When Nigerian playwright, Prof. Ola Rotimi (God bless his soul!), wrote his hilarious play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, he certainly did not have Britain in mind.
But is the Queen’s own country capable of the sick joke of a proposed visa bond targeted at former colonies in Africa and Asia: Nigeria, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka?
The hilarity is not in Britain’s right to control its immigration. That is legitimate and serious business. It is rather in its hypocrisy of comic pretence: playing dumb that its cruel empire past has caught up with it.
So, the mortal fear of forfeiting three thousand Pounds Sterling, courtesy of a visa bond, would keep desperate economic barbarians off their former Metropolis, when the former colonies are in all but ruins? Ah!
Coming from a Tory government, headed by The Right Honourable David Cameron, which name ironically sounds like Cameroun, another raped victim of German, British and French colonial greed, the policy has all the notoriety of Thatcherite racism.
But did Westminster think that after decades of blind plunder under many fanciful names – Pax Britannica, British Raj, British Pacification of the Natives, etc, etc, – citizens of its former colonies would just melt away, while the colonisers live happily ever after?
Meanwhile, the most pleasing irony: if at the height of British imperialism the chaffing colonies screamed “Africa for Africans!” or “India for Indians!” it is sweet comeuppance Britain now wants to bawl, “Britain for the British!”, but is too hypocritically restrained, stiff-upper lip tradition, to scream! Hence, Mr. Cameron’s proposed racist policy. But good to know the Brits also cry!
Still, you must feel their anguish. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian-born Al-Qaeda terrorist who gained global notoriety as the “Underwear Bomber” despite his failed mission, used the Queen’s own city as his own Londonistan to savour hate sermons and hone his terror skills.
Then, the evil Michaels: Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, Islamist twin-loonies ironically bearing the Christian name of the fiery archangel, and GOC of the heavenly hosts, Angel Michael. The loonies subjected the holy streets of London to the most profane slaughter of a British soldier, Drummer Officer Lee Rigby.
The irony is these two loonies are ethnic Yoruba – in any case, their parents were; before getting lost in the Diaspora. Yet, in the Yoruba motherland, only the raven mad would kill in the name of religion. The Yoruba credo of religious freedom and faith liberality is long settled.
So, how did Britain hap on this monstrous duo that caused universal pain and anguish, with their gruesome murder of that innocent British soldier?
Because of this bone-chilling outrage, the Brits are perhaps more than justified to design policies that ban, from their country, African and Asian barbarians; the first of which is Mr. Cameron’s proposed visa bond.
But perhaps if the colonised peoples too had had the muscle to repress the colonising Brits, with the invaders’ pacification (euphemism for mass murder of the resistant, which ran into millions), and the ensuing mass physical, psychological and spiritual dislocation over endless years, there would not have been brainwashed monstrosities like Abdulmutallab, Adebolajo and Adebowale. Nor would there be economic migrants.
Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart spoke of such spiritual and psychological disorientation, using his native Igbo as case-study. So, did Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Weep Not Child, a classical match-up between greedy British ruffians and land grabbers using the missionaries as front and an equally determined though pitifully less armed locals, insistent on reclaiming their land; thus creating the classic Yoruba fabled confrontation between the happy killer and the merry suicidal.
Even Brit, Edward Morgan (EM) Forster, in his A Passage to India, painted the snickering bigotry and allied evils of the British against natives in the so-called British Raj of India which, by the way, had as victims most of today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the latter-day pariahs of callow Mr. Cameron’s new visa bond!
Did Mr. Cameron think something would not give, after his ancestors’ brutal repression of other peoples, and making away with their wealth; and thereafter installing near-imbeciles to ensure the British gravy continued long after flag independence?
True, the likes of Achebe used the dominator’s language to achieve global fame, a far cry from the self-fulfilling prophecy of congenitally challenged Africa and Africans, by the likes of Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness. Wole Soyinka used this same English language to win the Nobel, the prime global literary prize. wa Thingo has enough literary clout to live in exile’s happy pain, as his native Kenya treats him like the Biblical prophet without honour.
But to every Achebe, wa Thiongo and Soyinka, there are myriads of economic flotsam and jetsam, churned out by a disarticulated Africa and, to some extent, Asia. This is the global class that has come to plague Britain and it co-western imperialists. It is therefore a question of the Brits’ ancestors having eaten sour grapes; and their offspring’s teeth set on edge! That is Mr. Cameron’s generation; and that explains his bond!
But not even Mr. Cameron’s visa bond would remove that plague. Still, a fairer international economic system could. If more Africans and Asians live and earn productive living in their home continents, then maybe Westminster would need less punitive visa bonds to control immigration.
But the humongous western greed is yet to be sated; and Africa, mostly run by pre-programmed cretins, is not about to surrender its notoriety as global economic laggard. That is why Mr. Cameron must reveal his callowness by trying to bully his favourite African retards to join the 21st century Sodom and Gomorrah his country and Uncle Sam unashamedly lead; and daring any African moron, on the pains of aids, to raise his voice against same sex marriage, the West’s latest abomination!
Still, a Ghanaian that goes flocking to Britain only has himself or herself to blame. Ghana is no El Dorado. But by somewhat gathering its best hands over time, despite the western hysteria that subverted Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and nearly aborted the Ghana dream, the old Gold Coast is well on the way to attain its manifest destiny.
Not so for Nigeria, ruled from the beginning by Whitehall’s cynically programmed Uncle Toms. And that is bad news for Mr. Cameron’s visa bond. So long as there is economic paralysis at home, the economic barbarians from here would do whatever it takes to hang in there, visa bond or no!
The bottom line? The Nigerian government must wake up. Mr. Cameron’s visa bond might well graduate into mass expulsion of Nigerians from Britain. Such reverse forced exodus forebodes nothing but ill.
The angry and bitter repatriates would settle for nothing less than where they were coming from. Meanwhile the local misfits holding mediocre courts are absolutely incapable of upping their game. Before you know it, the happy-to-kill clashes with the merry-to- die!
If a better Nigeria emerges from the smoke, then something good, though unintended, would have come from Mr. Cameron’s visa bond.
