President Muhammadu Buhari
Last Tuesday, the United States announced a hike in the cost of
visa application for Nigerians. The US Consulate in Nigeria didn’t mince
words in explaining the move: The total cost for a US citizen to obtain
a visa to Nigeria was higher than the total cost for a Nigerian to
obtain a comparable visa to the United States. The imbalance had to be
corrected. It’s a policy that can be rationalised.
If a country’s citizens are not inferior to another’s, their visa
application to that country should not be costlier than the other way.
It is the least a country could do for its citizens. In this specific
case, the US had apprised Nigerian authorities of the disparity in visa
fees. Well, the Interior Ministry set up a committee and, as with many
things Nigerian, that was the end of the matter. That’s such a shame.
What was more mortifying was the ministry’s lowering of the Nigerian
visa application fee for US citizens within 24 hours of the US
Consulate’s protests – a move US authorities were clearly unimpressed
with. Gaping hole exposed: Nigeria’s diplomatic relations are far more
woeful than we’ve been imagining.
No need to cast a cross-continental gaze at the US. Over ‘here’, in
South Africa, Nigerians are being slaughtered like rams almost every
week, and it is the brazenness that astounds the most. Last week, there
was a headline, ‘Another Nigerian killed in South Africa’. If you read
the papers three of four weeks before, you would have seen the same
headline, ‘Another Nigerian Killed in South Africa’. In the previous
week, you would also have spotted ‘Another Nigerian killed in South
Africa’. Dig deeper to the preceding two weeks and you would have found
that same headline, ‘Another Nigerian killed in South Africa’. Every now
and then, there’s always a Nigerian, and another one, to be murdered by
South Africans. A lot can be said of the insouciance of the South
African Government, but beyond the usual tokenistic state utterances,
the Nigerian Government has never truly been riled up by the relentless
killing of its citizens in almost all corners of South Africa.
In the last three years, and up until July 2019, some 127 Nigerians
had been killed in South Africa, 13 of them masterminded by the Police.
Between January and June 2019 alone, 10 Nigerians were killed in that
country. In the latest installation of the killings a few days ago, Pius
Abiaziem, a native of Imo State, was having breakfast in the Eastern
Cape Province of South Africa when he was picked up among many by eight
policemen, some of them masked, and taken to his home where he was
extra-judicially murdered. Unknown to them, his sister-in-law was taping
proceedings with her phone. Now, their crime can no longer be hidden.
Since the audio became public, Godwin Adama, Nigeria’s
Consul-General to South Africa, has been talking about sending a note
verbale to Pretoria. Ideally, the gruesomeness of the murder and track
record of South African killers should have forced President Muhammadu
Buhari to step in. A meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa is scheduled for
Pretoria in October, but Buhari had a premature opportunity in Japan,
where he, Ramaphosa and numerous African leaders attended last week’s
Tokyo International Conference on African Development. Guess what our
President was doing? Smiling away with Ramaphosa! At least that is what
the cameras of his own photographers and the social media handles of his
image makers told us. If the two presidents were any serious about
resolving the persistent killings, that meeting ought to have been frank
and sombre, fully empathetic towards the feelings of dozens of mourning
Nigerian families. Importantly, Buhari didn’t demand for the coming
October meeting; Ramaphosa invited him!
Hike in US visa fee and killing of Nigerians in South Africa, what
is the correlation? Responsible governments don’t joke with the welfare
of their citizens. That is what the US Consulate in Nigeria proved to
us; that is what the US Government would have done if its citizens were
being wasted in South Africa or any other country. And beyond lowering
the corresponding visa fee of Americans, Nigeria can learn to for once
send a strong enough-is-enough message to South Africa. Instead of a
smiley Buhari and Ramaphosa, what the media should have been reporting
by now is a diplomatic row between Abuja and Pretoria.
Earlier this year, Canada rowed with China over the type of citizen
a Nigerian would describe as a ‘common criminal’. Robert Lloyd
Schellenberg, the Canadian, had been originally sentenced to 15 years in
prison in China for drug smuggling. He appealed this judgement, only to
see the Dalian Intermediate People’s Court in China’s Liaoning province
upgrade it to a death sentence. The suspicion was that the shocking
judgement was politically motivated, owing to the December 2018 arrest
of Meng Wanzhou, Chief Financial Officer of Chinese telecommunications
giant Huawei Technologies, in Vancouver on a US extradition warrant – an
action China responded to by detaining Michael Kovrig, a Canadian
diplomat, and Michael Spavor, a Canadian consultant, in Beinjing on
allegation of endangering state security. The execution order on
Schellenberg prompted strong reprimand from Canadian Prime Minister,
Justin Trudeau, while the Canadian Foreign Ministry updated its travel
advisory for China, warning citizens about “the risk of arbitrary
enforcement of local laws”.
But here in Nigeria, our President is forbidden from speaking on
such matters. Buhari hasn’t personally spoken; Foreign Ministry doesn’t
even know the significance of a travel alert much less consider issuing
one. If anyone makes too much noise over it, the President’s noisemakers
would scream ‘Buhari can’t speak every time; that’s why he has aides.’
But it’s life we’re discussing here; and to almost totally leave the
crusade to Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Chairman of Nigerians in Diaspora
Commission (whose commitment to the course, by the way, is indubitable),
is to thoroughly undermine the sanctity of human life. If Trudeau could
go that mile for a Canadian drug convict, why can’t Buhari do more than
laugh with Ramaphosa, for Nigerians who have committed no crime? Maybe
we are too harsh on Buhari; a President who can’t even secure the lives
of his people at home, how does one begin to ask him to secure the lives
of those abroad?
Fisayo Soyombo, former Editor of the TheCable, the
International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) and Sahara
Reporters, tweets @fisayosoyombo