proudly9ja:

Ofcourse I agree with you. It pains my heart too that my country cannot take of its own talkless of her citizens living abroad but in the case of this woman, she is not begging for money or begging for accommodation. She said it clearly that if given legal status, she is ready to work, now for me, when that time comes, thats additional tax paid to government coffers, both sides gain.

adconline:



It's either you are delusional or insular

proudly9ja:

From the story, Im sure we can read that she was doing well when she was working and her situation is the way it is because she can't work. Il advise she waits till July when the results of her applications out and I pray its good news. After that, tings will work out well.

ROSSIKE:

Gbawe you get time.

Naija people make me laugh. Go to rural Uganda and see what some of these countries are like compared to Nigeria. Or rural Gambia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, or Burundi.

In my ''village'' in Naija, you can buy toothpaste, toothbrush, mobile phones, t-shirts. It's even got some tarred roads! There are restaurants, hotels, markets filled with goods of various kinds, gas stations, motorparks.

Go to rural Uganda and even common coke to drink you can't find. Bush paths are the means to get around in many places.

Some of you need to travel to these other African countries and leave their capitals. Even Ghana. Step outside Accra and Kumasi and you'll be wondering what the hell you're doing in that place. Nothing happening.

You won't appreciate Naija until you actually go around and see these other nations. In those places people don't bother returning to their villages for christmas en masse like we do in Nigeria.

Their villages are desolate.  The one or two large cities they have is where everything happens.

In their villages, not only is there no electricity, but there are no power lines laid down at all, and there are no generators, because no one can afford them.

Like I said, you won't appreciate Naija until you actually go around and see some of these other nations.

The Dispossessed: Mother living in limbo with no job, no benefits and no cash
David Cohen
04.03.10
Special report: The Dispossessed
Poverty demeans London, says Gordon Brown
If kids see only drugs, knives and guns they use them too
Raising 11 children on benefits is no fun for anyone
What should be done? Have your say
Bent against the chill in a flimsy skirt and top, Ade picked up her children from school and walked towards Bromley High Street where she stopped across the road from a barber shop advertising a “wash & cut for £10”.

But Ade, 39, had not come for a quick trim. Rather, she waited for the last customer to leave before the barber discreetly signalled to her, and she and her family trooped into the shop. For the next 14 hours this hair salon, comprising a sofa, microwave oven and a lavatory at the back, doubled as a home for Ade and her family — her children aged 10, nine, seven and four, and her ailing 79-year-old mother. They would wash in a bucket, heat a few vegetables in the microwave, and bed down on the floor and sofa. At 7am, Ade would wake to clean the shop — her “payment” to the owner — and attempt to disinfect the boils that had appeared on her son's head. By 8.30am, before the barber opened, she and her family would have slipped out of the front door and be on their way to school.

This pitiful scene was repeated day after day despite Ade begging the social services department of her south-east London borough to house her destitute family. “There is nothing we can do — be grateful you have the hair salon,” a social worker told her.

When Ade's second eldest daughter got a chest infection, she dug her heels in and refused to leave the social worker's office until accommodation was found. “My elderly mother fell to the floor wailing and begging for mercy,” recalls Ade, “but the social worker called a policeman who handcuffed us and physically dragged us out of the building. I remember shouting: Am I a criminal to want a place for my children to sleep?'”

Last October social services were forced, under threat of human rights legal action by the charity Kids Company, to provide a home for Ade's immigrant family. The home they supplied in Croydon is a two-hour journey, via two buses and a tram, from the children's primary school in Bromley, but at least they now have a roof over their heads.

But that is just the beginning. Ade's application to the Home Office for leave to remain in the UK — having followed her husband here from Nigeria in 2003 and subsequently being beaten and abandoned by him — is still “pending”. It means that until the Home Office gets through its massive backlog, she and her children, the youngest of whom was born in London, are “without status”, neither legal nor illegal.

It also means that Ade, who is competent to work having completed two years of a computer science degree at university in Lagos, is barred from seeking employment or claiming benefits until her application is resolved. Apart from housing, she is classed as “having no recourse to public funds”.

Her children, moreover, are excluded from the 41 per cent of youngsters officially recorded as living in poverty in London because to government statisticians, illegal or “pending” immigrants like her do not count.

The London School of Economics estimates that there are 947,000 immigrants in the UK who are here illegally. Many come on six-month student or tourist visas that they over-stay — just like Ade and her husband — but most remain below the radar and end up joining the army of illegal workers propping up the economy.

