Nigerians should not seek asylum. We are seen as criminals, says the president
Economic migrants are needed at home, former general and disciplinarian, tells Colin Freeman
NIGERIA’S president has told his fellow citizens to stop trying to claim asylum in Britain, saying that their reputation for criminality has made it hard for them to be “accepted” abroad.
Muhammadu Buhari, the tough former general elected last year, said those who had joined the migrant exodus to Europe were doing so purely for economic reasons.
The number of Nigerians imprisoned in Britain and elsewhere meant they were unlikely to get much sympathy, he added.
“Some Nigerians’ claim is that life is too difficult back home, but they have also made it difficult for Europeans and Americans to accept them because of the number of Nigerians in prisons around the world accused of drug trafficking or human trafficking,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“I don’t think Nigerians have anybody to blame. They can remain at home, where their services are required to rebuild the country.”
Mr Buhari’s remarks may upset refugees’ rights groups, who claim the vast majority of asylum cases lodged by Nigerians are genuine. In recent years, many have claimed to be fleeing Boko Haram, the Islamist group that Mr Buhari’s army is struggling to stamp out in northern Nigeria.
Only around one in 10 of the 13,000 asylum claims lodged by Nigerians in Britain in the past 15 years has been accepted. Claims of persecution appear to cut no ice with Mr Buhari, a headmasterly figure who waged a “war on indiscipline” while serving as the country’s military ruler in the 1980s.
Back then, Nigerians could be whipped if they did not queue for buses, and civil servants had to do frog jumps if they were late for work.
He makes it clear that a minority of his countrymen could still do with improving their behaviour. “We have an image problem abroad and we are on our way to salvage that,” he said.
Mr Buhari, 73, was speaking during a three-day trip to London, where he attended a conference on the Syrian crisis. He was elected last year on a pledge to take a firmer line with Boko Haram than his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, on whose watch the group kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok in the north east in 2014. While Boko Haram has lost most of the territory that it controlled, it has continued to mount attacks, killing 65 people last weekend. There is no sign of the missing Chibok girls,.
Despite pressure from Western governments to make no concessions, Mr Buhari said that he was willing to negotiate for the girls’ release if reliable interlocutors could be found.
“As long as we can establish the bona fides of the leadership of Boko Haram, we are prepared as a government to discuss with them how to get the girls back,” he said. “But we have not established any evidence of a credible leadership.”
He said it was possible that Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakr Shekau, had been replaced by another commander, although there was “conflicting information” as to his fate. Reports last week suggested that large numbers of Boko Haram commanders had taken refuge in Sudan.
The prospect of Islamist fighters proliferating across the porous Sahel region of west and central Africa alarms Mr Buhari. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant now controls the city of Sirte in Libya, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb killed foreigners in hotels in Mali in November and in Burkina Faso last month.
Mr Buhari traced the rising violence partly to the fall in 2011 of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, who employed large numbers of mercenaries from the Sahel. “The demise of Gaddafi’s regime led to a lot of armed and trained people being dispersed,” he said.
“Fighting is all they know, and they are available at a fee.”