How Deported Nigerians Partied and Forgot to Legalize their Stay

Baroness J. Jummy Ariyo

 I’M SORRY

But if you must live in a foreign country ILLEGALLY for over 10 years without finding ways to get yourself documented, you really deserve to get deported – and appealing against your deportation order is like saying you deserve to live in a house with no tenancy agreement and questioning the landlord’s right to evict you.

Many Nigerians arrive in the UK on visitor’s or student’s visa and many years later, they are still in the country working and even starting and enjoying normal family life without making a single attempt to get their status legalised.

Over many years some of them actually conveniently forget their real status and start to refer to themselves as Britico.

With the sizable proceeds of the multiple manual labour and lowly jobs they manage to get, they rent expensive homes and buy flashy cars. They spend thousands on clothes and shoes and throw the most lavish parties employing the services of top events vendors.

These are the ones that will have child naming or 1st birthday parties that 99% of the guests will be adults in expensively tailored Aso Ebi, beads set by top jewellers complimented by professional make over costing at least £50!

Many of these folks drive huge jeeps or CRVs with 2013 reg.

At any owambe party, they will spray so many $1 notes to make your eyes water.

And of course when they throw parties you will count nothing less then 500 bottles of the most expensive drinks costing over £30 each, among many others.

Many of these people have no form of investment of any kind in Nigeria. While some intelligent “illegals” periodically send money back home either towards a building project or savings, the others get carried away following many years of being undetected and begin to assume that makes them Brtish.

I have on several occasions been shocked by the reports of some folks being deported

Judging from their lifestyle and “status” no way would you ever suspect they are illegal

The problem is that these folks start families and have children that are wrongly assumed to be citizens simply because they are born in the UK.

In 1991 the law was changed and any child born in the UK where at least one of the parents is not a UK citizen does not get automatic citizenship.

As a result of their parents carelessness, many kids are going to grow up after living all their life in the UK to find out in their 20s that they are not British citizens.

At the risk of sounding unfeeling, anyone leaving their own country to live illegally in any other country surely must know and understand the risks they are taking. Besdes no one is made illegal after getting into the country. The decision to live illegally was made before leaving the country of origin be it Nigeria or anywhere else. That is a fact and while one must sympathize with folks caught up in the situation, we must also learn to address this matter without sentiments.

True many would have over the years,  tried to find ways to obtain their papers. And while we know several have done their uttermost to become legalized either through genuine or bogus marriages, fake asylum applications and other means,  so many other wont have been so successful either because they’ve fallen victims to unscrupulous Nigerian solicitors who have set up business mainly to exploit people unfortunate enough to find themselves at their mercy or because they simply cannot raise enough cash to fund their application .

It is great hypocrisy for any Nigerian to claim ignorance of the solid fact that many of our people will do anything and everything possible including obtaining students visa with no intention of going to school, in order to leave the country and get into the US  or the UK with no plans of leaving,  knowing fully well that their actions are completely illegal and if caught, they will have to pay the price of detention and possible deportation. Yet many wait years or until they are caught before trying to find a solution to their problem.

But the bottom line is that immigration laws are set in place for a reason and when people deliberately travel to any country purely with the sole purpose of getting lost in the system and living illegally without proper documentation, the government should not be blamed for carrying out the proper penalties when such offenders get caught.

Story by Baroness J. Jummy Ariyo