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A flood of deportees Editorial Thursday, November 19, 2009 IT seems Nigerians are the world’s new unwanted people. They are being deported from many parts of the world. Nigerians have a reputation for criminal cleverness. This is nonsense, of course. All Nigerians have been idiotically tarred with the same brush as a few criminals, some of them not even Nigerians. advertisement SOME countries may in the future legislate to keep Nigerians out, as the United States did to the Chinese in the late 19th Century. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which was passed in 1882, barred Chinese from entering the United States, especially California, for 10 years. The ban was not lifted until 1943, and only a very limited number of Chinese was allowed to enter the country, a bar removed only in 1965, THE Chinese do not deport Nigerians; they imprison or kill them. It was to save the Jews from Hitler that a conference was held at Evian in France in 1938. But most countries refused to accept Jewish refugees. Hitler sent them to the gas chambers. MANY Nigerians find their country stifling and try to escape from what they consider its leaden oppressiveness. Truly, a pall of hopelessness appears to hang over the country. Nigeria is a rich country, but most Nigerians are poor. Babies are not yet being eaten, as Jonathan Swift satirically suggested in “A Modest Proposal”, but they are being sold. Many other babies are abandoned by mothers, usually unmarried mothers who allowed themselves to be deceived by much older men because they needed money for food, who have no means of feeding and clothing them. THERE is corruption that taunts the people, “and what are you going to do about it?” The people are unable to do anything about the mansions built by those who had no income only a few years ago. Politics has brought them prosperity. Some generals collected their billions during military rule. One general once notoriously said that all Nigerian generals were stinking rich. THE country’s oil has made some people extremely wealthy. Oil producers in the Middle East have used revenues from the commodity to transform deserts into cities where everything works. Municipal services are steady. The highways have no holes, unlike in Nigeria where many of the roads have holes with the depth and diameter of a bomb crater. The Benin-Sagamu expressway, one of the country’s busiest highways, has been in a terrible state for more than five years. SOME of those who leave the country do so because of the overpowering smell of decay: the infrastructural collapse, the foul odour of corruption, insecurity, among other reasons. Many of them have professional qualifications but find frustration and not fulfillment in working in Nigeria. Money of course, is also an important consideration in their decision to leave the country. Some people may accuse them of being selfish. The situation in the country will not be improved by running away, they will say. MOST Nigerian professionals who leave the country to work abroad have valid visas and board flights. Some of them find employment before leaving the country. But many of the Nigerians being deported are unskilled. They have no travel documents or carry papers that are worthless because they were forged. THEY do not leave the country through the airports. They take the land route and Customs officers, whose hands may have been tied with the comfortable cord of currency, do not try to stop them. MANY of them perish in the desert. Many more languish in North African dungeons. Some others, in overcrowded, leaky boats, are swallowed up by the Mediterranean sea. SOME of them make it to Europe and discover that the fire abroad is much more intense than the frying pan that they fled from at home. But they are ashamed to return home. Many of them cannot even afford the fare home; they have no employment. They are arrested and then deported. THERE are many lost tribes of Nigerians on the West African coast. Unable to reach Europe and ashamed to return home, they have made their homes in alien lands and are badly treated by their fellow African hosts. AN enlightenment campaign about the perils and the privations illegal immigrants face may persuade some Nigerians desperate to leave the country to remain at home. But some people without skills and no travel documents will continue to leave the country and Nigeria will continue to face the embarrassment of the regular deportation of its citizens until its rulers allow it to realise its potential of true, not sloganeering, greatness.