On Monday, Nigerians awakened to the shocking –yet not surprising news– that 26 young women were found dead on an Italian migrant ship smuggling people to Europe. This instance was not the first time such a disaster would occur. Documented and undocumented Nigerians have been one of the many victims of this 21st century Middle Passage; thousands have died on the Mediterranean Sea seeking a better life from the strife and limitations at home. Media accounts of their woes are replete with sad tales of jaded Africans patronising human smugglers ill-equipped to navigate the treacherous sea in their sea unworthy boats.
According to the International Organisation for Migration, people from various parts of the world are trooping into Europe from different parts of the world. Africa is one of the biggest contributors of those migrants and Nigerians are on top of the list of people who make the journey of doom and death. Most of the migrants are determined people who, most of the time, survived thousands of miles of soul-crushing journeys through the Niger Republic, the edges of the Sahara Desert, and the dark winding paths of human duplicity before ending up in mostly Libya where they cross the Mediterranean to Italy or maybe, Spain. Europe is exasperated by the wave of new slaves throwing themselves at them like rusty kobo coins; African leaders seem hardly perturbed that their children are exiting Africa both by force and by choice.
The problem has been exacerbating since 2013 but the past couple of years have been especially terrible with figures rising to as many as 180,000 per year. In the wake of conflicts and economic collapse in Africa, many more migrants have a motive to make the trip through hell. They have thus been subjected to sexual assault, violence, starvation, and enslavement. They are eventually trafficked into Europe where, undocumented and unaccounted, they are the perfect victims for servitude in the barbarous plantations of civilised countries where they face debased capitalist exploitation.
As sad as these tales are, they do little to deter people who are hell-bent on escaping Africa. Many more people will leave, convinced they are better off taking their chances than staying back to whittle away with despair and frustrating idleness. No injunction can stop such resolve; it is an imperative of the human soul to drift towards lights especially when they live in circumstances where their sun never rises. Why worry about dying on a ramshackle boat when death is coming for you at home anyway?
They do have a point. If one runs through the news articles in the Nigerian media in the past few months, one would have to be a foreigner to ever be shocked how cheap death is in our country. If people are not dying in hospitals due to the poverty of their folks who cannot afford medical care, they die of snake bites. Or, capsized boats! Or suicide! Right here in Nigeria, people who do not leave her shores still died “at sea.” Between August and October alone, there were a recorded 72 deaths in Lagos and Kebbi states when passenger boats capsized. Some other victims were declared “missing.” Add to those figures the number of those who have been victims of Boko Haram and sectarian violence. Again, add to all those are the Nigerians who have been failed in one way or the other and, left as the walking dead, move between cycles of realistic and surrealistic wants.
People do not see gold at the end of the rainbow and are fleeing the country cannibalising them. Those who have the means will go by visas they have planned to overstay even before they are granted one; others will take hazardous routes through the desert and the sea. If Nigerian leaders are paying attention, they will hear the groan of pain and despair pervading the land. People are tired, hungry, and desperate. The future does not seem to hold many promises.
The annual assurances our leaders make when they read joyless budgets, like the one read yesterday by the President, they have labelled with fanciful names to our weary ears are unconvincing. The hope and faith that drove Nigerians to the polls to demand “change” two and half years ago have mostly waned. The Promised Land we thought we glimpsed now seems like a mirage. After going through various cycles of repetitive dysfunction, come 2019, Nigerians may get too disillusioned to care. The prospect of being continuously saddled with an unimaginative government that can galvanise Nigerians’ energies is a frightening one.
Over the weekend, I read an article by the President’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, where he mentioned that President Muhammadu Buhari took his time to read through the report of the panel of inquiry submitted on Babachir Lawal and Ambassador Ayo Oke before they were dismissed from service. Adesina’s claim that Buhari took his time to pore through the documents –which, according to him, was written in six hefty volumes– was alarming! Nowhere in the world does a president read through such reports in detail, they rely on advisers who give them a brief and advise them on various decisions and their consequences. The president then chooses which to execute.
Adesina thinks Buhari’s snail’s pace is a virtue and cannot be stampeded no matter how much impatient Nigerians try to harry him.
Unfortunately, he fails to acknowledge that Nigeria’s case requires an adrenalin shot and Nigerians’ destinies cannot wait for ‘Baba’ to pore through hefty texts just because he needs to take a single decision. When will he start reading and acting on the multitude and hefty volumes on issues such as economic and political reforms? Why does he have advisers and ministers if he still needs to wade through documents himself?
At this point, the Nigerian government, at the federal level –and equally critically, at the state government where they run a far less inspiring mode of governance– needs to wake up to reality and create a new governing order that arrests our drifting. Regardless of the present propaganda that Nigeria was bled out by previous governments, the truth is that we have consistently failed to establish a socio-political order with a moral vision that can inspire a more productive habit of thinking, acting, governing, and which ultimately promotes social flourishing. For now, what we seem to have, are mainly policies and ideas that gnaw at the base of enormous problems, none of them delivering many tangible results in either the short-term or long-term.
The government and their minions are the only ones who, looking through their rose-tinted glasses, see reasons to be optimistic. Most people are not, and that is because they choose not to live in a self-deluded reality. Some of those who are tired of waiting for the goodies that never trickle down are taking the death trips to Europe while others are helping themselves in every way possible. Nigeria and her leaders need to realise that they are hurting the most vulnerable among us and we cannot continue this way. I have lived through different stages of the Nigerian dysfunction but I cannot remember the last time it was this bad.
In the meantime, Nigeria owes it to those who died on the Italian ship to do right by them, whatever it costs, however large, and however late. For starters, they should cooperate with the Italian government in investigating the circumstances of these women’s deaths, request their bodies from them, and at least give them a decent burial right at home. We know it will not right the wrongs that led to their deaths but at least, they deserve better than they got. Whatever this diplomacy and burial cost the Nigerian government, they need to be done. They were Nigerians, after all.
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