Why Nigerians will never leave South Africa (II)

Let us take this further. The 2018-2020 budget for South Africa shows a plan of 5.8 trillion Rand. These come to about $400 billion over a three-year period. This means that South Africa budgets about $130billion dollars each year for her people. The budget for education alone comes to about $30 billion a year. This is larger than the entire budget for Nigeria in 2019, yet the Nigerian government intends to reduce the budget level as we go along. In the South African budget, you would find provisions for social security such as unemployment benefits, allowances for the old and infirm, and even provisions for newborn children. These kind of items are so alien to Nigeria where our national budgets are full of such frivolous items as promotes the continued inequality and oppression of the masses. Since the new wave of xenophobia broke, I have been opportune to take a virtual magnifying glass to the South African society, to find out why the country is so much more livable than Nigeria. I discovered too, that they have these Youth Brigades and they have been training many of the underprivileged youths in different skills, and wait for this, embedding them in real-life projects where they can get skilled up for the real world. I have suggested such should happen here too but there is no doubt that our own leaders are disconnected from reality. Meanwhile, the level of transparency around South Africa’s budgeting and implementation is shocking. Google any budget at any level; federal, regional or even city, and you will get a full PDF report. Try that here and what you get is a black hole – any point beyond the federal level.

Here in Nigeria, we find items such as the yearly purchases of luxury cars for government operatives and politicians, acquisition of luxury accommodation, monstrous government houses and headquarters, frequent travels, and just about anything that will continue to fan the egos of our pretend leaders. It is NEVER about the people. The leaders probably believe that they have paid off the people when they handed out N2,000 ($5.50) each to their followers during the campaigns and that should settle the next 4 years in their minds.

So that is why I am against the continued disturbance of the South African space by Nigerians claiming a sense of entitlement, and if they may remain, they need to learn to really shut up and appreciate the privilege of living in an organized society. For their emigration out of this country means they have left some of us to struggle with these absurdities when we all should be here solving the problem together. As I heard the Nigerian woman run commentary from her apartment about South Africans ‘begging’ Nigerians, and telling other Africans that they were sorry, the shallowness of our thinking further came to bold relief. Beg you for what? That you have a right not to fix your country and so rush to theirs? But I do understand that Nigerians out there will never come back home – except they can absolutely not help it. Perhaps we deserve what we get; Nigerians are very good at electing and supporting ineffectual leaders. We focus on who has the cash. Perhaps it is our fraudulent thinking catching up with us.

The rest of the world cannot reconcile why these people who say they are so helpless and therefore need to claim asylum, condone their leaders, who come abroad to buy all the most expensive chattel. If Congo has a Mobutu, Nigeria has shown that a nation can cope with hundreds, maybe thousands of Mobutus and mini-Mobutus, who constantly rip off the country while they rack up unsustainable debts for children unborn. When congressmen in Washington DC are living in their offices because they cannot afford rent in DC, Nigerian congressmen and mere civil servants saunter to America and elsewhere to buy buildings in the top cities. Some even buy whole skyscrapers!  True. Back home, we are told we have no rights to know what these politicians earn. It is a huge black hole. Not even the fact that we pay those salaries from our taxes makes any difference. This country is really absurd, and so are most of her inhabitants – home and abroad. Meanwhile, if the South Africans apologized sincerely, then they have claimed the moral high ground over every African. We never apologized to Ghana after booting out 2 million people. That is two million! Though we never killed any of them.

We need to develop emotional intelligence. There is a lot to understand and learn about the history of whites versus blacks in South Africa. Their past is extremely bitter and bloody. The relationship between the Boers and the black tribes is historically etched in blood, and essentially one between slaves and masters, humans and animals. That is how the blacks were treated. Unarguably, the blacks of South Africa had the worst deal than the blacks who were taken as slaves to America. That is why decades after the slave trade ended, apartheid persisted. Yes, we did offer our open doors as a national policy, but the blacks bore the real brunt and such scarring takes some time to heal, if ever. The trauma was generational.

Apartheid meant that services that dogs will reject were offered to blacks in times past. Rubbish schools were offered to them and since the minds of successive apartheid governments were made up to ensure the blacks didn’t get an education, their schools were underfunded and some looked no better than pigsties. The Boers needed to show that indeed, the blacks were unfit for education and any good thing in life. There is a reason why Nelson Mandela headed the militant wing of the ANC, which killed a number of people. The deliberate imbalance in education still persists till date. Ditto for healthcare and every other facility. The South Africans may have done better than Nigeria in providing hostels for poor labourers, but unbelievable injustice and violence were done against them, and they too hit back when they could. With all these going on, we should understand that migration comes with the risk of inserting oneself into a delicate situation like this. We must never take that country, or any other at all, for granted. And we must never mock their struggles. We must learn history as we migrate all over the place. And perhaps, we will now begin to appreciate our own country. Charity begins at home

NB – To underlie my consternation at the quality of our migrants everywhere, a couple of the returnees have already been caught involving in crimes; one for armed robbery in Enugu State, and another for rape. The world has a Nigerian problem, and it is a pity. Left to me, any of our migrants causing trouble anywhere should be sent back home. We cannot go to other countries and export our usual lousiness. I wouldn’t accept any other people from another country to come here in droves and misbehave on our streets. Fair is fair.