| Nigeria is not the Nether World |
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| Written by Mutti Yovbi | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 24 February 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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By Mutti Yovbi
As I sat listening to yet another exposé on Nigeria, I tried to reconcile the information that was being blared for all the world to hear and designed to ensure that all the wrong conclusions are drawn, with what I know. I am after all a Nigerian, I live in Nigeria, I have remained in touch with communities urban and rural and have friends and contacts across social groups. Protestations have come from all spheres of our society about the bad international press that we receive, even as we remain our own most strident and damning critics. Many times, I tend to agree that we have been dealt a bad hand by international press but just as often, I agree with fellow Nigerians that we could do better. Sounds conflicting but as Nigerians we understand what we mean even if we have not been able to articulate it effectively for the world to hear and understand. To all intents and purposes, the rest of the world appears to have colluded to give Nigeria this bad name and all effort is made it would seem, to carry out investigations to prove right their assumptions There is a lot that could be better about Nigeria. We could do with better leaders that are more visionary and less greedy, we could do with a more rapid pace of development and more equitable distribution of resources. The skewed access to socio-economic facilities has resulted in all sorts of social ills many for which we have become notorious. Most of us, particularly those that are not deserving of the bad name with which we have been tagged, have tried to wear our badge of infamy with honour, holding our heads high when we are collectively vilified with the guilt of a few of our countrymen. We even grab rare opportunities that present themselves to speak in ineffectual defence of the native land. The subject of the documentary that I was watching was sex slavery. It detailed how Nigerian woman are torn from their villages, forced from their families and taken to work in European countries. The documentary was about Nigerian sex workers specifically and how unbearable their life is, working the streets of Europe, yet they are not able to come back home because according to the narrator, the fate that awaits them is much worse than what they would be leaving behind. An aerial picture of one of the worst motor parks in Lagos was used to illustrate how bad living in Nigeria truly is. This was after an earlier picture depicting rural serenity from which the women were torn, Spartan and primitive conditions they left behind, illiterate and poverty-stricken families from whom they were ‘bought’. The women interviewed spoke with a variety of accents, some of them not recognisable as Nigerian. I pride myself for being able to tell from the intonation, no matter how refined the diction, if the speaker is Nigerian. Most Nigerians are able to do this; it is why we have the homing radar when we meet each other on foreign shores. The accents are usually accompanied by some speech mannerisms that even the most talented Ghanaian is unable to fake, but you can forgive non-Nigerians, particularly Europeans, for not being able to tell other Africans apart from us. Just as they look and sound alike to us, I suspect we all look and sound the same to them or so they would have us believe. These women that were bought from poor illiterate families of rural villages, needed no interpreter and spoke grammatically correct English on the whole. Although their faces were obscured so that it was difficult to determine effectively, it would be safe to say that the ones interviewed were well into their twenties and older. The narrator explained that a common affliction among them is pregnancy, an unwanted side effect of their trade and the woman who spoke for the charity organisation that works to take them off the streets explained that they have had to support many of the women to procure safe abortions, mostly state funded or paid for by the organisation. Nigeria was in the news about child trafficking only two weeks previous when a Daily Telegraph journalist made this country the destination for her survey. Her means of determining that children were up for sale was to offer money to impoverished families for their children, on the promise that they would be taken to live with families in England. Knowing what I do about the child trafficking and paedophilia and what I do about opportunities that exist in the west, if I were to be offered forex for my children to go and live with a family in the UK, because I believe it will give them a better chance at success, I probably would say yes. I would be resolving as I hand them over, to pray for all that I am worth, enough prayers to support them through any hardship they might experience so that they would become stronger and better individuals for it. Suffering is often welcome in my culture as portend for a better future and prayer is still touted by bible bashing, often super rich pastors (many of whom have an arsenal of rags to riches testimonies) as the master key and antidote to all ills. So my potent prayers to protect my children and the promise of a better life held by any country in the west, will help me decide very quickly to give up my children, lest the neighbour takes advantage of this rare opportunity brought to my doorstep by a white woman. This is the thinking of educated and worldly wise me. I am not seeking to defend Nigeria….. No, let me take that again, I am definitely defending Nigeria. I am choosing on this occasion to stand up for my country while I query the objectivity of these exposés, these studies that are designed simply to look for evidence to support deeply held prejudices. Social ills perpetrated by anyone of African decent must be proven to have its root in Nigeria or at the very least be practised here as well. No other group of people suffer collective punishment and incessant slur for the sins of a few of their number than Nigerians do. Yet no other people are as eager as Nigerians themselves to help find that proof of bad practice, even if it has to be staged. As Nigerians we criticize our country worse than any other