In
April, a former Nigerian public official lost his daughter under questionable
circumstances. The young lady’s death was avoidable, and who knows, maybe her
spirit is already haunting a UK hospital and another one in Nigeria. A hospital
in Birmingham misdiagnosed her condition; the one in Nigeria performed surgery
on her without having a life support machine. When her condition deteriorated
post-surgery, the hospital could not artificially ventilate her heart. She died
as a result.
I was hurt to read about that needless loss of
life; anyone should. A premature death is hurtful enough, but an avoidable one
is shattering. In seven months of this tragedy, the father has written two
public notes on his grief. One could tell he deeply loved his daughter. In the
latter, he talks of bereavement hallucination and its redemptive and
therapeutic powers. It is clear that this father will not get over his
daughter’s death anytime soon; it is an agony no one should experience.
In that same piece, he urges the government to
“grade and classify” hospitals as “first, second and third tier, the same way
banks are categorized in Nigeria”. He wants a first-tier hospital to have “an
agreed high standard of medical equipment installed and top-quality personnel
working there” so that “patrons can know the level of service to expect when
attending any hospital based on its classification as 1st, 2nd or 3rd tier”. To
rewrite his thoughts, the rich should be able to patronize truly first-class
hospitals; the poor can settle for the second or third-tier. Or, who would
third-tier hospitals serve? The rich? First-tier hospitals will care for
first-tier lives; third-tier hospitals for third-tier lives. But this is not
where I am going.
26 ‘third-tier’ lives
Two weeks ago, 26 Nigerian “third-tier” lives
perished at sea while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from the north
coast of Africa. All 26 were women, two of them even pregnant. This wasn’t the
first time that Nigerian migrants would die, or the first time the public would
gett a sniff of their travails while on the risky sail in search of green
pastures. Anyone interested in knowing the grim dangers of the average migrant
journey should please google ‘Europe by Desert: Tears of African Migrants’.
Thank me for the link if you wish, but you should compulsorily thank Emmanuel
Mayah, the writer, one of the most daring journalists to ever emerge from
Africa. At great risk to his life, Mayah went undercover for 37 days with
illegal migrants, travelling across seven countries in an attempt to cross the
Sahara Desert. On his return, he documented the dangers involved in such
journeys: rape, armed robbery, fraud, blood oaths, hunger, dehydration, death.
That was in 2009. Eight years after, very
little has changed. Year on year, migrants keep dying in their thousands — from
the hundreds of thousands who’d rather die than remain on the continent. This
year alone, 150,985 have arrived in southern Europe via North Africa, according
to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM); 2,639 others died while
trying to.
In May, Nigerians were among the 44 migrants
to have died of thirst after their truck broke down in the
Sahara Desert in northern Niger while en
route to Libya, where
they were to cross to Europe. Ghana was the only other nation represented in
that tragedy. In August, Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation (NIDO), quoting
data from the IOM, said Nigerians formed the majority of the 1,500 migrants to
have died in the first seven months of 2017. Both NIDO and IOM have always
acknowledged that these figures are an underestimation of migration casualties;
it is never easy to account for deaths in the desert, at sea, and at the
various stages of an illegal trip.
Migrant casualties are literally an everyday
affair, but the latest round is generating above-usual notice for various
reasons. This is one of the very few cases where Italian officials are
suspecting that migrants were deliberately murdered after they had been
sexually assaulted. An investigation is already ongoing and five people are in
detention already. The nature of this investigation has to be harped on: Italy
is investigating the death of 26 Nigerians who tried to enter Italy illegally;
given the circumstances, it is under no obligation to do so. Italy also gave
dignity to the migrants, organising a burial ceremony for them, even going
ahead to place a picture and an information card with copies of dental scans
and a list of traits like tattoos and scars “that might someday be used to
identify the victim if a family member ever comes looking”.
The migrant’s life doesn’t
count
In all this, the Nigerian government was
conspicuously absent. The girls were buried without Nigerian presence at the
solemn ceremony. Meanwhile, the Embassy of Nigeria in Rome has been sleeping —
no interest in the investigations into the cause of the deaths. On the day the
26 were buried, Geoffrey Onyema, the Foreign Affairs Minister, was quiet.
Meanwhile, when Nigeria beat Argentina in a World cup friendly three days
earlier, he was quick to pen a congratulatory message to the Super Eagles,
announcing: “Russia, here we come!”
Okay, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, SSA to the President
on Foreign Relations and Diaspora, issued a statement describing the death of
the girls as “avoidable and preventable… tragic and lamentable… just not worth
it ultimately”. But to know what she truly feels, look no further than her
Twitter engagement with those implicitly blaming the tragedy on the government.
When one person tweets that “Everybody is trying hard to blame the gov for
their death as if they were sent on a mission by the gov,” Dabiri-Erewa
retweets. When another berates the Federal Government for its absence at the
interment, she asks if the Nigerian mission was “duly informed of the time,
date and venue”. Finally, as contained in the press release, and as she
generously argued on Twitter, Dabiri-Erewa believes the solution to persistent
migrant deaths is to educate Nigerians on the dangers of such journeys.
Absolutely not!
Talk to anyone in Edo — the state with the
highest contribution to Nigeria’s migrant population — and you will hear that
migrants are well-aware of the risks. The problem is that they’re in so much
suffering already that they wonder if death can be any worse. There is
something migrants are running away from; and unless the government addresses
it, more deaths are bound to happen. What they are chasing after are the simple
things of life: food, shelter, clothing, employment, dignity, a sense of
belonging in their own country. Only people who have experienced the lack of
these basics can understand and interpret the frustrations of migrants.
The ex-public official who lost his daughter,
for example, was failed by the health system. Seven months after, he hasn’t
healed. Now, consider a poor Nigerian who has been failed numerous times by the
health system, uncountable times by the job industry, many times by the
education system. Imagine the travails of a man who has lost his wife because
he couldn’t afford first-tier healthcare, whose children are out of school
because he couldn’t pay their fees, whose family has been thrown out by his
landlord because he could’t pay his rent. Many years of multiple frustration
will convince him that there is better life abroad, and he’d rather die trying
to get it than remain in penury in Nigeria.
Blood on their hands
In case Nigerian public officials do not know,
many of them are culpable for the death of these migrants. By their daily
abdication of their responsibility to take decisions in public interest, by
filling their pockets at the expense of building the structures that could have
kept the dead migrants back in the country, by constantly travelling abroad and
experiencing the way normal societies work yet failing to replicate the same at
home, by their blithe contempt for the life of the common man so long they and
their families are sorted, so many Nigerian public office holders — not all —
have blood on their hands. The migrant’s life doesn’t mean a thing to the
government, but no problem; karma hasn’t stopped being a bitch!
Soyombo, Editor of the International Centre forInvestigative Reporting (ICIR), tweets @fisayosoyombo
Culled from The Cable
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