Chidi,
I'm curious.
Yes, we all pray, May God Bless America, but is it a now a matter of premediated Pan-Africanist policy that should that something unforeseen soon happen it will be a mass exodus and, "U.S.A of course would be the first choice for Nigerians."? Eh, Chidi?
If your mind is already made up about that I hope that your residence is close to the nearest airport, for a quick getaway for you & your family first, others later. I'm only expecting this because according to Baba Kadiri, I.G.B.O. is the acronym for I Go Before Others, a wise but not necessarily a heroic or chivalric spirit of self-preservation. But there must some true-ism in the saying, "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die"
My dear friend and sometime defender Alim Sesay once joked that in the early years of the RUF War in Sierra Leone, when the war was still confined to the East and some equally dark things were happening up North, some of the Creoles in Freetown were quite unperturbed, that their attitude was, "Oh the savages! By Jove, those savages! Let them go on killing themselves until they get tired of the bloodshed, Ojare!" However, on the 6th of January 1999 when the RUF suddenly ( like a flash of lightning) descended on Freetown – like Hannibal the son of Ogun's surprise attack, unexpectedly descending down alps and taking everyone completely by surprise, in the RUF's case to begin what they declared was their "Operation Spare No Soul" and "Operation No living Thing", it was then that Dr Olufemi Johnson groaned in Krio, "which God for call? " and started to cry. There was no possibility of a quick getaway, the airport was too far away, and the boats to Banjul were already fully loaded. He gave his last-minute orders to his houseboy Santigie to lock the gates and barricade the garage doors. Now the question remained and he couldn't quite figure out an answer, where to hide his daughters and his wife from the savages, the advancing rapists?
With regard to that episode of the war the people of Freetown still say, " God Bless Nigeria" – and will forever be grateful to Nigeria, because without the Nigerian troops and the Nigerian Airforce – all under the ECOMOG flag - under Nigerian of Brigadier General Maxwell Khobe – the genocide would have been a fait accompli….
An Israeli once told me that as a prisoner of war, you don't wait until the full moon or when the place is completely dark, you escape at the earliest opportunity - like Sierra Leone's late President Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabbah , the moment that Johnny Paul Koroma struck ( to oust him by a military coup) Alhaji Kabbah hopped into the nearest helicopter that few him to Guinea Conakry and stayed there as a refugee for a good ten months.
We may still enquire, why didn't Kabbah continue his flight from Conakry to New York City? And why didn't Ojukwu flee from Abidjan to Washington DC, or why didn't Dr Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah flee from Conakry to Peking? Clearly, the reason (not necessarily Pan- African) was they wanted to remain close to home for a quick comeback…
President Trump obviously know things that we do not know. He probably knows that very soon something will happen in Nigeria that would trigger off large scale migrant visa applications. U.S.A of course would be the first choice for Nigerians.CAO.
--Chidi Anthony Opara is a "Life Time Achievement" Awardee, Registered Freight Forwarder, Professional Fellow Of Institute Of Information Managerment, Africa, Poet and Publisher of PublicInformationProjects
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