nigeria to start coming home after Bacani was abducted by militants
in Port Harcourt. Conejos himself made the appeal for the Filipinos
to avail of the government’s program for voluntarily repatriation.
Bacani, an electrical supervisor for Italian
company Saipem was abducted Thursday night along with a Colombian
and a Nigerian. A Colombian oil worker was killed during the armed
attack at the workers’ company compound.
There are about 5,000 Filipinos working in
Nigeria even before the deployment ban in Nigeria started in January
following the abduction of 24 Filipino seafarers in the Niger Delta.
In February, a Filipino instrumentation engineer of a
Dutch-affiliated company in Nigeria was also snatched while on his
way to the Lagos airport for a vacation.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer and
one of the biggest employers of Filipino workers in that continent.
--Francis Earl A. Cueto
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