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As Nigerians marched to the polls yesterday to elect their next president, at least one Nigerian may have died that day trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Nigeria ranks high among nations with highest number of migrants hopping into aircraft, ships or make-shift high-risk inflatable boats to escape hardship at home.
And here is the paradox. Nigerians, nay Africans, inflict pain upon themselves in their own countries when they, in full consciousness, elect bad leaders. Or allow bad leaders to bear rule over them for as long as they wish by manipulating the constitution and subverting due process of the law.
Even with pervasive democracy across the continent, Africans are still influenced by primitive and otiosely primordial considerations such as religion, ethnicity and the lure of lucre in making their choices over who rules them. In some cases, they refused to participate in the electoral process as is rampant in Nigeria, the behemoth but underwhelming hope of Africans and the Black race.
In Nigeria, especially, many people do not take interest in politics. But as Pericles, the inimitable Greek politician, once said, “just because you do not take interest in politics doesn’t mean politics will not take interest in you.” This is at the core of the high volume of migrants’ mortality and humanitarian crisis that currently afflicts Nigeria. Many fail to show up at the polls. Others simply refuse to register to vote. And by refusing to participate in politics, they end up being governed by their inferiors (apologies to Plato). A regular feature of elections in Nigeria is that many shout the loudest on social media and grandstand on orthodox media but on election day, they would prefer the comfort of their homes to the drudgery of queueing at polling units to vote. These ‘good’ citizens are the reason why bad officials are elected. They are by inference, the reason why there is high migrant mortality among Africans fleeing, hotfoot, to Europe. This is a typical African disease; a situation where good and noble men abandon the democratic space leaving it for scoundrels and scallywags.
In any country where the bad and the ugly bear rule, humanitarian crisis is usually the end-point of governance. In the case of Nigeria, the statistics over the decades tell the story most eloquently. There is a correlation between bad governance and migrant crisis.
In August, 2008, then External Affairs Minister, Ojo Maduekwe, at a workshop on irregular migration organised by his ministry, shocked the audience when he said that 10,000 Nigerians died at high seas between 1999 and 2002 in their bid to stowaway as illegal immigrants to Europe and elsewhere. Put pointedly, 10,000 Nigerians died avoidable deaths in just three years, a record 3,333 deaths per year or an average of nine deaths per day in the deep waters of surging oceans and mysterious seas. I wager that these were Nigerians in their youth, at the prime of their lives; some university graduates, some artisans, some possessing sundry special skills; some languid and scraggy; some energetic and full of bounce and beans; some fathers scurrying to Europe to win the bread, some single mothers on the trot from home to escape the shame and sordidness that assailed them; some ugly, some beautiful, some big, some small but more importantly, they were all Nigerians. But they died, in the most heinous way, in circumstances that could have been avoided. They died in a manner that draws the chill and truly, truly in a manner that should embarrass all of us.
The minister did not stop at that. He said in addition to the high death toll, some other Nigerians, who are lucky to still have their being, are stranded in various parts of Africa awaiting a transit miracle to Europe. Some16,000 Nigerians were stranded in Algeria, about 8,000 in Morocco and more than 21,000 in Libya. During that period, a goodly 1,461 Nigerians were tenants (you call them inmates) in British jails; 1,500 in Libya; 550 in China; 391 in India; 65 in Morocco and eight in Afghanistan (of all places, my God!).
Please note that these figures do not include those thousands that have perished in the sand dunes of the desert on their way to Europe for the good life. It does not include the multitude of young Nigerian girls hawking sex in Italy, in Spain and other places. But that was then.
You would think that with the flowering of democracy, more Nigerians would have returned to their country from around the world. You would even conjecture that the exodus of Nigerians to Europe and elsewhere would have ebbed. Never! These days and these times, the bug bites deeper. More Nigerians have perished off the coast of the Mediterranean. Some dropped dead along treacherous routes in the scorching deserts of the Sahara. It’s called the Japa syndrome.
The root cause is bad governance; a by-product of bad leadership orchestrated by evil men and women shooed into office by sentiment-driven voters. Nigerians thought they had seen enough of bad governance during the 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). But they were wrong.
The over seven years of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has made the failings of the PDP look like excellent grades of a whiz. And with this has come more pain on the people, the same people who saw evil and embraced it. The same people who voted according to the dictates of their belly; who danced to the whims of ethno-religious bigotry to enthrone raw mediocrity over merit. This is a typical African disease: a condition whereby good people of sound pedigree unite in fetish coalition to elect a thug, sometimes a dimwit, to lead them.
The Africa migrants mess has worsened in recent years due largely to bad leadership. In 2022, it was estimated that 2,062 African migrants died while crossings the Mediterranean Sea. If you apply the statistics that out of every four Africans, one must be a Nigerian, then you will have rough idea how many Nigerian lives are lost in the struggle to cross the sea. But even this does not tell the full story as some undocumented number of African migrants got drowned and their bodies never traced. Between 2014 and 2018, for instance, about 12,000 persons who drowned were never found. These were men and women sacrificed to the demons in the sea by bad leaders in their countries.
Nigeria, in spite of her many failings, still remains the hope of Africa. An African renaissance would begin the day Nigeria experiences a rebirth in leadership. This is the major task of the next Nigerian president, whoever that person is: He must engender a culture of good governance, the type that would rekindle hope in the people, create opportunities, jobs and nurture an ambience that promotes entrepreneurship. The world is waiting for Nigeria to get it right. The birth pangs for a new and prosperous Africa swirl in the womb of Africa’s most populous nation. It does appear that the countdown to the birthing of this new order has begun. I stake my bet on the side of optimism.
