Africa: the invisible continent
By Richard North - May 31, 2023
One of the more irritating facets of the UK legacy media is its obsession with US politics but, as I noted recently, this is matched by the almost complete absence of a comprehensive overview of global foreign affairs.
The contrast was at its starkest in its coverage of Sudan last month where, despite the country’s long history of instability, the media was almost completely caught out by the eruption of violence in the capital which was nothing if not predictable. And even while violence continues, coverage is superficial and intermittent.
But it doesn’t change. This is a media that can afford to devote acres of newsprint to a tawdry soap opera about two television presenters and manages, in foreign news, to find space to report a pay dispute in Disneyland Paris yet cannot be bothered to cover the inauguration of the president of the most populous country in Africa – a continent which seems invisible to the media.
Even in its own terms, Monday’s inauguration of Nigerian president Bola Tinubu (pictured) was important, but all the more so when the fate of his country is so bound up with our own, driving a significant element of UK immigration.
Yet, while we are told almost nothing in the national media about recent events in Lagos, with the notable exceptions of the Financial Times and a slight piece on the BBC website, we are assailed with the news that Sunak intends to visit Washington, even though the eventual outcome of the visit is likely to be sterile.
As it stands, though, we know far more of our government’s policies towards the United States, with its 330 million population, than we do of a country with a population of 230 million, the instability of which is having a measurable impact on our domestic affairs.
In fact, it would be fair to say that I have next to no idea what HMG’s specific policies are towards Nigeria – if indeed it has any, other than treating it as an endless source of cheap labour and encouraging unlimited immigration from the country.
It would also be fair to say that my personal knowledge of Nigeria is slight and, although I have occasionally written of it, it is a country that inspires in me as much interest as a traffic jam on the M1 – belonging to the category of knowledge that one “should know”, rather than “wants to know”.
However, Pete did a more recent piece in the general context of Nigeria and immigration and, although it is nearly three years old now, it is as pertinent now as it was then.
In the remote event that this government is actually interested in curbing immigration (which seems unlikely), then we need a Nigeria strategy, within the broader context of an Africa strategy, better to address push factors rather than always being caught on the back foot and reacting to events.
A useful start is a piece written a year after Pete’s, a copy-out from a Bloomberg report, published online by Aljazeera, under the dismal heading: “Once Africa’s promise, Nigeria is heaving under crime, few jobs”. Policy missteps, entrenched corruption and an over-reliance on oil, the piece says, have pushed the country’s economy to the brink.
What comes over – with nothing more recent to change that perspective – is that Nigeria, despite being blessed with many advantages, is as close to being a failed state as it is possible to be, without that status being formally recognised. And the words that stand out from the Aljazeera piece are “heaving with crime”.
That this has an impact on the UK is evident in several ways – not least because the country has become a global centre for internet fraud and drug-dealing, reported as early as February 1998, when the cost of Nigerian fraud was put at £3.5 billion a year. In the UK, Nigerian criminals were found to be working on their scams while employed by government departments, and even in the Metropolitan Police.
A National Criminal Intelligence Service spokesman confirmed that Nigerian fraudsters had been found working “from the Government to the private sector. They are not just trying to get money, they also want letterheads which can be used for further frauds”. A police source said that you can always tell if a law enforcer is dealing with organised Nigerian crime because “they have a broken marriage, a drink problem, and the largest card index in the office”.
Mentioned then, and reported in more detail a few years later, was the gang element of Nigerian crime, with the BBC told of the activities of “Black Axe”, a Nigerian student fraternity which had evolved into a dreaded mafia-group. The broadcaster had unearthed “new evidence of infiltration of politics, and a scamming and killing operation spanning the globe”.
After a two-year investigation, the BBC concluded that, over the past decade, Black Axe had become “one of the most far-reaching and dangerous organised crime groups in the world”.
Black Axe’s international cybercrime network, the BBC said, is likely to be generating billions of dollars in revenue for their members. In 2017 Canadian authorities say they busted a money laundering scheme linked to the gang worth more than $5 billion.
Nobody, the BBC added, knows how many similar Black Axe schemes are out there. Leaked documents obtained by the BBC showed members communicating between Nigeria, the UK, Malaysia, the Gulf States, and a dozen other countries. The gangs were still reported as active (and expanding) last year, with arrests in Italy.
In 2012, there were already enough Nigerian criminals in UK prisons to warrant the British government to propose financing prison space back in Nigeria to house the overflow. And, although something like this had been proposed in 2006, and several times in 2007, not until 2011 had it looked a realistic proposition, except that as late as March 2018 HMG was still talking of building a prison in Nigeria to enable the transfer of Nigerian inmates from UK jails.
According to House of Commons statistics there were 320 Nigerian nationals in prisons in England and Wales at the end of 2016. Foreign nationals made up about 12 percent of the prison population compared to about 9 percent of the general population.
At that point, then Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari had warned his fellow citizens to stop trying to make asylum claims in Britain, saying that their reputation for criminality has made it hard for them to be “accepted” abroad. “I don’t think Nigerians have anybody to blame”, he said. “They can remain at home, where their services are required to rebuild the country”.
In 2017, Priti Patel, then secretary for international development, was complaining that Nigeria was the fourth largest source of human trafficking to the UK. The International Organisation for Migration estimated that approximately 80 percent of girls arriving to Europe from Nigeria through irregular migration were potential victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.
More recently, Nigerian students have tended to diversify, and no one can complain that Nigerians lack inventiveness in their determination to add to the UK prison population.
As of now, president Bola Tinubu has his work cut out, but then so have British authorities in dealing with Nigerian immigrants. One wonders, therefore, why we should contribute to the racket which keeps university vice-chancellors very rich and our police forces very busy.
Perhaps we should be helping Tinubu keep his people at home, where they are really needed.