group of people, yet can we say that we truly are the worst in terms of the crimes and social ills for which we are continually blamed and are condemned? I acknowledge again that there is a lot that could be better about Nigeria, just as there will always be room for improvement in every country of the world, still ours is not the worst country nor are we the worst people on earth. There are key questions that can be asked about many exposés and documentaries put together by Europeans on Nigeria. Starting from the assumptions that led them to decide that Nigeria as a country is the most appropriate destination for gathering negative information? When Nigerians as individuals are the subjects of the research, how do they determine that those interviewed to be truly Nigerians or that they are credible enough as reference points? If the same documentary was to be done in or about a country in Europe, would they seek information more widely, talking to a more representative sample of the population and supporting claims with properly analysed data? These journalists seldom seek to verify claims made by individuals nor do they set it within the context of the whole. One family in a small hamlet in the depths of Yoruba land chooses to give up its children and this was interpreted to mean that the vast majority of families in Nigeria, several millions of them, are as eager and to give up children in exchange for amounts not enough to buy a good tokunboh . No questions were asked of the antecedents of the people whose names that littered the article posing as intermediaries for the sale children. My only conclusion is that the journalist was both very lazy and unwilling to carry out baseline checks for a story as significant as was published or that she was the willing victim of a con, desperate to provide some evidence for what she already believed. How many of the transactions initiated in the course of her investigation was she able to take to completion such that she was handed the children to take away? What specific evidence led her to conclude that children do get sold in the manner portrayed by her article. This should not be taken that there are no real issues around child trafficking in Nigeria. They are simply more serious than was portrayed in that exposé, which will only detract from the hard work done by many Nigerian organisations to battle child trafficking. For the sake of sensationalism, the journalist of a reputable newspaper with international readership has simply imposed another burden of proof on Nigerians travelling with children and created doubt in the minds of those wanting to help combat a foul practice. This could possibly be a setback for Nigerian victims of child trafficking and their mostly unwitting parents. In spite of claims in the article that children are sold for money, many parents are simply caught in a cultural time warp and genuinely believe that sending their children to work in towns offers more opportunities for the child and eventually for family. In investigated cases of child trafficking, the children are always expected to return. The documentary on sex workers from Nigeria promoted misconceptions along similar lines. The way it was presented, one cannot but begin to wonder whether the young women interviewed were simply wily and have successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the reporters to gain sympathy. The documentary focussed more on trying to show yet again, how bad things are in Nigeria, enough for families to ‘sell’ young women into sexual slavery in Europe. No mention was made of the fact that if these women are getting pregnant, their clients, white middle class European men in the main, must be exposed to all manner of sexually transmitted ailments, including AIDS, from having unprotected sex. Another question I would like answered is how it was determined that the women interviewed were all Nigerians. Was it from the colour of their passports or was it because the women said so. Was it conclusively confirmed that these women were sold into slavery? To sensationalise an acknowledged problem through the provision of inaccurate information and wild claims, again will mitigate the impact of work done by government and non-governmental organisations to prevent young women from being lured into the sex trade. It has been determined through studies that selling is not done by families but between traffickers, always without the knowledge of girls lured away even from universities, with promises of jobs. The amazing thing is that human trafficking in Nigeria, has been extremely well researched and the information is available in the public domain, including the internet – a Google click away really. There are also myriad and reputable organisations, government and non-governmental, none of these were interviewed. Rather the article substantiated with rumours, its claim that Nigerian immigration officials were involved in the sale and trafficking of children. That is the value of western investigative journalism when they beam their lights on Nigeria. Finally to portray Nigeria as uninhabitable, while many Europeans come here to live lavish and exotic lives, exploiting weak social systems to their personal benefit, is grossly unfair. Expatriates in Nigeria have been known to acknowledge that no other country has been misrepresented worse than Nigeria. Having travelled with trepidation and arrived with misconceptions, they are often surprised by the friendliness of the people and the enhanced lifestyles that many of them would otherwise be unable to afford. We do acknowledge that Nigeria has its challenges, most prominent of which is its rulers and their misrule. Nevertheless, we deserve no better than balanced reporting that provides accurate information within an appropriate well researched context. It is not enough to publish a picture of Oshodi and present it as the true face of Nigeria or to assume that every African caught in a crime or in a less than savoury situation is a Nigerian. We are no worse than any other nation in the world and should therefore not be forced to don the garb of infamy. Not every European is a serial killer nor are they all paedophiles and yobs. Rest assured, they have deserved many times to be treated as such, but we have always refrained from doing so.
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Posted by Robot| 24.02.2008 10:52