Kids Company is aware of 300 immigrant families who receive no benefits and whose status has yet to be determined. It recently found one family sleeping in a shed. For many, their only means of survival is to turn to theft, drug dealing or prostitution. Ade has her own horror stories to recount, such as the landlord and immigration lawyer who demanded intimacy in lieu of services. She gave them short shrift. But how has she survived with no job, no benefits and no money in London?

Telling her story for the first time as part of the Evening Standard's week-long series on London's Dispossessed, Ade sits on a battered plastic sofa in her living room in Croydon.

She grew up in Lagos, the daughter of a cocoa trader, and she was still at university, she says, when her middle-class existence was shattered by a car accident that killed her father and brother. Unable to afford the fees, she got a job in a firm where she met a business administration graduate and at 29 married him, having three children in quick succession.

“In 2002, my husband lost his job and came to London,” she says. “He got work here as a concierge and a year later, I left the children with my mother and he brought me out, and I got a job, too, working as a security officer earning £700 a month. My husband told me he had permission to stay and that he was sorting my papers as well.

“We rented a flat in Elephant and Castle and in 2005 the kids joined us, followed by my mother, but instead of happiness, my husband started beating me. I discovered he was seeing other women, but when I challenged him he attacked me and threw boiling water over me. I was pregnant at the time and had to be admitted to hospital because he kicked me in the stomach and there was concern for the baby.

“The beatings became more and more frequent. In 2006, six months after our fourth child was born, neighbours heard me and the children screaming and called the police. They found me in a pool of blood but my husband had fled — it was the last time I ever saw him.” But Ade's problems were only just beginning. Keen to clarify her status, she approached her local MP Harriet Harman, who wrote to the Home Office to ask how Ade's application was progressing.

The Home Office replied that they had “no record” of her application, nor her husband's. “It was a huge shock because it meant I was here illegally. The Home Office said I should make a fresh application, but that until a decision was made, I was barred from claiming benefits or working.”

She stopped work and in early 2008 re-applied, hoping for a quick answer, but after a couple of months her money ran out and her landlord evicted them. Her one relative here, an uncle living in Bromley, took the six of them in and Ade moved the children to a local school. But eventually it became too much for her uncle's partner and she asked them to leave. For months they moved from place to place, living in squats and dingy flats.

Eventually, homeless and penniless, they wound up last year living in the hair salon. “You have no idea what it feels like,” says Ade, fighting back the tears. “You are so vulnerable, so desperate, if not for the kids you think of suicide. I had no clothes, no food. The children were amazing. They'd go to school and at night they would sit very quietly. Then one would say, we're cold mummy, we're hungry mummy'. They lost weight but hardly ever complained. If not for Kids Company and the Salvation Army, we would have starved. And we'd still be sleeping at the barber.”

Kids Company, she adds, provides her with legal aid and £50 of food vouchers and bus money a week.

Would she consider going back? “No, no, please God no— I have been here seven years and my kids are doing well at school. My eldest is top of her class and her teachers say she's one of the gifted and talented.

“There is nothing for me in Nigeria. The Home Office have promised me an answer by July. I pray for a good answer so I can finally end this nightmare. It's been two years now. Why can't they decide quickly? When I pick up the children with the other mums at the school gates, I feel like a fool in my charity clothes. I am an educated person — if I was allowed to work, I could easily support my children.”

Upstairs in her children's bedroom, there are three beds but no cupboard. Where, I wonder, are their clothes? “What clothes?” she says. “Each child has two outfits, the one they're wearing and the one in the wash.”

In four months Ade will know her fate. Until then, she's stuck in limbo

tpia.:

white south Africans whose forefathers migrated to Africa centuries ago are being compared with Nigerians who left Nigeria less than 50 years ago?

anyway, let me not get into this argument again.

many of the white south Africans are leaving the place anyway.

Don't be naive. everyone cares who setttled where and when.White south africans are Africans of Germanic, dutch, french and english descent. No body is chasing them out of Africa but please note the difference btw nationality and ethnicity. That is fact.

You are simply proving my point as well by showing the queens germanic history though this does not invalidate my previous stated pint concering you and the queen as far as ancestry is concerned.

Please note Germanic tribes of which english is a deravitive stem from the same group of people such as The Xhosa and the Zulu who share common ancestry though the Xhosa are know to have far longer inhabitance in Southern Africa.

