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TheScoop Verdict: It is time to end this Abike Dabiri show

By: Bhodemarz on November 22, 2017 / comment : 0 , ,

In her former life, Abike Dabiri-Erewa was the Nigerian queen of the screen. Now, she is one of Nigeria’s most popular politicians, a fact that she owes more to her days as the NTA Newsline anchor than her 12 years stint at the Nigerian parliament.
Nothing has changed: Currently the Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora, Dabiri-Erewa still fancies herself as the queen of the screen, still loves the show and gets high on the attention.
She needs rehabilitation and our sympathy but it is time for her to go.
If not for anything the recent happenings involving the uncovering and subsequent burial of 26 Nigerian women in Italy who had been found dead on a Spanish military ship, has once again exposed Dabiri-Erewa’s incompetence and undue crave for attention, escalating a purely diplomatic issue into a free-for-all.
As SSA to the president, she occupies a non-cabinet role and is not involved in any priority decision making – yet she signed a press release on her quasi-official letterhead condemning the government of Italy.
Dabiri-Erewa has become more of a Buhari public relations team embed than an actual assistant who should scarcely be seen while providing technical advice to the president and the federal government. She is not a diplomat and does not have the standing to represent the views of Nigeria or the Federal Government at international level.
Dabiri-Erewa’s uninformed diatribe and twitter meltdown is completely antithetical to the dignity with which the Italian Government has handled the matter of the 26 Nigerian illegal migrants who got no attention from their own government. Typically, as Nigerians took interest in the situation, Dabiri-Erewa could not help but plug herself into the matter despite lacking information. A Twitter user wondered why there was no government representative at the burial of the girls. This was Dabiri-Erewa’s tweet-response: “I hope the mission in Italy was duly informed of time . date and venue. If true , this has to be looked into. FEC , as the highest decision making body, is taking this up cos of its utmost seriousness .”
That response in which she “hoped” and wondered “if true”, shows her utter cluelessness about happenings on the diplomatic front and her complete fixation on the cameras and twitter notifications, perpetually seeking validation and support.
Italy is one of the worst hit countries in the world by the activities of illegal migration and has shown more than enough commitment to combat it as its economy is being crushed by having to bear the burden. Let’s bring this home, Italy has had to deal with much more internal security problems as a result of the activities of the Nigerian crime syndicate running Sicily and else where in their country. Yet, Italy has shown good faith in condemning all forms of wrong treatment of Nigerians by its citizens or anybody else. Remember Emmanuel Chidi? The Nigerian Boko-Haram asylum seeker who was murdered by a racist Italian football fan over a year ago. This was condemned at all the highest levels of government including the Interior Minister, Speaker of Parliament and then Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, who tweeted “Today the government is in Fermo with Father Vinicio and local institutions in memory of Emmanuel. Against hate, racism and violence.”  Mancini, his attacker, has been arrested and charged with murder. Chidi has also been posthumously awarded by the Italian government to preserve his memory and combat all forms of xenophobia, racism and hate.
Yet Abike Dabiri-Erewa implies the Italian government is enabling girl child trafficking. In her release she said, “If there is no demand, there is no supply. So while we on our end ensure that we do everything to curtail the supply, they on their end demanding are just as guilty.”
This is utterly irresponsible and it is not the first time she would be throwing Nigeria into needless diplomatic tensions with should-be allies, if we are really serious in the business of tackling trafficking.
Despite known diplomatic channels, Dabiri-Erewa took to Twitter, accusing the Italian government like a road side pundit.
“Why were they (the bodies) hurriedly buried nine days before the date communicated to the DG, NAPTIP by the Italian Embassy without any information to the Nigerian Government? Why the rush to bury the bodies without carrying out a post-mortem to determine the causes of death?”
She can learn a thing or two from her predecessors – Ambassador TD Hart who served the Yar’Adua/Jonathan administration and Ambassador Patrick Dele Cole who served the Olusegun Obasanjo administration in similar capacities.  Those – by the way  – were trained, career diplomats and far less controversial. That is if you have heard of them at all. She should ordinarily be liaising with the Director of the Department of Consular and Legal Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Under-secretaries in charge of Economic and Consular affairs and that of Regions and International Organizations.
An Ambassador who spoke with us in confidence, said, “the problem with these appointees without diplomatic training is that they are making policy statements that are causing embarrassment to the country.”
Ordinarily the diplomatic procedure is for the Italian Foreign Ministry to send a Note Verbale to the Nigerian Mission in Italy. The mission would transmit it via Telex to the Foreign Ministry, copying the Minister, State Ministers and Permanent Secretary. In this case the Undersecretaries in charge of Region & International Organisations and the Economic & Consular Affairs would be copied due to the nature of the issue. These Undersecretaries would then involve the Directors of Consular and Legal and that of Western European Affairs.
As you may have noticed from the above, Abike Dabiri-Erewa does not feature in this loop.
Unfortunately, Dabiri-Erewa appears to be running a parallel and militant Foreign Affairs Ministry. This is typical of the Buhari administration where different power centres sprout in places where cooperation and/or hierarchy should be clear – from the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and NNPC GMD feud to the turf war between the EFCC and DSS.  The natural order has been turned on its head. Dabiri-Erewa has been accused of hijacking the Nigerians in Diaspora Organization (NIDO) activities, rendering the NIDO desk in the ministry redundant. She has also managed to endorse a tweet calling for the execution of looters who are somehow to blame for the 26 trafficked women found dead in Italy.
When Dabiri-Erewa’s calibri font almost sparked a diplomatic row with the United States following a preposterous, cynical travel advisory she released concerning Nigerians visiting the US, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama said she should be ignored.
But that is not enough.
Abike Dabiri-Erewa benefits from this weak minister of foreign affairs who has allowed her run riot. In our opinion, she must not be ignored. She should resign, be redeployed or out-rightly fired. It’s time to end this show and go home.


