Director, Legal and Consular, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Bolaji Akinremi, speaks on the maltreatment of Nigerians in other countries and what the government is doing to forestall future occurrence, as well as effort to repatriate stranded Nigerians from Ukraine, amongst other related issues in this exclusive interview with BEN OGBEMUDIA and LINUS ALEKE

You participated actively in the consular and migration forum that led to the signing of MoU between Nigeria, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and other countries. What informed this move, was it aimed at curbing human trafficking and smuggling of migrants to these countries or some other things?

I think that what we should look at here is to begin to shift our focus from the negative side of migration to the entire story about migration and the positive side essentially. What we have done with South Africa, the United Kingdom, Ivory Coast, and others that we are signing up with them, consular and migration Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

The first thing we need to understand is that migration is an essential part of human life. It is a phenomenon that you cannot wish away. It is part of the exercise of human liberty and freedom. But it goes with some challenges, especially, where it is not done legally. There will always be problems like trafficking in persons and the smuggling of migrants. But that does not mean that we should lose sight of the importance of migration because human beings are differently endowed and people need to exercise their freedom. So, when they move to places, there are things that they do.

They bring in new ideas, new development, and all of that. And no one would say that migration is only negative. When we focus on human trafficking alone, as the issue of migration, I don’t like it. And therefore, what we are doing is to also push for the positive side of migration. We should take advantage of migration and not pay too much attention to the negatives in migration. It is good that we pay attention to human trafficking, but while we are doing that, we should also promote regular migration, legal migration, and labour migration. We should promote it.

What are you doing to promote regular migration?

We are putting measures in place to promote regular migration between these countries. One of them is to facilitate visas, to simplify visa processing. You see, we have a lot of complaints with the South African Mission. One of them is fake documentation.

Now, Nigerians need to understand that there are things that they do, which are not acceptable elsewhere. For instance, I am not afraid to say this, many Nigerians have yellow cards without taking the inoculation. That is very wrong. These people just present yellow fever cards, whereas they have not taken the vaccination. The question now begging for answers is how did they get the cards? So, when visa officers, notice some of these things they deny them visas or delay the issuance of the visa.

These are the things we are trying to rectify. How to make sure that people who are travelling genuinely for legitimate business are promoted. Let us talk about labour migration, for instance, we are working to ensure that those who have work permits do not run out of status. And if any of them runs out of status, the first thing should not be to repatriate the person simply because he lost his job temporarily. The best thing to do instead is to regularize his stay.

These are things that we are handling with all of these countries. Nigeria and South Africa as you know are the biggest economies in Africa. So we have a lot to share, for example, we are working together on the possibility of producing a vaccine, even though South Africa has eventually produced one. But we are working together in other areas of pharmaceutical, health facilities and all of that. We try to close the gap between the two countries and to ensure that we create opportunities for our people.

For example, some of our consular officers who are handling Africans, in South Africa had told me that since we had a consular and migration forum in South Africa from December 5 to 28, 2021, the reception they get now in the South Africa mission have improved a lot. That is diplomacy, we must continue to engage and dialogue. If we don’t do that, we will not get the benefit. So, if all we are thinking is to wait until somebody is trafficked, then we are thinking negatively. We should think positively. How do we make an inroad for our people?

How do we get the youths to contact other youths on the other side? How do we take advantage of technology? How do we take advantage of development in that place? So, all of these things are what we are doing. We are also doing this with the UK because we have this migration arrangement with them. We have a migration partnership with the UK because the UK has become like a second home to so many Nigerians and because of that many consular issues do develop.

Therefore, they may need to remove or return people. We need to guide and make sure that is not happening just anyhow. It should not just be a situation where a UK official will grab a Nigerian that is living illegally in the UK, and the next thing is that he finds himself in Abuja or Lagos, no. Our mission in London must be notified and they can confirm whether the person in question is a Nigerian or not. This is because that can also constitute a security risk for us. If they just bring anybody to Nigeria. These are consular and migration issues that we are handling and we have successfully signed this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), on the consular and migration matter with Cote d’Ivoire.

As you know, there is the issue of Itunu Babalola, unfortunately, it was the following month that we signed that MoU that the young lady died. But she has been in prison for two years before then. Those are the reasons why we decided to go and sign the MoU. Mind you that ECOWAS also has a Protocol that also speaks to this issue. But Côte d’Ivoire is one of the countries that Nigerians move to. Since I was young, I use to hear of Abidjan and Ankara. Our people have patronized these places for a very long time. There is a direct road from Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso into some part of South West in Nigeria. So, we cannot stop people from moving but when they move, they must see their government protecting their interests. And that is what we are doing, as the department that is charged with that responsibility.

When we started the issue of consular and migration matter with Côte d’Ivoire, we had that in mind and that had also helped because with that we were able to repatriate her body. We were able to ask the government to do an autopsy on her body and with that, we can engage. We are expecting them here in April to have the first consular and migration issue between Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. For South Africa, we have held a meeting between November 25th and December first, last year.

We had the Nigeria/South Africa Bi-national Commission and we agreed to be holding a consular and migration forum every six months. So there is an implementation committee to look into everything that we agreed on in that forum. How do we implement it and fix a time frame? I am the Chair of the consular and migration forum for the Nigeria and South Africa side and we attended that meeting. The one you are talking about, and we were able to clear a lot of ambiguity in all this matter of visa.

