One of the outcomes of the recent Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja was the confirmation that a new labour migration policy would be implemented in the country. I was indeed elated by the policy which the minister of labour extolled as very crucial to protecting Nigerians travelling or working abroad.
The vision of the policy document which had been waiting since 2010 is to build an effective, responsive and dynamic labour migration governance system in Nigeria. Its three pronged mission is to provide an appropriate framework at national level to regulate labour migration; ensuring benefits to Nigeria as a country of origin, transit and destination; and ensuring decent treatment of migrants and their families and contributing to development and national welfare.
Migration, a reality of globalization, is a historical and natural necessity driven by the quest for self-preservation and actualization or economic emancipation. However, a huge industry of human exploitation has grown around it.
Child labour, sex-slavery, human drug trafficking are mostly the ills that signpost migration where victims gain little while the cartels behind it distort the values of the society with their obnoxious wealth. The various aspects of the new labour migration policy are of cause essential to regulate those recruitment agents operating as modern day slave dealers not interested in the plight of the migrants, but in what they could make from them.
In the last seven or eight years that I was opportune to travel to a number of Asian countries on academic and professional missions, I have been exposed to different cases and fortunes of many Nigerians who sojourn in such countries. Although, I met many who are credible ambassadors of Nigeria working as expatriates and professionals and who I am always proud, the situation of many others is of grave concern.
In the oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, there is a small but vibrant community of Nigerians, mostly engineers and geologists, working in Brunei-Shell Petroleum Corporation. In that country’s main referral hospital, RIPPAS, a Nigerian is a consultant physiotherapist. At the country’s premier university, I met another group of Nigerian scholars engaged in teaching and research at the university. A few of them, on completing their contract, returned to either Australia or UK. An exception is Dr. Ibrahim Abikan who graduated with a Ph.D in law from a top Malaysian University, taught at UBD briefly and returned to the University of Ilorin from where he took a study leave.
In Malaysia, I encountered hordes of young Nigerians pursuing graduate study programmes. Many have completed and are retained as lecturers, but the story I heard of many Nigerians in that Asian country is not palatable. I met some of them working as waiters in some hotels in Kuala Lumpur. I witnessed a meeting between the Nigeria High Commissioner (with concurrent accreditation to Brunei) and members of Nigeria in Diaspora Organization, NIDO (Malaysia) in 2008 where the high commissioner practically lampooned them.
When some of them alleged that the high commission was not protecting their interest, he declared, ‘I was not sent here to come and be hobnobbing with fraudsters and 419’. Sometimes in 2009 while attending an international conference organized by the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre in New Delhi, India, I visited the Nigerian High Commission to interview its senior officials; one consular officer gave depressing reports of Nigerians languishing in various Indian jails for a range of offences.
From these experiences, I concluded that majority of Nigerians in search of greener pasture abroad were not prepared for their journeys nor did they have the requisite qualifications and means to sustain them as migrants. The question I always raise is how they find it easy to leave Nigeria and become a nuisance abroad. It is on this account that I heaved a sigh of relief when the Federal Government announced that a labour migration policy would come in force in the country. Indeed, it is a long overdue policy given what many Nigerians endure living abroad and the image they presented of the country.
Abdulwarees Solanke,
Voice of Nigeria, Lagos
