By Dayo Sobowale
A bill board advertising a beer in Igbo language at a busy junction around Festac in Lagos set the tone for this piece today . Lagos is a highly cosmopolitan city but it is a Yoruba town and I have never seen any street advert in vernacular in Lagos before . Not even in Yoruba , the language of the Yorubas who believe Lagos rightly belongs to them . But then that is the reality of the situation , as only a blind man would contend that that part of Lagos is not more populated by the Igbos than any other ethnic group and a census should confirm that , if it is free and fair . Undoubtedly the Igbos are not the only people who have migrated to Lagos to eke out a living but they are a good example for the story I am about to tell today albeit on a national and global setting . Another good example are the Sabo Communities in Sagamu and Ibadan and I confess here that there is nothing that thrills and fascinates me more than the sound and sight of a Sagamu or Ibadan Hausa man having a discussion in perfect Ijebu or Ibadan dialect , that those of us Yorubas born in Lagos cannot ever dare to speak or master as eloquently as these well integrated Yoruba Hausas who are indeed migrants in every sense of the word . But as I said before these are good examples and unless we want to behave like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand , we must admit that not all migrations are seemly and integrative ; and that indeed the problems of Nigeria and most ECOWAS state members as well as that of Europe and the USA nowadays , revolve around the issue and management or mismanagement of Migration .
The first hard fact that we have to admit with Nigerian migration is that the flow of migration which is North South and with Lagos as the target destination and magnet , is not reflected in the census figures for the many censuses conducted since independence . Geography , Ecology and Climate do not support the huge population given the North compared with the South especially the South West states through which migration takes place to Lagos . A census in the seventies under military rule gave then North East a population of 15m from which six states were carved out namely Borno , Adamawa , Bauchi , Yobe , Gombe and Taraba . But it is an open secret that the North East is in the Sahel the creeping desert that makes vegetation to disappear and humans to keep leaving their present abode to look for food and water and herdsmen especially to look down south and move to get water and food for their cattle . This explains the present menace of the armed Fulani herdsmen desperate to feed their cattle by migrating to the Middle Belt states which have fertile farmlands and now the SW and SE . Yet in Nigeria , where power , politics and sharing of the national cake revolve around the strength and size of state populations and the number of voting centres and expected voters . the Sahel states have even more voters than the southern states to which their people and supposed voters and citizens have flocked or migrated for sheer economic survival . Still even though the people are fleeing the North East because of climate and ecology which are hostile to human existence they usually manage huge votes that sum up at elections for the North to always be the ruling part of the Nigerian nation largely for a long time now .
I have mentioned a census during military rule , let me now say that colonialism set the tone for the subsequent power structure of Nigeria after Independence in 1960 . There was the story that the English colonialsts loved the Northern royalties love of horses and their durbars and decided to give them Indirect Rule while using Direct Rule for the restive and educated Southerners like the early Nationalists who studied in England and came back to challenge the realities of Colonial life which made the Nigerian people servants of the Colonial masters . It was rumoured that the Colonialists taught the North that power or politics , post- Independence , would be a game of numbers and population , and the North must make sure censuses reflect that the North always outnumbers the South at censuses. And that has been the case ever since , regardless of climate change , the Sahel or even the terrorism of the Boko Haram insurgency .
We shall now look at three world locations where the good , the bad and the ugly of migration are well illustrated in terms of today’s topic . These are the USA , the EU and the Middle East . We start with the US where a new government that replaced the one before it in the 2020 presidential election simply changed the policy on migration in opposite direction to that of its predecessor . Without mentioning names the US new policy since 2020 has been to open its borders to incoming migrants especially from Latin America . Opponents of this open border policy suspect that it is because the party in power wants the population of migrants to swell because migrants , black , brown or yellow , traditionally vote for it . Some American whites even believe the goal is to make migrants population more than white Americans so that the demography of the US would change for ever. The reality on migration in the US is that migrants are welcome and there is really no illegal migrant in the vocabulary of the new government to the horror and consternation of the last party in power whose president built walls at the borders to deter illegal migrants .
With regard to migration to Europe since the Syrian war that saw huge numbers of refugees fleeing into Europe , it has been a ding dong , do or die game of diplomatic and political survival between one nation Turkey , and the entire EU . Refugees fleeing the Syrian war , go through Turkey which is the remnant of the once powerful Ottoman Empire that was initially Arabic but became Turkish because it became totally militarized and the Turks dominated its military . Even now , Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan who built a 1000 room presidential palace in the capital still sees himself in the borrowed robes of an Ottoman Emperor of modern times . But the times have changed and Turkey is an applicant for EU membership which is not forthcoming any soon for several reasons . The EU has given money to Turkey to keep migrants at the borders of Europe notably Greece but Erdogan is using the migrant issue to blackmail the EU that he would flood Europe with migrants . But the EU too is not united on the issue of migrants . It has given quotas for member nations to adopt but some have refused and have built border barb wires and have raised the alarm that migration is an attempt to Islamise Christian Europe . But then the migrants have changed the face of Europe and the danger of lack of integration of migrants in EU nations is rising . Some Nordic nations seem determined to return some Middle East migrants to their mother nations after giving them temporary citizenship by saying the wars have ended in such nations and they could return . This is a sharp departure from the humane policy of a Christian Europe that has values that say those fleeing wars should be given political asylum . But that is the reality of the situation . Just a way of showing pragmatically that in International Relations there are no permanent enemies but permanent interests .Once again From the Fury of this pandemic Good Lord Deliver Nigeria.
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