The craze and madness for Nigerians especially those from the southern part of the country to travel to Europe and other parts of the world did not start immediately after independence in the 1960s. Those who were fortunate to travel for the sake of seeking knowledge came back to Nigeria after their studies. Unfortunately, this trend changed from the mid 1980s with successive military regimes due to their negligence of the Nigerian economy and the bastardization of the Naira for the selfish interest. The Nigerian military and its leadership took all sorts of orders from the IMF and the World Bank to destroy the Naira through various policies of devaluation and dehumanization in the pretext that it will bring in investment to Nigeria and lead to more job creation. All these never happened. Rather, people became poorer and searched for other avenues to survival.
Within this period that the drama was taking place in the large theatre known as Nigeria with the military as lead characters, Nigerians who were fortunate to be in other parts of the world especially in Western Europe and the United States of America at this time, started to see how “rich” they have become over night. They converted the pennies and pence that they had and saw that it was all becoming so much money back home in the local economy. This group of people in Europe and the United States of America started to open up all sorts of illegal avenues to get others to become “millionaires” by coming over to the new world. When they visited home they told all kinds of lies, cock and bull stories to any one or prospected victim that was ready to listen. They made stories of how they “worked” for just few hours and made so much money.
Unfortunately many of the people that you will find telling these “wonderful money-making stories” are either common criminals with no identity or legal papers in Europe and the United States of America, or those that can not take to crime but are barely living from hand to mouth. For this second group of people buying good clothes and feeding well only becomes a reality when it is time to visit home, for Christmas or Easter. Those from the United States even have the liberty of returning the new clothes to the store on their return for as long as the clothes did not stay with then for more than three months. Overnight Visas to travel out of Nigeria became precious and expensive like gold, only accessible to those that have enough money to buy. The self enslaved Nigerians living abroad had suddenly sold themselves and their ideas as well. They came for Christmas and Easter holidays with little Dollars, Euro or Pounds converted them to Naira.
This group of Nigerians in their individual capacity planned to enslave more people for the sake of Dollars, Euros and Pounds conversion to the Naira. They made their contacts with the various embassies on who to bribe and how much visas will cost. The crazy title of “connection man” was given to some people who had access to those to live abroad and can walk into an embassy with the papers sent from abroad. Traveling abroad suddenly became one of those things that any one can do. What was needed was just the decision to sell an ancestral land or some property that belongs to the family. All for the sake of hard currency conversion to the devalued Naira note.
Those unfortunate Nigerians that have seen the power of conversion of the “hard currency” to Naira, but could not afford to pay the high price of the visa and other travel documents decided to walk all the way to Europe. Almost every young boy and girl from some particular part of Nigeria wanted to travel to this land where people are assumed to virtually pick hard currency on the streets.
These people get to Europe and live a life that is beyond any reasonable explanation. They get to their destination disappointed. They have been lied to by the people who took their money to purchase visas for them. Life becomes unbearable, except for the girls and women that knew from the start of the whole process that they were traveling to Europe as sex workers.
For the men, hawking on the streets of Europe becomes a form of formal work since they have no skill to offer. They take to selling drugs or what ever will give them money. Pride is then redefined. The average person who gets involved in this vicious circle becomes a wanton liar.
I once asked a friend of mine who traveled to Nigeria for the Christmas holidays that: what did you tell your people that you do here in Athens ? He laughed and replied “I told them that I am a marketing officer for Sunny music”. I really felt sorry for him. Here he was in Athens living under the fear of being arrested every day by the Greek police and getting convicted for piracy.
Recently, I was in Italy discussing with a lady on how she got to Rome. She told me that she knew she was traveling to do prostitution. “Wetin be my own, after all I no pay kobo to travel”. I then asked her what that meant and she told me that she just needed to go to the shrine, take an oath and leave some of her pubic hair for the priest to prove that she will pay her dues, and if she fails to pay, she will go mad. How much is this? I asked. “50,000 Euros na im I pay for one year. I no even give my Madam problem before I pay am finish and make I tell you I make plenty money for Nigeria when I send money home”
I visited the United States of America , Canada and the United Kingdom, the story was not any different. You see Nigerians and you ask yourself whether they must travel to these parts of the world. They come with all sorts of stories on why they had to travel. The image of Nigeria means nothing to them. All that is on their mind is dollars to be converted to Naira.
When I first started my many trips around the world, I had so many bad feelings towards most of the immigration officers that I met in different airports across the world. But for the many years that I have spent outside Nigeria and traveling to many countries of the world, I have realised that this clich� of hard currency seekers from Nigeria have done a lot of damage to the Nigerian green passport and the Nigerian image.
I do know that this terrible group of people with little or no moral standard will frown at this article when they read it. They will write to defend Nigerians in diaspora. The question that most Nigerians in Diaspora should be asked is what type of work they have been doing where ever they have lived in the past years and what they have contributed to their communities that they think will move the Nigerian nation forward. When I first heard of the Naira re-denomination, I was happy that at least, majority of Nigerians will have a taste of good life after the transition period. I do not expect the re-denomination policy to produce magical results over night. People will then be able to buy what ever they need paying in bits and pieces over a period of time. It then means that Nigeria will be going back to those glorious days when the Naira was not only a strong currency, but the lure to travel and stay in Europe was not there.
Ibrahim Adoke Yakubu, a postgraduate student, wrote in from the University of Athens, Greece.