FREEPRESS – Had it been the Nigerian system is fair to the child of the common man as it is to the child of the rich, no Nigerian citizen will contemplate the pain, even without the danger posed by rebels and gandamarines, of going to Europe by land and through the most dreaded Mediterranean Sea.
Juliet Edopolo, Ekhaguere, Osas, Ejirense, Esther Ogbeide, Baba, Okpo, Usman or Odion will never think of going to Europe except for holiday or tourism. So many promising young men and women with brains, beauty and various abilities have left Nigeria, not because they want to but because they and their abilities have been rejected by their own country’s leaders. In the cause of their migration, some die on their way while others arrive Europe to begin a new life in a system where things work; where citizens don’t generate their electricity or dig the soil before they drink water. Though they experience victimization, they work hard and struggle to earn a living, which most of them cannot live in their own country no matter how much they try, as Nigerian leaders derive unquantifiable pleasure and satisfaction from impoverishing their citizens.
”No fewer than 10,000 Nigerians have died between January and May 2017 while trying to illegally migrate through the Mediterranean Sea and the deserts”, the Nigeria Immigration Service has said. NIS Assistant Comptroller-General, in charge of training, manpower and development, Mr. Maroof Giwa, said that 4,900 Nigerians died in the Mediterranean Sea while the rest died while going through the deserts in their bid to cross to Europe.
According to Vanguard Online post of October 11, 2016, Victoria Ojeme reported that the European Union (EU) has expressed worry over 45,500 illegal migrants from Nigeria that crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe between 2015 and 2016. The Deputy Head of EU Delegation in Nigeria, Mr Richard Young said “within this number of people coming from Nigeria, 2012 was 800, in 2013 the number was 2,900, in 2014 the number was 8,700 and in 2015 and 2016 the number arithmetically increase to 45,500. While expressing worry that all these people were passing to Italy through boat on Mediterranean he said, that in 2016 3,700 people have drown in Mediterranean Sea.
The Italian Interior Ministry estimated the record of Nigerian arrivals at 36,000. The estimate was as at November 2016 and leads to an average of 109 Nigerians daily arriving via the risky route. In the report, in September 2016, a Nigerian gave birth to a boy on a Mediterranean rescue ship. The baby’s parents, Otas and Faith Oqunbor, had named him Newman Otas. They had been making the dangerous crossing from Libya with their two other children, aged seven and five, and were rescued just 24 hours before the baby was born.
Had it been the economy of Nigeria was organized, stable and promotes equitable distribution of opportunities and resources, many Nigerian citizens will not risk the hazards and expected humiliation in the hands of rebels and even state’s officials of Libya on their way to Libya in order to get to Europe, which has become a dream el-dorado for so many who have been impoverished by so many Nigerian leaders, whose only interest is how to butter the bread of their children, at the detriment of every other Nigerian who cannot even afford ‘akara and akamu’.
Today, every one is blaming Libyans, while some have taken this blame further by protesting to Libyan embassy. Why blame others for our failures and woes. Why blame our inability to utilize our God-given gifts and resources for the empowerment and development of our citizens and it’s resultant poverty and famine which has driven our citizens to migration for green pastures, on Libyans.
In this news of modern slavery and torture in Libya, all the victims of rapes, mental abuse and mechanical torment are Nigerians, mostly Edos and other black people. If you say they are desperate to travel that is why they are caught in this agonizing web of hellish treatment, remember ‘no one runneth when no one pursueth him or her’. No Emirati will travel by land to Europe because the government of UAE takes the welfare of every citizen as a duty. No European citizen will travel to Nigeria or any other African country or even to the United States by roads because they have a system that works, and patriotic leaders who know that their duty is to develop the people, and not the leaders we have here who will sink a borehole with 350,000, and inflate it to 35,000,000 or buy wheel-barrows at the prices of latest Peugeots for distribution to citizens as empowerment, and still ask the citizens to go on their kneels to receive them as gifts of their benevolence and dividends of democracy.
If the reverse becomes the case, that Europeans are made to face even a quarter of what Nigerians face every day in their daily life living in Nigeria, if they are able to stay alive for a season, they will not only trek through the desert but ride on the back of goats to cross the Mediterranean Sea to enter into Libya and Nigeria with no recourse to the danger posed by rebels who have come to derive pleasure from torturing migrating Nigerians who have been battered, raped, abused, impoverished, rejected and made stranded by their own country and leaders.
Many are happy that Nigerians are being evacuated from Libya back home. Of what good is it for government to bring a man who has successfully escaped from poverty and disease to hunger and torture back to abject poverty, disease and mental torture. It is motion without movement. It is like running and going nowhere. It is like the proverbial story of the seed of maize that jumped from frying pan to fire; you want to help it not to get burnt, you removed it from the fire and put it back on the frying pan. This is the dilemma of the common Nigerian who is being evacuated from Libya as they may end up in IDP Camps. They may end up in more poverty, more abject than it was before they migrated from our beloved but battered country.
Truth be told, there is no difference between those who go through pain in Libya and those who go through pain here in Nigeria. Both of them are suffering the same fate as a result of leadership failure and the present administration’s inability to move Nigeria from where they met her, violating heartbrokenly directive principles of state policy and fundamental human rights as enshrined in Sections1,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,23 and 33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,42,42,43, 44 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Today, Nigerians are still complaining of corruption, unreliable power supply, fluctuation in government policies, abuse of public offices, misapplication and mismanagement of public resources, and all these are the bane of illegal migration, leaving the ordinary Nigerian with no hope for better life living in Nigeria.
Without a patriotic, selfless, visionary, articulate and ready-to-die-for-Nigeria leadership commitment which believes in the rule of law and good governance along its key performance indicators, more Nigerians, even the rich will keep migrating illegally or legally out of this nation in search of fulfillment through their rejected and untapped gifts, abilities and talents.
Chief Blessing Agbomhere
Executive Director
Gatekeepers Foundation
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