Olatunji Dare Not a few expatriate Nigerians in the United States have been fretting since Republican Presidential hopeful Donald Trump threatened to send them packing if he wins November’s presidential election.
“To make America great again, we need to get rid of the Muslims, Mexicans and the Africans, especially the Nigerians,” Trump said. “They take all our jobs, jobs meant for honest hard working Americans, and when we don’t give them the jobs, the Muslims blow us up.”
This was a new one. Nigerians as a group had previously figured on his catalogue of bugbears. only as crime-prone elements. And this latest was just a preamble.
“We need to get the Africans out. Not the blacks, the Africans. Especially the Nigerians,” he elaborated. They’re everywhere. I went for a rally in Alaska and met just one African in the entire state. Where was he from? Nigeria! He’s in Alaska taking our jobs. They’re in Houston taking our jobs. Why can’t they stay in their own country? Why? I’ll tell you why.
“Because they are corrupt,” he said to vehement cheering by a predominantly white audience of some 10, 000 at a rally in Wichita, Kansas. “Their governments are so corrupt, they rob the people blind and bring it all here to spend. And their people run away and come down here and take our jobs. We can’t have that! If I become president, we’ll send them all home. We’ll build a wall at the Atlantic Shore. Then maybe we’ll re-colonise them because obviously they did not learn a damn thing from the British!”
There you have it, Himself the Donald, the tabloid media personality and cartoon character on the top of his flippant, foul-mouthed, demagogic form. Do not expect him to do anything differently yet, because what he has been doing so far has served him well. It has kept him at or near the top of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, supposedly the bellwether of political preference in an election year, and as prohibitive front runner in national polls for the Republican ticket.
What the statesman and British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (1848 – 1930) said of a speech by one of his contemporaries can be said with justice about Trump’s broadside: “There were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true.”
It is true, but trite, that a good many Nigerians are involved in syndicated extortion, credit card fraud and other scams of like nature that a name has even been created for the phenomenon: “The Nigerian Connection.
Through their own gullibility and credulity and a predilection for reaping where they did not sow, hundreds of Americans have fallen victim to these scams. In whatever case, it is not proven that Nigerians are more given to criminal activity than other national or sub-national groups in the United States.
It is true, but trite, that Nigerians are to be found even in Alaska. They are everywhere trying to earn a decent living like other residents. Were business or pleasure to take Trump to Greenland and beyond, indeed to the farthest regions of the world inhabited by humans, he will find Nigerians there. That is not a flaw in their character but a tribute to their enterprise, their sense of adventure, their irrepressible spirit.
It is again true, but trite, that there is much corruption in public life in Nigeria, and that many public officials who have corruptly enriched themselves warehouse their loot in the United States, in the expectation that it will buy them life most abundant.
Since taking office in May 2015, the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has been unmasking the corruption that virtually bankrupted Nigeria under Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, identifying perpetrators in high places, and preparing the ground to bring them to justice.Dasukigateis only the best-known manifestation of this exercise.
So, it is no news that corruption is a big issue in Nigeria. Nor is it a revelation that major American oil companies – think Halliburton – have over the decades aided and abetted it big-time.
A good many Nigerians might not be averse to being re-colonised, this time by the United States as Trump said he might do if elected, the British having made a hash of it. One recalls how, at a very low point — as if there was ever a high point! — in the Second Republic, a tearful Imo State Governor Sam Mbakwe, whom no one ever accused of flippancy, wished the British could be brought back to continue where they had left off.
Decades earlier, the question was being asked in homes and on the streets: When will this independence end? Even now, today, it is not inconceivable that there is still some yearning among some of our compatriots, however muted, for the return of Britannica.
So it is true, but tiresomely trite, that corruption in Nigeria has assumed industrial proportions. And Trump was all triteness when he hurled his broadsides at Nigeria and Nigerians. And where he was not trite, he was a peddler of falsehood.
It is not true and not trite that Nigerians have been taking jobs meant for “honest, hardworking Americans.” To put it baldly, it is a shameless lie.
What jobs?
Certainly not the job of healing the sick and tending their wounds and caring for the old and infirm that tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and medical workers who claim Nigerian nationality carry out everyday.
In the tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut that Trump is familiar with, the health care delivery system will virtually collapse if the Nigerians he has been denigrating were to pull out.
The educational establishments from primary school all the way to research universities will be the poorer without the Nigerians who serve as teachers, administrators, senior faculty and scientists engaged in cutting-edge research.
There are more Nigerian doctors, more Nigerian engineers and more Nigerian professors in the United States than in Nigeria. Virtually all of them earned their places in the system by competition and superior performance, not by “taking away jobs meant for honest, hard-working Americans.” And they have kept their places in the system the same way – by superior performance.
Not that it would make any difference to Trump if he knew it, but according to recent research, Nigerians constitute the largest group in the United States with graduate – or post graduate, as we say in Nigeria –degrees.
These are not your thieves stealing jobs from hard-working Americans. These are people who have, through diligent study and application, earned their places under the American sun, a good many of them as American as Trump and Mark Rubio, and more American than the Canadian-born Ted Cruz.
To those Nigerians out there freaking out about what Trump might do to them in the very unlikely event that he is elected U. S. president, I say: rest easy. I commend to you President Harry Truman’s commiseration with five-star general and World War II Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, who was about to succeed him in The White House.
“Poor Ike,” Truman lamented. “He will give orders, and nothing will happen.”
If Trump issues arbitrary orders, or pursues any of his other crack-brained ideas, he will find himself blockaded by the system of checks and balances, if not by entrenched interests. Little will change. About the only way he or any president for that matter can get anything done on the domestic front – even lofty things — is to tinker around the edges.
Ask Barack Hussein Obama. http://thenationonlineng.net/donald-trumps-delusional-world/ |
