The House of Representatives has mandated its relevant Committees to probe concerned Ministries, Departments and Agencies to check the validity of all immigration documents of every Chinese citizen in Nigeria and the expatriate quota of all the Chinese businesses in Nigeria to ascertain the number of illegal and undocumented Chinese immigrants in the country and to repatriate them to China.
It urged the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and all relevant MDAs to, as a matter of urgency, ensure that all Nigerians who wish to return home are evacuated from China and quarantined upon arrival.
These include Nigerians that only visited for business, Nigerians with any form of travel document and identification, Nigerians with passports but expired visas, and Nigerians with passports and valid visas who have been ejected by house owners and Nigerians who have tested negative to Covid-19.
The House also urged the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and all relevant MDAs to provide all necessary financial and other assistance to affected Nigerian citizens in China who wish to seek redress in any local or international court for breach of fundamental rights, loss of property or any other actionable cause occasioned by their maltreatment or discrimination in China.
It further mandated relevant Committees to ascertain the extent of violation of rights of Nigerians in China as well as losses arising from such maltreatments and to further engage the Chinese Parliament appropriately to register Nigeria’s National Assembly condemnation of the maltreatment, discrimination and xenophobic attacks against Nigerians in China. The committees are also ensure the cessation of such actions by its people and government and that treatments meted to Nigerians are compatible with China’s human rights obligations, and to report back within two weeks for further legislative action.
These resolutions followed the unanimous adoption of a motion on: “Maltreatment and Institutional Acts of Racial Discrimination against Nigerians Living in China by the Government of China, sponsored by Benjamin Kalu (APC, Abia) and nine others, during plenary on Tuesday.
Moving the motion on behalf of others, Kalu said the House was ware that as a result of the mutually beneficial diplomatic and economic relationship between Nigeria and China, about 10,000 Nigerians, including investors, traders, workers and students, currently reside in and around Guangzhou in the Guangdong Province of the Peoples Republic of China and have generated massive trade volumes between the two countries such that for 2019 alone, the Nigeria-China trade value was worth over $8.6 billion.
He said the House recalled that sometime on April 8, 2020, photos and videos appeared on various social media outlets depicting institutionalized acts of racial discrimination, maltreatment, xenophobic assaults, embarrassments, illegal detentions and forceful evictions of Nigerians and other Africans living in Guangzhou.
According Kalu, the House is: “concerned that under the pretext of curbing the spread of Covid-19 which ironically originated in Wuhan, China, several kinds of maltreatments of Nigerian citizens in Guangzhou have been perpetrated by Chinese people and authorities including wrongful confiscation of Nigerian International Passports, prolonged and illegal detention of Nigerians in the name of mandatory quarantine despite their having certificates of clean health and no recent travel history, outright refusal to test or release the test results, and the eviction of Nigerians from their homes and hotel accommodations”.
The Chairman House Committee on Media and Public Affairs argued that the House was worried that in the exercise of his function of protecting the interests of nationals of a Sending State as provided for under Article 5 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963, the Nigerian Consul General was treated in clear violation of Article 40 of the said treaty which requires the Receiving State to treat consular officers with due respect and to take all appropriate steps to prevent attacks on their persons, freedom or dignity.
James Kwen, Abuja