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I think that what we are seeing is the result of the effort by a lot of agencies because it is not only Foreign Affairs. We have, for example, the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Information and Culture, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Youths and Sports, NDLEA, NAPTIP, National Human Rights Commission about 25 of us.

We pull ourselves together under what we call consular and migration platforms. On behalf of Nigeria, we discuss each country. In March, it is going to be Ethiopia, you know that we have been having this running battle on the consular matter with Ethiopia. Nigerian traders and travellers often have problems when they travel to Ethiopia. If they have more than $3,000 in their pockets, the Ethiopian government will seize it because their law says that if you have more than $3, 000 you must declare it. Now, there is a conflict here, because Nigeria law says when you have less than ten thousand dollars, you will not be disturbed.

So, if you take $9, 000 out of Nigeria to where you are going and you are transiting through Ethiopia and you mistakenly go out, maybe you have a lot of time, and you are coming back and you have that money in your pocket. They will not say because you are transiting, so long as you enter into their system with that money. We have a lot of money confiscated by Ethiopian authorities. This is a consular issue and that is part of the thing we are handling, and then of course by March when we have the joint ministerial commission between Nigeria and Ethiopia all these matters will be trashed out.

Nigerians are always treated badly outside. Take for instance the maltreatment of a Nigerian diplomat by Immigration officials in Indonesia. The brutalisation of Nigerian citizens transiting through the Togolese International Airport in December last year and many others. Critics have observed that these ugly treatments are happing to Nigerians because the Nigerian authority is not applying diplomatic instruments of reciprocity. Do you agree with that?

Let us not look at it from that prism. Unfortunately, there is not much time today for us to discuss this issue in detail. There is always divergent opinion on issues. But whatever we do in West Africa, Nigeria cannot afford to be throwing its weight around. As a leader, we cannot say because we have the power, then we will oppress other people. What kind of reciprocity are they talking about, it can happen anywhere. The airline accepted their fault, the Nigerians involved also accepted that they overreacted. What happened? You flew into the place, the number is larger than the aircraft that is scheduled to take you from there. Now, you need the patient to know what the next plan is. But if you take it up and you start struggling with the airline officials, to an extent that you are exchanging physical combat.

Then, they will take it up with you and rough handle you. So, while, I know that our people walk with a lot of confidence anywhere they go. The pride that we are the giant of Africa, and in West Africa, we are also a leading country. But at the same time, we need to apply patience and restraint. We need to tell ourselves the truth. Some time ago, I had a case in Tanzania, of a Nigerian who was traveling with a British passport, he wants to invest in Tanzania. He was in business class, and when he landed. Of course, the business class will go out first, so by the time he got to the immigration point to clear himself, they were wondering why it was only him. So, they told him to go and refill his immigration form, trying to wait for others, he did that and by the time the economy people came, they asked him to queue behind them.

He protested, insisting that he was in business class, how he can be at the back of the queue, so they took the form from him and gave him another form to fill, saying that he did not feel the other form well. He told them to show him what was wrong with the one he filled earlier. With that they started altercating, they became furious because he was arguing with them. You know we Africans don’t also handle ourselves well. So, the next thing was that the mobile phone of the Immigration officer was on the ground and the screen smashed, then they denied him entry into the country.

They wanted to detain him, if not for the intervention of our mission. By the time I spoke with him, I told him that he should have been calm, now they are accusing you of smashing the phone of an Immigration officer. They were wrong for asking you to queue behind those in economy class, but your banging the man’s phone is also wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right and there is this tendency that when they look at a Nigerian, they always feel that you want to show them that you are more than them. So, there is envy and all of that, I am not saying that was what happened in this case.

So, they already have something in mind, those who will accept you will accept you. And those who don’t accept you would not accept you. I don’t think it is the problem of Nigeria not pulling its weight, I don’t think so. I had served in a country where an American boy misbehaved and the rule of that country is that he be flogged for putting up such behaviour and they flogged him. He was an American, but it does not matter. Individuals have to take responsibility for their actions, we cannot turn around to say that they don’t respect our country when we violate the grand norm of their countries. Who said that they don’t respect our country? They respect our country but we as individuals must behave responsibly.

There were reports and trending videos that Nigerians were singled out and maltreated by border security officials while fleeing a war zone. As an official of the Federal Government, did you get that report, what happened?

I will not say that Nigerians were singled out because when a Nigerian is coming you can’t identify him. After all, he is not tagged. The issue is that we can say Africans or blacks, and it is also the issue of migration. They already know that it is Africans or blacks that will not have regular travelling documents or genuine paper to stay in that country. Now, these European countries have understood that they will not allow migrants to move into each other’s irregularly.

They don’t allow undocumented migrants. So, even though there is a war situation, they are still keeping that understanding between each other. We have it on record, we have seen the video just as you have seen it, that even in train stations they did not allow blacks to get on.

But eventually, today our missions are ready, in about four or five fronts, our mission in Hungary, Romania, Austria, Slovakia, and our mission in Germany is assisting in different ways. We have thousands of Nigerians that have been received safely by these missions and documented, and ready for evacuation. As much as we know that there is a challenge, we are working round the clock to ensure that all willing Nigerians are repatriated to safety.