The report that about 30 Nigerian students were last Thursday deported from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, over Ebola stigmatisation must have come to many as an embarrassment and shock. The Nigerian students returning to that country were detained at the airport for three hours before being herded into the Ethiopian Airline flight ET 910 that flew them from Abuja.
According to media reports, on arrival at the Khartoum International Airport, the immigration personnel cordoned off the students, seized their travel papers and arranged boarding passes for them to return to Nigeria without any cogent reasons for their strange action.
Narrating their ordeal in the hands of the immigration authorities, one of the deported students, Fatimah Ahmed Abubakar, a second-year medical student, said they were singled out among the other passengers alighting from the aircraft after which they were detained for three hours without any explanations. Their international passports were later seized. When they demanded for explanation for the unwarranted treatment and humiliation, they were asked to shut up and await their deportation to Nigeria.
Another victim, Hauwa’u Ibrahim Bakori, a second-year student of Pharmacy at Al Ahfad University for Women, Omdurman, said that she and other students were denied entry on arrival at Khartoum International Airport. Most of the students were returning to Sudan after their vacation.
The deportees said that the stories making the rounds at the airport were that they could be carriers of the dreaded Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) that hit Nigeria a few months back. The students also alleged that all their efforts to get the Nigerian Embassy to intervene in their plight proved abortive because the immigration authorities were bent on deporting them, even after they were fleeced of $500 each to reclaim their passports which were not given back to them until they got back to Nigeria.
The Khartoum ordeal, coming 42 days after the World Health Organisation (WHO) certified Nigeria as Ebola-free, smacks of ignorance or mischief on the part of the Sudanese authorities. Nigeria’s victory over the scourge received international commendation and admiration to the extent that developed nations like the United States used its approach as a template to tackle the disease in their own countries. So successful was Nigeria’s fight against the disease that it has sent about 250 volunteers to the three Ebola-ravaged countries in the West African sub-region, namely Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to combat the scourge.
The federal government should as a matter of urgency wade into the Khartoum episode with a view to righting the wrongs done to the affected students so that they could return to that country to continue their studies. Granted that the Sudanese authorities have every right to take precautionary measures to keep the plague away from their soil, they could have done the right thing by subjecting the returnees to screening to determine their health status rather than outright deportation of the students that did not exhibit any symptoms of the disease.
In all of this, our deplorable educational system plagued by endless strikes especially at the tertiary level is partly to blame for the harrowing experiences which Nigerian students are subjected to in foreign institutions even though some Nigerians have the penchant for overseas studies. There are instances of those who go to places like Indonesia to pursue diploma programmes. Some parents are also not helping matters. They are in the habit of rubbing shoulders with one another in their craze to send their kids abroad. A good number of such students end up as social misfits, drug addicts and prostitutes, while others suffer tragic fates.
There is, therefore, the need to make our tertiary education easily accessible to the teeming Nigerian students who are surplus to requirement every academic year. Nevertheless, the federal government has the responsibility to ensure that its citizens are fairly treated within the acceptable diplomatic norms wherever they are legally accepted to reside or study.
