NEW AGE
4/29/03
Dying to leave Nigeria (1)
By EMMANUEL ONYEE MAYAH
Monday, December 7 1998 went down as a day of national shame when a German registered aircraft touched down at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport Lagos, carrying 146 Nigerians, all of them in handcuffs.
The aircraft, an airbus 310 with registration number D-ADLM and
special call sign H.L.F. 917 landed at the D-Finger of the airport and, not
without some fuss, began to discharge its human cargo; 146 deportees from Germany who were accompanied on the flight by 40 German policemen.
As they were herded to the airport security cells, spectators feasted
on the deportees many of whom were arrested in Bonn, Berlin, Stutgatt and other German cities in an operation said to have lasted one month.
Information on the trail of the deportees had it that the authorities in their host country had set out a substantial part of security vote to create a special unit of combined police and immigration officers to tackle what had come to be known as the Nigerian menace. Indeed before the big haul of 146 `unwanted Nigerians', the German authorities had in June of the same year deposited 60 Nigerians at the Lagos airport, using a chartered skyjet DC-10 aircraft with registration number V2-LER. The seriousness of the exercise was such that even though the 60 deportees were manacled on the flight, 70 German security men escorted them, to prevent them from escaping. The Germans obviously did not want to take chances, given that 17 Nigerians, out of the 77 arrested, had managed to escape before the deportation date. And perhaps to compensate for their loss, the German authorities vigorously smoked out 40 more
Nigerians, manacled and deported them with dispatch a few days later,
thus bringing to 246 the number of Nigerians ejected from that country in
only three operations. Statistics since the early 1990s show that no other country in the world has had its citizens treated like vermin in
foreign lands. The Germans are not the only ones with a special squad created to hunt down Nigerians perceived as criminals, illegal aliens or both.
NewAge enquiries revealed that similar mechanisms solely devised to
rout Nigerians exist in countries like Spain, Netherlands, Italy,
Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Canada and the USA.
In the morning of November 25, 2002 Spain deported 44 Nigerians,
bringing to 375 the number of Nigerians so repatriated in 11 months. The figure shot up to 412 with the deportation of another 37 the following month. Statistics available to NewAge show that 609 Nigerians met with a similar fate in 1998, 434 in 1999, 473 in 2000 and 298 in 2001.
According to the Spanish Interior Ministry, the Nigerian deportees, mainly young men and women, were deported for offences including fraud, prostitution, human trafficking and drug offences. Among them were two Nigerian women who the Spanish authorities were so much in a hurry to get off their soil that they left their babies behind in that country.
The same week Spain deported 44 Nigerians, Republic of Ireland
repatriated 25 Nigerians for similar offences. That country deported 39 more Nigerians in 2000 and in 2001 entered a controversial pact with the Nigerian government to break down diplomatic barriers and smoothen the way for the repatriation of about 2,000 Nigerian asylum seekers in exchange for an £8 million aid package. Amid the raging controversy, the statistics tumbled out that in 1998 and 1999, Britain deported 55,120 African asylum seekers of which Nigerians were 22,400. According to the Detainee Helpline Support Unit (DHSU), a non-governmental organisation based in the UK, 13,100 were repatriated in 1998 and 9,200 the following year. For months and years, these Nigerians were held at various detention camps and prisons, particularly the Jones Lay Home at Gatwick and Heathrow Airport detention camps.
The preponderance of Nigerians turning up like a bad penny in every
criminal and immigration case has led to the argument in Nigeria that some of the crimes blamed on Nigerians in Britain are actually committed by West African nationals carrying Nigerian passports. One immigration officer in Lagos said many of the deportees could not speak any of the Nigerian languages, neither did they have known addresses, and that explains their rejection of such deportees each time they are repatriated to Nigeria.
However, in a counter argument, immigration officials in UK say they
are convinced these illegal immigrants are Nigerians, that "what the
Nigerian detainees do is to start speaking in tongues as soon as you put them on the plane.
"And when they refuse to speak their local languages when we arrive
Nigeria, we have no choice than to bring them back to Britain. But what we now do is to detain them perpetually till they are fed up and decide on their own volition to go back to Nigeria." Such unpredictable wiles of
detainees to resist deportation probably pushed the Germans to adopt a more aggressive approach like the use of manacles and sedatives. While Germany deported no less than 246 Nigerians in 1998, it repatriated 168 in 1999 and 113 in 2000. And between 2000 and 2001, the Nigeria Immigration Service recorded that 17,992 Nigerians were repatriated from various countries across the world.
