Folarin Ademosu

By Folarin Ademosu Jr

The latest xenophobic attacks on Nigerians, among other foreign nationals, majorly in Atteridgeville and Rosettenville, South Africa, has frayed tempers back home. Expectedly.
No fewer than 20 shops owned by foreigners were reportedly looted and 12 houses attacked. Two properties belonging to Nigerians were torched, a parish of the Celestial Church of Christ, CCC, was attacked and its prophet, Samson Sangojimi, bloodied before he was rescued by the South Africa police. Despite police presence, the baying South Africans allegedly tried to forcefully take from the prophet a bag they claimed he had drugs in—which he denied.

While we lament, and pillory the barbarous acts of our South African friends, we should sincerely prepare our minds for the next attack. Believe me, this will happen. Undoubtedly, South African government and its citizens share a belief that foreigners are primary contributors to the ills ailing their society and have exclusively dominated their business firmament. More so, the recent xenophobic unrest came two years after a similar one in 2015 which killed seven people, and another earlier in 2008 that recorded 62 deaths.

To say such future onslaught against foreigners is inevitable is to remind ourselves of a comment by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, in 2015, which is believed to have inflamed the xenophobic crisis of that year. The king stated that “those (immigrants) who come from outside to please go back to their countries … the fact that there were countries that played a role in the country’s struggle for liberation should not be used as an excuse to create a situation where foreigners are allowed to inconvenience (sic) locals.”

And, if the attack eventually recurred, we only would remember as our responses to the current incident a diplomatic summoning of the South African envoy by the Nigerian Government for an explanation, and riposte by some ragtag youths on the regional office of South Africa-owned MTN, in Abuja. At that time, we shall try to remember, but will find none, any pragmatic measure taken by government at tackling the rising number of Nigerian immigrants, including asylum seekers.

Instructively, it is time the federal government realised that Nigerian immigrant situation has reached a crisis point and must be addressed with all seriousness.

In a 2016 report, the Italian Interior Ministry claimed over 36,000 illegal Nige¬rian immigrants made the voyage of death across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy in that year alone. Scores of these risky travellers never get to their destination, but get drowned in the Sea, summarily executed, detained in anti-immigrant camps, among other cruelty they face.

Just recently, a gory picture emerged on the internet of many African men, including Nigerians, with hands raised behind their heads while being hurled to their death in the hands of gun-wielding Libyan militiamen. The only official response to the mass execution came via a travel warning from Abike Dabiri-Erewa, special adviser on diaspora affairs to the president. And, after that everyone returned to default passivism or deliberate forgetfulness.

If that and other incidents of bestiality against Nigerians didn’t provoke government to formulate policies that will properly address the factors underlying the exodus of Nigerians, especially youths, from their fatherland, the newest xenophobic attacks in South Africa provides an opportunity to. We need not make bones about the fact that Nigeria is perceived in the eyes of the world an exporter of crimes, such as drug-dealing, financial fraud and human trafficking. We need not hide the fact that the largest number of Africans prostituting in Europe are perceived to be Nigerians, while we remain the all-time signature reference on Advanced Fee Fraud, locally called 419.

Apparently, the root causes of illegal immigration of Nigerians are corruption, bad governance, poverty, social strife, injustice, joblessness, faulty reward system and economic hardship. Also, it is also a problem caused misplaced priorities by government. Despite the risk involved, it is unlikely that Nigerians facing abject poverty, unemployment, or those reduced to destitute in the Internally Displaced Persons, IDP, camps will not jump at an offer to travel, even on a wooden canoe, across the Atlantic Oceans.

The Nigerian government must put on its thinking cap and fashion out policies that will address the social and economic malaise underlying illegal immigration.

Folarin Ademosu, a journalist, writes from Lagos