What The Papers Say
National Concord, Nigeria
Drug trafficking: The real issue
It is the duty of any government to ensure the security of its citizens, fight evil and enthrone law and order. Indeed a good government should save citizens from themselves in order to avoid anarchy.Drug trafficking in our society is a cankerworm that eats deep into the society with consequent disastrous ends. The social sickness could get to such a dangerous and epidemic level as it is in Europe and America. If this nation should be visited by the malady of hard drugs, the basis of our existence will be threatened.
But we are worried that the nation has not started tackling the real problem. It appears we do not even know the extent of it. If we do, we would have realised that we have killed faceless people and we are likely to kill more; while the real dealers are sitting pretty. Those who have been caught are mere victims used as cannon-fodders for some big shots.
Narcotic czars are multi-millionaires and well-placed citizens. Hard drugs are expensive and not produced in Nigeria. All those caught so far were attempting to take them out. There must be a connection with big distributors between Nigeria and abroad. The weakest link is what we are dealing with. We must not make faceless people scapegoats of a problem largely attributable to the moral turpitude of rich people.
In our society, drug pushing is still a new phenomenon. The pest can be nipped in the bud. The need to go for the real culprits now is emphasised by our limited resources when advanced countries despite their seemingly unlimited resources are not appearing to be winning the war. Despite billion-dollar budgets, the United States and Western Europe are not anywhere controlling drug trafficking, what with the expertise of the peddlers and the mafia connections.
The idea of death sentence appears deterrent but not on "errand boys". Can we claim to be winning the war against armed robbers with the same capital punishment? We have failed to tackle armed robbery problem in the last 15 years. Now our land is ravaged day and night leaving our lives constantly in danger.
While the death penalty is a blanket measure incapable of distinguishing between different categories of offenders, the reality of other crimes it is aimed at stifling is clearly otherwise. There exist different shades of drug trafficking offences and diverse categories of offenders and in every given case, varying degrees of culpability. The present punitive measures takes no cognisance of the distinctions and contradicts the most rudiment of fairness and justice and has inadequate control effects.
It would bring no salutary effects to the social and moral welfare of this country if the resort to shedding blood is increasingly viewed as the ultimate cure for all our socio- economic problems. The debasement of human life implicit in such a tendency can only aggravate the harm already inflicted on public psyche in recent times.
If we are concerned about the slur on our image abroad as drug pushers, we must also be concerned about giving the impression that we have no respect for the sanctity of human life.
Cocaine and heroin are the crude oil of Bolivia, Peru, Pakistan, Thailand, Colombia and a host of other countries which the Western nations would rather give aid than this country. We may not allow our country to become a member of the "Golden Triangle" but even in America and Western Europe where they have a higher degree of narcotics, there is no death sentence on pushers. Why are we then holier than the Pope?
This administration must face the real issues of drug trafficking. The big shots in the business must be pinned down. The mafia can be broken by a concerted effort of the government.
National Concord, Nigeria
Re-visiting the issue of illegal aliens
Although experience has shown that the issue is capable of generating all manner of sentiments, an objective assessment of the matter would be that the Federal Government is right in asking illegal aliens in the country to regularise their papers or leave. No country anywhere in the world, not even the United States of America, a country peopled essentially by immigrants, can allow nationals of other countries to flout its immigration laws with impunity. Nor is it even in the interest of aliens to reside in the country illegally. For, their status as illegal residents means that their host government can neither provide adequately for them nor protect them, say, from unscrupulous employers, who are ever ready to exploit their illegal aliens status and pay them sub-human wages.This said, however, it must be acknowledged that even for those illegal aliens who are in a position to do so, the regularisation of their immigration papers is a far-from-easy task. To avoid creating a veritable (and profitable) racket for unscrupulous immigration officials and, equally important, to minimise the hardships attendant thereon, the government would be well advised to follow up its order on the regularisation of aliens' papers with specific guidelines and procedures for doing so.
Further, for those illegal aliens and there will, no doubt, be many of them who must go eventually, the government should start now to set in motion, the machinery that will lead to their orderly evacuation. In this specific regard, adequate arrangements as to their convergence at suitable assembly points, feeding, health- care, transportation and eventual reception in their home countries need to be carried out by both Nigeria and the aliens' governments. This is necessary if we are to avoid, as indeed we should, a re-enactment of the image-denting expulsion effected by the Shagari administration in 1983.
In the public perception, and probably that of government as well, illegal aliens are basically nationals of neighbouring African countries who, under a more auspicious economic climate would not have attracted serious attention. But our African brothers are, in reality, not our only illegal aliens. Illegal and undesirable aliens are also to be found within the ranks of Europeans, Americans and the orientals in our midst. But because these later group, for the most part, wield considerable economic and political influence, they appear capable of getting away even with murder; their papers are regularly renewed with effortless ease (when they have papers at all); sometimes they adopt Nigerian citizenship but maintain a firm grip on their passports, and, of course, they wheel and deal in a way few Nigerian nationals can afford to, making millions and siphoning them out, to our economy's detriment. While we are on the subject of aliens therefore, the government would do well to take a hard look at this band of aliens with a view to bringing them into line, and expelling those of them who have no honest business living in Nigeria..
