Do we STILL have ANYTHING which resembles a security and intelligence capability in Nigeria? If so, how come our sovereignty and national security interests can be so easily and flagrantly violated?
For how long will citizens of Niger Republic continue to pretend to be Nigerians whilst holding on to their meaningless independence? Has it ceased to be a crime for a foreign national to willfully assume Nigerian nationality to register to vote and thereby distort our national statistics or pose a danger to the free expression of the democratic will of the Nigerian people? Some say that the interest in acquiring these cards is not so much about the voting but as a way of buffering the stack of documents with which they have been known to lay claims to Nigerian nationality.
On the evidence of what I saw on the 18th day of January 2011, it is not in doubt that 70% of foreign nationals in the affected areas may have already registered to vote!! We may extrapolate therefrom that perhaps 200,000 foreign nationals, mostly from Niger may be voting in Lagos this April. I doubt that they will be voting for GEJ, so it is up to the President’s men to sift the chaff from the wheat before the registration exercise ends. It may lead to chaos if left until polling day. At my own polling unit, over 250 of the expected 500 voters have already registered.
As we speak, across many neighbourhoods of IKEJA …Ajao Road, Tokunbo Alli, Sports Center, Balogun Street, Adekunbi Crescent, Oluwaleyimu Street, Ezekiel Street and beyond where there is a HEAVY presence of Niger nationals living and working on the streets as okada riders, water cart pushers, fruit sellers, maisuya, maiguard and itinerant tailors, the whole voter registration exercise has been marred by a MASSIVE registration of aliens, particularly Niger nationals and to a lesser extent, people from northern Cameroon. These are people we see everyday and they have already been registered. I personally sent away one guy who normally supplies water to my residence whenever the public or private systems fail.
One can only imagine how bad this case is likely to have been in areas such as Idiaraba, Mushin, Alaba-Rago, Ketu/Mile 12 and AGEGE.
One ignorant and pregnant registration officer (a victim of very poor education apparently) tried to prove to me that a citizen is anyone who is resident in the neighborhood…her own unique understanding which perhaps stemmed from the fact that Nigerians can register anywhere they live. She unilaterally extended this to include foreign nationals.
Thankfully, everyone supplied a house address and GSM number so it will not be too much for the SSS, immigration and police to immediately swing into action and use both the provided names and phone numbers and round up the offenders for swift prosecution. It is the case that African nationals usually leave Nigerian to go elsewhere, bad-mouthing the country whereas they are typically “the grubs which live inside the pumpkin and destroy it”.
I have posted this for the SPECIFIC BENEFIT AND INTEREST OF security operatives on this board. In the years to come, do not be surprised that some Hausa folks begin to lay claims to Lagos a la the Jos scenario. The only difference this time would be that the said Hausa folk will be from Niger, rather than Nigeria. There are widely believed to be over a million nationals of Niger resident in Lagos alone.
Nigeria has seen Maitatsine, Abubabakar Kilakam and Amrul Bashir Abdullahi. Who is next? What kind of nonsense is this anyway?
Nigeria we hail thee!
SSS Where Areth Thou ?