Source: The Scoop

OPINION: What is the worth of a #Nigerian migrant’s life? by 'Fisayo Soyombo

By: Bhodemarz on November 21, 2017 / comment : 0 , , ,

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

Italy probes deaths of 26 Nigerian women from migrant boats

By: Bhodemarz on November 06, 2017 / comment : 0 , ,

Italian prosecutors are investigating the deaths of 26 Nigerian women - most of them teenagers - whose bodies were recovered at sea.
There are suspicions that they may have been sexually abused and murdered as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean.
Five migrants are being questioned in the southern port of Salerno.
A Spanish warship, Cantabria, docked there carrying 375 migrants and the dead women, following several rescues.
Twenty-three of the dead women had been on a rubber boat with 64 other people.
Italian media report that the women's bodies are being kept in a refrigerated section of the warship. Most of them were aged 14-18.
Most of the 375 survivors brought to Salerno were sub-Saharan Africans, from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, The Gambia and Sudan, the daily La Repubblica reports.
Among them were 90 women - eight of them pregnant - and 52 children.
There were also some Libyan men and women on board.
People-smuggling gangs charge each migrant about $6,000 (£4,578) to get to Italy, $4,000 of which is for the trans-Saharan journey to Libya, according to the Italian aid group L'Abbraccio.
Many migrants have reported violence, including torture and sexual abuse, by the gangs.
In the year to 1 November, 150,982 migrants arrivedin southern Europe by boat from North Africa, the International Organizationfor Migration (IOM) reports.
Of them, 111,552 (nearly 75%) came via the Central Mediterranean route to Italy. The number who died on that route was 2,639, the IOM says.
The others arrived in Greece, Cyprus or Spain. The total is less than half the 335,158 who arrived in the same period of 2016.
Last year the total for Greece was higher than that for Italy.

Source: BBC


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