Our question, which other Nigerians may want to ask, is: Have Nigerians in the Diaspora forfeited their being Nigerian citizens because they live in America? One is asking this question as a result of the interview given by former Nigerian Ambassador to the United States, now Senator Jibril Aminu. The interview was relayed in a broadcast by one of the two Nigerian television stations now being received in the United States. Senator Aminu was reliving his experience in Washington DC during the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The interview held on September 11, 2006, marked the fifth year remembrance of the sad event.
While explaining the event as it happened, the then ambassador took the whole episode as a non-serious matter for Nigerians. The Senator’s countenance or body language spoke unprintable volumes concerning such a serious tragedy. Nigerians will never know how many of their citizens perished in that historical occurrence. It is really sad that some of those with whom we place trust for our lives in their hands, who are in service as citizens of the same nation, continue to fail in their duty.
What prompted our question was the inability of the then ambassador to tell Nigerians, and the world who watched the television interview, the number of Nigerians who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. When he was asked as to how many Nigerians died, he re-asked the journalist with an indescribable gesture: “Were they Nigerians? They were Nigerian naturalized Americans,” the Senator answered himself. “Many of them worked there,” he exclaimed.
It was sad that the Nigerian ambassador in Washington, DC did not care enough for the lives of Nigerians who died in such a tragic incident, and that he could not find out how many Nigerians lost their lives at the World Trade Center, just because they were naturalized Nigerian Americans.
Senator Aminu is a highly studied personality considering his background before he was appointed as Nigeria’s ambassador to the United States. Although, Confucius, the Chinese philosopher had said that “the highest study of all is that which teaches us to develop those principles of purity and perfection, virtues which Heaven bestowed upon us at birth, in order that we may acquire the power of influencing for good those amongst us, by our precepts and example.” Has the former ambassador actually demonstrated his knowledge and ability, at the time those Nigerians died at that WTC attack and during his explanation to the Nigerian people, five years after, in this last interview he gave on the attack?
The inability to tell Nigeria how many Nigerians died in that attack, was it callousness or dereliction of his responsibility as an ambassador?
One may be incorrect in his assessment of the sad situation of that 9/11 event and of the interview given by our honorable senator, but on that day and the one following, some of us in the United State who were not paid Nigerian government employees, out of human concern, were searching through the news media and listening to hear if Nigerians were among the dead. The U.S. media and the U.S. authorities announced in passing that Nigerians were among the dead at the World Trade Center, without giving us figures, while they provided numbers of other nationalities who died there.
So what is the fate of the Nigerians in the Diaspora? Was it because the Americans knew that Nigerian authorities don’t seem to care about what happens to its citizens anywhere? Poor fellow Nigerians; their host country will not mourn them and their land of birth will not either?
Yet Nigerians in the Diaspora are working themselves to death just to see how they can help their country of birth, Nigeria, and its image. Is Senator Aminu aware that the U.S. dollars these Nigerian Americans are remitting monthly to their families and relatives based in Nigeria, has been recognized as giving a lift to the Nigerian economy? These Nigerians have not given up their Fatherland because they have joined the international political, economic and industrial game of dual citizenship.
