Up till 1 am in the early hours of Thursday, more than three hours after their arrival at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja, Lagos from South Africa, Richard Simon was full of life.
He and his peers aged between four and six played gleefully inside the lighted pilgrims’ hall of the airport, racing against one another to catch a small round plastic object one of them threw up into the air. They showed no sign of sleeping soon.
To her and many Nigerian pupils evacuated to the country on Wednesday night, it was a big break from the manacles of repression and the dawn of a new life. “I am happy to come back home,” the 13-year-old native of Imo State said amid hearty smiles. Chubby and cheerful, Oyinkansola Ogunfolaji sat on a long steel chair in the hall devouring a plate of rice she and other returnees were served. Like Ogechi and Ijoma, the 12-year-old Ogun State indigene was a victim of verbal assault in school. According to the Grade 7 pupil, the past three years of her schooling in Mabopane, a suburb of Pretoria, came with painful memories she could not easily erase.
“So far, I have won nine awards in subjects including Afrikaans, English, Mathematics, Economics and Management Sciences, Social Sciences and Life Skills. I feel bad because no one would remember me for my achievements and it would be like all my hard work has gone down the drain. “I don’t have a sense of belonging in the school. They want us to realise that we are not one of them. If we complain to our teachers, they will correct them but after a while, they will resume the discriminatory act.”
However, the narrative was different for Adediwura Beckley, a Grade 9 pupil in Pretoria. She was lucky to be in the company of South African classmates who treated her like one of them. “I will miss my friends, my teachers and my school,” she revealed with a sense of nostalgia. Sadly four months ago, the livelihood she strove to build crumbled before her eyes. The 33-year-old nursing mother ran for dear life as assailants set her shop ablaze. She lost all she had toiled for.
“Animals are better than those people,” Okafor thundered, adding that Nigerians especially are targets of xenophobia. “Even at the South African airport, they didn’t want to release us to come back to Nigeria. It was when we started to protest that they freed us.”spoke with, Mrs Adejoke Beckley, urged the government to improve on the educational standard in the country so that her children would not regret coming back home.
She said, “There are no proper documentation here and no support from the government. For instance, if you want to do a business here, you have to struggle on your own to start. But back there in South Africa, it is easy to get loans with a soft landing. They have a lot of incentives being given to their citizens who are into business. The government has a lot of work to do to make life convenient for the people.
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