What's the worth of a Nigerian citizen?
After reading Chinex memoir (Post found here) on Tochi ,the young Nigerian that was killed some time ago in Singapore and watching daily on news and Papers how Nigerians are being humiliated and deported from abroad,I was prompt to ask myself "What's the worth of a Nigerian citizen? ".
I remember Israel invaded Uganda just to save few of their citizens,America send jets to pick their indigenes in crisis laden area,This should be a wake up call for Nigeria,Coincidentally i came across an article that speaks some of my mind.
Find the excerpt below:
Source;Business day
The serial and sustained deportation of Nigerians from all over the world fittingly underscores the worthlessness of life in the country. But much more, it painfully illustrates the growing devaluation of the worth of a Nigerian citizen at home and overseas.
The latest verse in the deportation chronicle was the hauling of about 734 Nigerians from the streets of Libya and various detention camps of Muammar Ghaddafi's country of religious fundamentalists to Nigeria . The deportees cried blue murder as they were 'cargoed' like sardines to the Murtala Muhammed Airport , Lagos.
Yet, even as they rue their plight, they should count themselves lucky. Some other Nigerians are not alive to recount their tales. They were executed for various offences in different parts of the world. Some died under scorching heat as they strove to strut through the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert for easier access to the next transport out of Africa to Europe . Others, though still alive, are living corpses as they painfully await their date with the hangman. They constitute the amorphous brigade of Nigerian youths on death row in prisons across the world.
Everywhere you go, you are confronted with the sordid tale of a family that has just received one of their own who was banished from yet another overseas country. High Commissions and Embassies in Nigeria always humour us with the disturbing statistics that place Nigeria ahead of nations with the highest rate of migrants. Envoys who had worked in other parts of the world before coming to Nigeria tell us that in all their years in the slippery turf of diplomacy, Nigeria is where they have recorded the highest number of emigrants. And it is true. Nothing wrong with anybody wanting to live away from home. But what rankles in the Nigerian story is the manner these Nigerians are treated. They are scourged and scotched by the governments and people of their new countries of residence. And when their 'hosts' don't know what to do with them, they ship them back home.
It is a long list. Here are a few cases. In July this year, about 96 Nigerians (50 male, 25 female and 21 infants) were deported from various parts of Europe . They were assembled in Dublin , Ireland and chaperoned by 150 escorts from their respective countries of deportation, a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) report said. The previous month, 130 other Nigerians were expelled from across Europe . Two months earlier, in April, they spared us: only 25 Nigerians were repatriated from Ireland . Deportation, repatriation and expulsion of Nigerians is a running story. It is a script that runs from Spain to Italy , Germany through Austria to Switzerland .
When they are not deporting Nigerians, they are killing them oftentimes in the most gruesome manner. Rewind to 2007 when Osamuyia Aikpitanhi was gagged and killed aboard an Iberia Airliner by Spanish security officials. His offence was that he had no valid resident permit. Rewind further to the wee hours of January 26, 2007 and the blood of Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi haunts the nation from the deepest crust of the earth.
Tochi was the 20-something-year-old Nigerian hanged for a drug-related offence in Singapore . In that country, as in Thailand and elsewhere, to do drugs is to court death. Tochi was arrested on November 28, 2004 at Chiang Airport in Singapore . Between 2004 and March 16, 2006 when the Appeal Court in Singapore upheld the death sentence pronounced by the High Court, the Nigerian government played the Possum. The life of a citizen was not important to the Obasanjo government. While government feigned ignorance of the halo of death hovering over the head of a citizen, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and human rights activists across the globe including the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) of Nigeria mounted pressure on Singapore to temper justice with mercy. The Obasanjo government only issued an official appeal 48 hours to the execution of Tochi. Of course, the appeal was turned down and Tochi had to face the hangman. He was hanged about three years after his arrest and about nine months after the Appeal Court sanctioned his death.
Tochi's story draws the chill. It typifies the worthlessness of the life of a Nigerian citizen even as other nations place high premium on the lives of their citizens. The In 2003, the British government had to despatch the very best of its detectives to Africa to investigate the parentage and filial history of Boy Adam, a Briton suspected to be of African descent courtesy of the DNA analysis of his dismembered body, fished out of the River Thames. Though the boy was dead, the UK government showed it cared for life - human life.
It is the same for the US government or any other government including the government of Africa 's meanest tyrant, Ghaddafi. The citizen is the centre-piece of these countries' diplomacy. It is called Citizen Diplomacy. Nigeria 's Foreign Affairs Minister, Ojo Maduekwe, touted it as the philosophy of his office. But on several occasions when the opportunity came for him to walk the talk, he failed. The unseemly sight of hundreds of dishevelled and somnolent Nigerians marching through Airport road in Lagos , after they were dumped at the Murtala Muhammed Airport from Libya , advertised the Federal Government in bad light
The Yar'Adua government must wean itself of the failings of the previous regime by safeguarding the lives and defending the rights of Nigerians anywhere in the world. It is because of government's ambivalence to the cries and pains of Nigerians that other countries, including South Africa , have continued to treat Nigerians as pigs.
There are many illegal aliens in Nigeria , from devious Indians to crooked Chinese, but Nigerians including the nation's often overzealous intelligence service do not hound them out of circulation or dehumanise them in spite of their predilection to undercutting the system.
The Yar'Adua government must stand up for the rights of all Nigerian citizens everywhere in the world. They sure deserve better treatment and would get it only if the Federal Government wants it. Enough of this ill-treatment of Nigerians.
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