Many royal families incorporated powerful families from across borders to strengthen their kingdoms and dominions. This is not uncommon as in marie antoinnete of Austria and king louis or Isabell of spain and I forget the "French kings" name.

The fact still remains despite this. all the abovee can still trace ancestry to common lands much further back than you can to Britian itself.


If you still claim people don't care about who settled where and when, how come there is still animosity regarding territory between scots and English men or Scadanavians and Irish people as to who are the original peoples of that island or even the dreaded BNP party who feel they have a legitimate ancestral claim to England.

Common now, common sense needs to be applied here

You only need to get on a plane from Nigeria with a foreign passport to confirm this.

A white south african can argue his indigenous history to That part of Africa say against a nigerian or a senegalese, however he cannot do the same when refering to the continent of "Africa" as a whole. They will try to argue that they are not the last settlers in SA and found the place uninhabited when they arrived, however history and culture proves otherwise.

There is nothing wrong with being A british national of Urohobo descent, however you cannot argue with the queen when she can trace her descent much further back than you can.

As far as living in the past, tell that to Nigerians with other countries passports who are being stopped left and right at airports

Thats what the jews of europe used to think befoe one swoop of legislation invalidated their birthrights.

Anything is possible.

like I said before a british national is different from a british person by descent.

olabukola:

In Nigeria you are from where our father came from. We must not copy copy british or US. why can;t we have our own identity. If you are born in Uk and you chose to be called British good for you and don't worry when people call you one. You trying to be Nigerian when you are chose british means that you are neither here nor there. The idea of half Nigerian half british is nonsense. If your father is a Nigerian your are automatically a nigerian. Some Oyibo will ask a black person who tell him he/she is brit " Where do you come from originally" that question makes you a fake brit simple and that is what you are to him/her.

There is a very worrying trend that is rearing its ugly head in many states of Nigeria. This trend sees many Governors expelling Nigerians from a state they have chosen to live and forcefully sending them back to their so called "States of Origin" for non-just cable reasons.

For want of a better term to describe this very strange practice by some state governments, I will refer to it here after as "internal deportation". Deportation by its very legal definition has to do with deportation of an alien out of a country either because he was not legally supposed to be in the deporting country or because he has committed a crime.

The trend started a few months back in Lagos when the state government in it's mega -city drive on various occasions expelled so called destitutes loaded them unto buses and sent them back to their so called states of Origin.

ChinenyeN:

Wow, seriously? The Igbo born in Lagos cannot contest as full citizens? I guess ethnicity is much more institutionalized in Nigeria than I thought. If only this level of institutionalization would coerce people into developing their regions. . . if only.

After graduating in 2008, he told his family he wanted to continue learning, by moving to an Arab country to study Arabic.

His family told the BBC Mr Abdulmutallab's parents decided to send him to Dubai to study for a post-graduate degree in business management, thinking he would benefit from its cosmopolitan nature and would not be exposed to extremist influences.

But despite his parents' objections, he abandoned the course before it was finished, saying he was no longer interested and had found an alternative course in Yemen.

He said the seven-year programme would cost nothing and that it did not matter if his Nigerian passport expired - he would be able to obtain a Yemeni one.

When his mother contacted him to urge him to reconsider, Mr Abdulmutallab told her not to get in touch again as he had found "a new life" and they no longer had any ties to him.

George_D:

EloSela, Siena you can talk all you like but i think the most person to blame in all this is onwubuike himself. if he had stayed home and not gone to a foreign land that uses and dumps people, all this won't have happened in the first place!

George_D:

well if the gold medals are nothing, why not try asking those pot smoking lay abouts to go get some for thier country?!

debosky:

Just wondering. . .were you born in Nigeria?

debosky:

So what? Are the thieves in jail the only thieves in jail? Does it justify their crimes and negate their resultant punishment? No

Keep looking for a reason to justify this. . . .I'm interested in what new excuses can be given.

1. It's racism

2. He's being 'dumped' after being 'used'

3. He's not the only rule breaker

4. He's not medically fit to live in Nigeria (despite living here for over 30 years prior to moving to the UK)

5. I don't 'think' he should be deported for a driving offence (Despite what the law clearly states that a jail sentence qualifies a person for deportation)

6. Laws are biased against him

More please.

~Sauron~:

You guys are still here?
Mr Onwubiko is already in Lagos munching Agege Bread n Beans.

George_D:

oh yes. as if he's the only rule breaker in the whole of uk!