A NATIONAL SHAME: FOREIGNERS BEATING NIGERIANS IN NIGERIA.

FOREIGNERS BEATING NIGERIANS IN NIGERIA: A NATIONAL SHAME*

What we saw in that video of an Indian national beating two Nigerian truck drivers, Riliwan Olajide and Taiwo Yinusa, with the help of Nigerian thugs on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is not new. It is a pattern. And it is wrong.

How can a Nigerian be abused in Ghana, be abused in South Africa, be abused in Libya, be abused in India itself - and still come back to his father's land and be abused again by the same foreigners in his own country? Where then is safe for a Nigerian?

This is what happens when a government makes foreigners feel like gods and its own citizens feel like slaves.

Today in Nigeria, a Chinese man will slap a Nigerian worker in a factory in Ogun State and nothing happens. A Lebanese man will seize the passport of a Nigerian girl working in his restaurant and use her as a slave and nothing happens. An Indian factory owner in Lagos will flog his workers like animals and beat truck drivers with sticks using hired thugs and nothing happens.

Why? Because the government has told them, through its silence, that Nigerian lives do not matter.

A foreigner knows that if he beats a Nigerian, he will not be arrested. He knows he can call the police and the police will come to protect him, not the Nigerian. He knows he has money and our officials have hunger for money. So he does what he cannot try in his own country.

No Indian can beat a Chinese driver in India with Nigerian thugs and go free. No Lebanese can beat an American worker in America and still keep his business open the next day. But in Nigeria, anything is possible.

If government does not act on this Karma Agric Feed & Foods case, it is sending a message that it encourages this abuse. Because justice delayed is encouragement. Every day that man is still walking free, other foreign factory owners are learning that they too can beat Nigerians and nothing will happen.

Nigeria must not be a country where Nigerians are strangers. We cannot be unsafe in foreign lands and still be unsafe in the hands of foreigners in our father's land.

If a Nigerian breaks the law in India, India jails him. If a foreigner breaks the law in Nigeria, Nigeria must jail him too. That is what sovereignty means.

Until we start defending our own people on our own soil, no other nation will respect us outside.