The Nigerian House Of Representatives has condemned the ill-treatment and discrimination against Nigerians living in South Africa, stressing that over 409 convicts were currently serving jail terms there.
Mrs. Abike Dabiri-Erewam, the Chairman of the House Committee on Diaspora, disclosed this in a statement issued after the committee’s visit to two prisons in South Africa.
She described the increasing number of Nigerians in foreign prisons as “ridiculously embarrassing.”
The representative of Ikorodu Federal Constituency in Lagos State, Dabiri-Erewa, who visited the prisons alongside two members of the committee, Ajibola Famurewa and Umaru Shidanfi, consular officers of the Nigerian Embassy and executives of the Nigerian Union in South Africa, disclosed that over 400,000 Nigerians were currently living in South Africa.
During her interaction with some inmates, the lawmaker explained that some of them confessed that they had been denied their freedom, despite completing their jail terms.
“The inmates complained of extreme discrimination by the prison authorities in South Africa.
The law enforcement officers always maltreat citizens of Nigeria for unjustifiable reasons. Sometimes, the authorities tore into pieces their Nigerian passports among several other allegations and refused to grant them bail, while others from other countries that committed similar bailable offence were granted bail.”
What took them to the prisons in the first place? We should not be shouting about welfare to convicts in other lands where they live in better conditions than their counterparts in Nigerian jails. I am tired of this Diaspora thing. Some people are only out to protect the interest of some few people from a section of the country. Does Abike Dabiri cared to visit the people detained in Saudi Arabia? Check out the offences they have committed in South Africa and stop feeding us with stories of how they were being treated.
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