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ECOWAS Refugees In Ijebu And Lagos Are Nigerians By Farouk Martins, Omo Aresa
Oru local Government in Ijebu area has been famous for accommodating Ecowas refugees from Liberia, Sierra Leone and other African countries for almost twenty years now. Each time their plight hit the news, many of us empathize with them. Nigeria has come to accept that many of them would not go back home for variety of reasons, not different from why many Nigerians make other countries their homes. This is another reason we should be proud to be a Nigerian.
We are very accommodating and generous to those who come to our land and are willing to live by our rules and culture. The earlier they assimilate the better for them and their host. One of the problems we have with those who refuse to tow the local culture is a deliberate attempt to take over or enshrine their ways on top of the locals. I always make Ibadan a community in point that has absorbed people from different areas with the saying that a slave has become a king and a king has become a slave in that same community.
In one of my articles, it was made clear how to be any Africana. This tolerance is waning these days when everyone is for himself. Unfortunately, this is not only true in other African countries; others have reduced Africans into mere cargoes that can be easily discarded in the sea or out of their lands. So there are lessons Nigerians can teach others on how to treat refugees from other lands. Even Nigerians have evolved into this type of generosity.
Many of us can remember the cry of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe when the children of Nkrumah were kicked out of Nigeria like unwanted baggage. Since then crime like everything else in Nigeria has gone up, not down as the blame on the poor immigrants became unjustified. Anytime people look for scapegoats in any land, they look towards the immigrants. I always tell the story of one of the girls from Ghana then, while working as a house help, she was also a student at the University of Lagos. Most Nigerians worked their ways up in foreign lands the same way.
The Ecowas refugees have been in Oru and Lagos camps for almost twenty years. While many of them have left the camps by marriages to Nigerians or recruited as teachers by other States or got into higher educational institutions and progressed, those who are still left faced uncertainty about eventual relocation for a while. Unlike Nigerians who fight about places of origins, these folks have no place to go during holiday celebrations. Nigeria is it. As we can imagine their children, know no other place but Nigeria. That does not mean they can not refer back to their ancestral home or speak the language. I had friends when I was growing up whose parents thought they were Brazilians and would only speak English in their only Nigerian accent!
We now have Anambra, Ogun and Ekiti States conducting official House business in Igbo and Yoruba respectively. Very soon Lagos will join them and other states will follow. That will be another incentive for people to assimilate into their host communities all over Nigeria and Africa I hope. There are no aliens among Africans.
What a difference knowledge and nationalism make now that we know we are not Egyptians but we migrated and created the culture the ancient Egyptians were proud of. We are not Jews but we created the culture the Jews are proud of. Indeed an African anywhere is an African in every land of Africa. We learn more about ourselves and get to realize that the solution in Africa is not coming from World Bank, United Nation or Paris Club but from Abuja, Nairobi and Soweto. In cooperation with other African countries, Nigeria is determined to solve the Ecowas refugee problem for good and other Asian, European and American countries can learn how from us.
The Yoruba of the Southwest of Nigeria have always taught their children that the way a free child is born, so is a child born into slavery. The point in that proverb is that you can not treat people anyhow. The rat race, hustle and bustle may have changed some of that but Africans based on our community self help and dedication stand a better chance to treat our neighbors as we want to be treated. If anyone thinks, I am always looking for ways to appeal to the pride of Nigerians or Africans to teach the rest of mankind a civilized way of living: I am guilty.
It is true Nigerians fight bitterly amongst themselves but as soon as we miss our brothers and sisters, we longed for them. Actually the same thing happens in most families. We plan and save for that Muslim, Christian, Ogun or Yam festivals when everyone would gather together only to bring up some trivial animosity about whom Mama loved more or who got more from Papa. Luckily it happens only a few times and those are the ones we hear because they sell stories.
Bakassi Peninsula is a good example of families living together for ages in Nigeria. It was really hard to see part of Cameron itself leave as some of them still see themselves as Nigerians. As soon as the International Court pronounced that more Nigerians have to become foreigners, naturally many took exception to the ruling. They want to be Nigerians. If the North had gone, if Lagos had gone, if Biafra had gone and if the West had gone, would we be fighting to be together again as these “refugees”?
Africans like to fool themselves, the fact remains that nobody can tolerate us or accommodate us better than fellow Africans. It is natural and instinctive that you feel more comfortable among your own. We may fight and bicker, Ghanaians are Africans, so are Liberians, Sierra Leoneans and Kenyans. We can not resurrect Nkrumah but he left a great deal behind to learn from.
The way Africans are treated outside of Africa is despicable and the way Africans are treating Africans inside Africa is shameful. Nigerians have been disrespected by the smallest country in Africa for fear of taking over or perpetrating crime. We must remember these are the same Nigerians who came to your rescue when the colonialist left. You can not use the bad apples among us (too many?) to justify the inglorious treatment meted to many of us. Not even our dignified fellows, at your airports before stepping in, get respected. Not to talk about the Nigerians dragged out in front of their local families and brutalized in your communities.
Nigeria must teach the rest of the world how to deal with our African bothers and sisters before we can call a point of order in African Union meetings to the unbecoming behavior of authorities in other African countries. The people of Oru Local Government deserve our congratulations for harboring our African brothers and sister for over seventeen years.
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