Of this number, 288 were from the Netherlands, 126 from Sweden, 203
from Belgium, 47 from Ukraine and 113 from Israel. According to the
Nigerian Ambassador to Israel, Dr. George Obiozor, Nigerians were "abscondees from pilgrimages. They have been doing this abscondment for so long; and for a country in a constant state of war, any undocumented alien is viewed as a security risk". It was further gathered that upon arrival in the Holy Land these Nigerians destroy their passports and when arrested by the police, they claim to be refugees from Liberia or Sierre-Leone.
Today the conduct of Nigerians in Israel pales into insignificance to
the vice of Nigerian young women in Italy, a place now seen as a byword
for sexual iniquity in social discourse. Both in number and frequency,
Italy remains in the lead of large-scale eviction of Nigerians, mostly vice
girls and pimps seen as the major arteries feeding the network of
international sex trade in Europe. Indeed the mass deportation of Nigerian women from Italy started in 1997 but peaked in late 1999. Ever since, the Murtala Muhammed International Airport has become the location for a reality television where Nigerian prostitutes deported from Italy can make anything happen.
Between March 1999 and April 2001, a total of 1,136 Nigerian girls
were deported from Italy, according to Mrs. Titi Atiku, chairperson of
Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF). For example in December 1999, 150 Nigerian vice girls were flown home from Italy under tight security. The deportation, on a chartered Alitalia Flight, brought to 308 the number of such Nigerian women so deported in four months, in batches of 64,19,75 and 150 respectively. In March of the same year, 60 Nigerian ladies, escorted by 20 Italian police officers, were repatriated; and in April 47 girls and 17 men suffered the same fate.
As more Nigerians in Italy were linked to sex slavery, women
trafficking, advance fee fraud and drug trafficking, the deportation exercise intensified in December 2000 when another set of 166 Nigerians comprising 111 women and 55 men were flown home. Similarly, 403 girls were deported between January and June 2001, with 3,000 more held in Italian prisons, awaiting repatriation, according to WOTCLEF. Invariably, the Italian police were unrelenting the following year, deporting a total of 658 Nigerian girls. Information available to NewAge reveals that with the several deportations made last year, Italy is still purging itself of undesirable elements from Nigeria and only last month repatriated 84 vice girls, two drug traffickers, and two human traffickers, using a chartered BLU PANARAMA aircraft.
Some of the Nigerians were rounded up on the streets of Italy while others were picked up from their homes. Meanwhile, neighbouring European countries were not sitting idle; Spain alone deported 481 girls between February and November 2002; 59 were sent home from Netherlands, six from Ireland and 18 from Switzerland.
It has been argued that the economic, political cultural and fiscal
policies of successive governments in Nigeria, built on political upheavals, deceit and instability to say nothing of mismanagement and chronic corruption, are factors responsible for anywhere-but-home instincts of Nigerians, young and old.
But these sentiments cut no ice in these foreign lands, just as they
have never won Nigerians any sympathy. Especially in the United States, where the Nigerian Consul-General in New York has revealed that since 1998 an average of five Nigerians are deported a week and about 10 apprehended every month for a variety of crimes ranging from credit card fraud to drug dealing. Indeed, the continued resolve of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) to clamp down on Nigerians on the wrong side of the law becomes more manifest in the fact that notwithstanding its deportation of 66 Nigerians on Sunday September 30, 2001, 50 in February 2002, 131 between March and July, 134 in October, 63 in December and 79 in February 2003, the US still found it necessary to join forces with Canada to trap and evict more Nigerians.
Both governments, in January 1999, leased a jet dubbed Con Air and
flew 60 handcuffed Nigerians back to Lagos. The sky service jet with five
Nigerian criminals and five escort officers left Pearson Airport in Canada for the US to pick up 55 other cons for the trip home. The Nigerians were
handcuffed and some fitted with leg-irons during the 24-hour flight. The move became necessary after commercial airlines had refused to fly the Nigerians because of the potential danger in the exercise.
It was gathered that the Canadian government paid $20,000 for five
seats on the flight while the US coughed out $275,000 to lease the skyservice in addition to providing 25 more security escorts.
The use of security officers in the deportation of Nigerians
notwithstanding, the exercise is hardly without incident, sometimes
resulting in casualties. A case in point is the death of Miss Semira
Adamu, the 20-year-old Nigerian who died of brain haemorrhage aboard a Sabena Airline flight while being deported by the Belgian authorities. She
was shackled hand and feet, with her face covered as the police tried to
force her aboard the aircraft. Passengers on the flight watched in horror as Semira struggled and subsequently fell into a coma. She was taken to a hospital where she died hours later.
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