By Sylvester Sunday Orji
Malala Yousafzai said” I want people to remember that Pakistan is my country, it is like my mother and I love it dearly. Even if it’s people hate me, I will still love it .” Her words survived through years to become a timeless reprove to many Nigerians whom in their trendy frenzy are forcing their children on the glorious name of America; leaving a hilarious lash on their nation, our Nigeria, our own America.
It is called birth tourism. Birth tourism, says Wikipedia, is to travel to another country for the purpose of giving birth in that country for the purpose of obtaining free schooling, free medical, citizenship for child and parents.
According to the 14th amendment, a baby born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (i.e. excluding children born to foreign diplomats, and perhaps excluding hypothetical children born to an invading army) is automatically a citizen of the United States. There are no exceptions; it is … involuntarily imposed.
However, the 14th amendment didn’t guarantee that the lives and future of those born under such laws would be indiscriminately protected. If so, Indeed, the plight of the many black Americans, would long have ceased. The amendment did not tell us the implication of borrowing a nation to secure the future of our children. Neither did my fellow countrymen weigh the consequences, upon clear conscience, of building a castle on a borrowed block. Permit me to ask, therefore, whether a rat kept under the custody of cat can truly celebrate genuine freedom?. The spot-on answer to these questions resonate in the timeless struggle for the relevance of black lives in the states: The Black Lives Matter Movement which seems a crucible of the struggle that Martin Luther King Jnr. championed many years ago.
Few days ago, I was a bystander to this scenario. Usually, Nigerians wait till a few days ,or weeks or months to the delivery period to send their wives over to America or UK or any other nation. Thus, a colleague sent his wife to the United States of America for birth tourism. The family had one thing in mind: American citizenship. First, he told me he wanted to secure the future for his baby. At least, he/she automatically becomes an American citizen. Weird though it appears, yet he is not alone in this act. Many rich Nigerians see the sense in that move, the craftiness of planting your seeds in alien soil. After all, the ruling class loot and dump the yield of the collective struggle of their fellow countrymen abroad.
As a scribble this essay, we must, therefore, equip ourselves with the knowledge that by our actions and inactions, we can create or recreate a world where our children would become slaves instead of masters of their destiny. As we craze over forcefully becoming Americans, selling out the men and women who would bear the glory of this nation on eagle’s wing let’s not distance our thoughts from the recent xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa and several such dehumanising unreported experiences of our brethren scattered like seeds across various countries in the world . Daily we want another nation, just like the founding fathers had, in their errors, assumed that having political freedom was the end of captivity or having wealth the end of lack or having the key to the craft of state ship births safety or that political independence can deputise for patriotic and patient sacrifice that deliver a prosperous nation.
I am tempted, so irresistibly, to recast history into our hearts. Few years ago, precisely 1983, Nigeria sent away thousands of Ghanians, swiftly reminding them that they don’t have an alternate nation or better still, there is no place like home. They swallowed the insult as much as they faced their future. US, other nations, could, one day, do the same to Nigerians. Ghanaians have, today, created a nation that they can proudly pass to their children. Why not Nigeria?. The future is at a stake. The struggle for which we may not live to benefit is far more noble and derives its objectives in securing the future of the generation that may never meet us, know us, appreciate us. And that was the throb of what Gaylord Nelson meant when he said that: “ The ultimate test of a man’s conscience maybe his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard. “Barely 56 years after independence, we are all nearly weary of being free. We are drifting to the same white men we lost our lots chasing away from this nation. We, afresh, seek the latest version of freedom. Another independent nation where we would plug prosperity from the trees of the sacrifice we refused to make. We want Biafra, We want Niger Delta Republic, We want Oodua Peoples’ Republic.Except we see Nigeria as our first mandate, except we resolve to collectively redeem this nation from the claws of unfriendly leadership, in vain, our dreams would be.
I would have slipped to the valley of ingratitude if my lips fail to hail all the men and women whose sacrifice has taken us this far. They, whose voice rang out in the morning to correct the ill. The teacher whose pay is so meagre; starving and serving the nation. The policeman who bore the pain of our defence; receiving the bullets shut against everyone of us. The clerk whose honest record, the world may not know. The doctor whose secret sacrifice eludes recognition. The veteran pensioner whose youthful energy was invested, unreservedly, into the nations feverish fortune. All those who, in their zeal, paid the unrewarded ultimate sacrifice for this threshold where our glory would flourish. Those tiny drops of patriotism will, one day, make an ocean of redemption.
Orji writes from Nsukka