By Abdu Labaran Malumfashi.

Those who have double citizenship most often find themselves in a quandary as to where their loyalty should be for real. In even more quandary is the smaller country that thinks it has the first right of refusal to the loyalty of such people. But more often than not, such people become of questionable loyalty to the less developed country.

But it would seem to be the opinion of the ‘uninformed’ like yours sincerely, that any ‘small’ country worth its name should not rely 100% on the loyalty of people who share their nationality with bigger or more developed nations, for their peace of mind.

These expat locals would always choose the foreign big country to their smaller country of origin. They always run back to the foreign country when the going gets tough for them, for one reason or another. Some of them may be born there, but majority are recent immigrants who might have initially faced hostility before they were finally ‘accepted’ as part, but not fully the parcel, of the foreign land.

The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is said to be prosecuting a Nigerian top official of the giant oil company, the Nigerian National Oil Corporation (NNPC), for taking a bribe of over $2 million from a foreign oil company to undermine Nigeria’s economy. The offender is alleged to have a dual citizenship of Nigeria and the US, and who had also practiced law for so many years in the US, before taking up the NNPC appointment in Nigeria.

If he were not wanted by the FBI, the NNPC official would have gone back to the US the moment his time at the Nigerian oil company 

comes to an end. And that would be it, until another opportunity for him ‘to serve’ in Nigeria presents itself again.

There is also a Nigerian living in a European country, who aims to be someone locally but goes back to the foreign land the moment his ambition hits the dust. 

Nigeria is rated as having some of the most intelligent and smartest people on earth. In the US, for instance, Nigerians were said to be the most educated foreigners in the country. So are they in other countries as well.

Some are given the gift of the garb, sophists, in other words, so they can easily use their mouth and deceive our ‘Euro centric’ or ‘US centric’ leaders and into believing they are what they actually are not. Nigerians may be the most educated and smartest foreigners in the US and Europe, but they are also among the most crooked, wherever they may find themselves. And the ‘fluent’ use of the borrowed language is not going to do any harm to their chances of getting high profile positions with the Nigerian government.

Too much importance is attached to paper qualifications in Nigeria, which explains why some people will go to any lengths to obtain degrees, even if they are not from a known university or even a known country. A lot of people parading themselves as ‘graduates’ are anything but, and in most cases they are a little different from illiterates. One wonders from which university such ‘graduates’ graduated.

This knowledge comes to those who work in the newsrooms of newspapers or news desks of the electronic media, because then they would be exposed to all manner of English grammar, leaving one to wonder as to the language the  ‘graduate’ conducted the degree examination he was supposed to have passed.

Some of them were even retained in the institution they passed from to ‘teach’. The language they are going to use beats the imagination, bringing to mind the computer language of GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out).

Recently, the Federal government cancelled all degrees obtained from Cotonou, for civil servants in the federal service. About 2,600 people were so affected. That was at the federal service, as was announced by the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman. He said that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) had agreed that all degrees obtained from Cotonou in the last two years were not recognised by the government, and that the Head of the Civil Service of the federation had been told to terminate the appointment of holders of such degrees in the service of the federal government with immediate effect. 

An acquaintance once told me that he knew of someone in the federal service who had ‘bought’ his PhD, and I doubted him at the time. I am however, now the wiser by the minister of education’s recent announcement.

That was only in the federal civil service. If the states and local governments were to add up their lot, the lot would be unbelievably high. All because of the importance attached to paper qualification over competence.

Professor Faruk Kperogi has severally wrote on people who lived in foreign lands but used fake certificates to get employment in Nigeria. One of such persons was a female who was once given a very powerful ministerial appointment and became so close to the principal. The woman had claimed to have gotten a first and second degrees from one of the top universities in the US. She also claimed to have secured an appointment with a top investment firm in the US.

But when Professor Kperogi, who teaches Journalism in a US university investigated the claims, he found that the claimant did not attend the university as claimed, and the papers presented for the employment were fakes.

There is no reason to doubt Professor Kperogi making the allegation, because the affected person never denied it. Nigeria therefore, is found to be in the habit of giving appointments to people who lied about their qualification or who are expat locals.

May Nigeria be free of people whose absolute loyalty is not to the father land, but to foreign lands.

Malam Malumfashi wrote from Katsina for Katsina Times newspapers and a magazine 

@ www.katsinatimes.com