Very soon, Chinese boys and girls will be selling pure water on our highways. Many of them will out-sprint our own hawkers and there will be messy street fights. Write down that prediction and remember to acknowledge my copyright to that prophecy when it comes to pass.
But, wait! What prediction are we talking about when we already have hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals all over Nigeria — from the aquatic splendour of Lagos to the arid wonders of Sokoto. The Chinese have embedded themselves into our society unobtrusively. They have meshed with our communities and, if I may borrow an expression invented by Prof Wole Soyinka, many of them have not only frolicked here but also wifed here.
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I have seen mixed race children with Chinese features in many rural communities in Northern Nigeria. You can’t miss their facial features — almond-shaped or slanted eyes with pronounced epicanthic folds, dark irises, flat noses, prominent cheekbones and flat facial features. The Chinese are members of the Mongoloid race— one of the three main races in the world, the others being Negroids and Caucasoids.
Invasion
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The current Chinese invasion of our urban and rural spaces is intriguing because the Asian immigrants, unlike their caucasian counterparts, live, wine and dine with the local people and are therefore, to some extent, stakeholders in the affairs of those communities. Their children won’t be regarded as immigrants but as locals. Someday, they will claim their political and traditional rights and provide leadership for fellow local ‘brothers and sisters’.
That, however, is not the worrying aspect of the massive emigration of Chinese nationals to Nigeria. It is normal for people all over the world to seek better livelihood in other lands. What is worrisome is the capacity of the newcomers to outnumber the original natives. When you’re talking numbers, the Chinese are heavyweight champions. I checked the current population of that country in real time as I was writing this piece and it was 1,417,794,773. The US comedian, Richard Pryor, would tell you the hidden connotation of having that huge population, “A billion people, that’s some…!
To further contextualise the matter, we simply have to remember that the population of the entire continent of Africa is 1.5 billion.
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China has the capacity to ‘neutralise’ the numerical strength of several Nigerian ethnic nationalities. If the Chinese decide on a programme of encouraging 15 percent of their population to settle in Africa with Nigeria as a favourite honey pot, they will be the largest single homogenous ethnic block within most of the individual countries and will rightly determine its fortunes, based on the mantra of one-man-one-vote.
Just consider the figures: 15 percent of their population is 212,700,000, enough to distribute all over Africa and emerge as the most populous ethnic group in many countries of the continent. Imagine if there was a 40 million Chinese population in Nigeria! If you analyse figures coming out of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), it will take some doing to outvote or out-rig the hypothetical Chinese!
I’m not advocating a Trump-style ‘nationalist’ racial cleansing, neither am I oblivious of the positive contribution of some foreigners of Chinese descent to the manufacturing sector of Nigeria’s economy. I am rather interested in seeing the bad eggs among the lot identified and removed from circulation as the law demands.
Demarketing Nigeria
I have been a victim of racial profiling in some foreign airports on account of the categorisation of Nigerians as pathological criminals. To discover that some of the cybercrime for which Nigerians have been classified as past masters were actually designed, orchestrated and supervised by Chinese nationals operating in Nigeria in plain sight is, therefore, galling.
Just the other day, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) blew the lid off one of such Chinese-led criminal outfits operating from a seven storey building in Victoria Island, Lagos.
There were 792 suspects in all, including 148 Chinese, 40 Filipinos, two Kazakhstani, one Pakistani and one Indonesian.
The foreign nationals used the facility to train their Nigerian accomplices on how to initiate romance and investment scams and also used the identities of their Nigerian accomplices to perpetrate criminal activities. It is a massive computer-based operation.
Nigerian accomplices, who are assigned WhatsApp accounts linked to foreign telephone numbers, especially from Germany and Italy, engage victims in romantic conversations as well as phantom business and investment discussions to trick them to shop on the purported online investment shopping platform called www.yooto.com.
So far, the EFCC investigations have shown that the Nigerian accomplices don’t know who the real owners of the ‘company’ they work for are, because the workers are not offered letters of appointment and are usually paid either in cash or through a private account.
I see a big problem looming in the horizon if Chinese nationals continue to come to Nigeria to establish criminal enterprises using Nigerian names. Had the shoe been on the other foot as indeed happened several times in some foreign countries in the past, the media would be agog with news of Nigerians duping the Chinese. Now it is the Chinese who are duping Nigerians and also swindling the whole world using Nigerian names to commit the crimes.
Criminals
In the northern part of the country, the Chinese are all over the mines stealing mineral resources and establishing protection rings. They have become part of the ‘insecurity architecture’ of the country. I hear that they also run human trafficking rings operating under ‘Omerta-style’ codes of secrecy. They sell goats and may soon start selling ‘pure water’. In the Southeast (Enugu) recently, one of them was nabbed for attempting to smuggle out some precious stones mined in the state.
Many of these foreign criminals enter the country on 90-day visas and remain here even though they are out of status because we don’t do due diligence after allowing them into our country. It probably would have been tolerable if they speak well of Nigeria outside. No, many of them feel superior to blacks generally. In words and deeds they show that they have no respect for Africans.
Four years ago, during the COVID scourge, blacks were singled out for special ostracisation and dehumanisation in Guangzhou province of China. In my column in Daily Trust at the time, I wrote a piece titled “Racist China”:
“Some Africans resident in Guangzhou are now virtually destitute and are looking for any opportunity to return home. Many of them claim they are treated like lepers in public and targeted for additional COVID-19 tests without ever seeing the results. The police and public health bureau in Guangzhou claimed that officials had responded to false rumors that 300,000 black people in Guangzhou were setting off a second epidemic. How can black people be so accused when it is widely suspected that the origin of Covid-19 is linked to the Chinese propensity of eating anything with four legs except a table — maggots, scorpions, millipedes, roaches, bats, lizards, worms, etc” (https://dailytrust.com/racist-china/)
Destroy the Armada
Nigeria’s Interior Minister, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has his work cut out. This ‘armada’ of undesirables must be routed.
And I ask the Chinese, how can you treat my people like excrement in your own country and then compound my existence by coming to my country to commit crimes in my name? Whoever does that and expects to walk free in my backyard?
Wole Olaoye is a Public Relations consultant and veteran journalist. He can be reached on [email protected], Twitter: @wole_olaoye; Instagram: woleola2021
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