Dark Tales from Libya
“Circumstances alter cases,” a returnee, Efosa Ijesurobo, 34, from Edo State, told Sunday Trust. I have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Benin. I have a wife and two children but I was compelled to live them here, in Nigeria, and move to Libya where I engaged in menial jobs in order […]
“Circumstances alter cases,” a returnee, Efosa Ijesurobo, 34, from Edo State, told Sunday Trust. I have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Benin. I have a wife and two children but I was compelled to live them here, in Nigeria, and move to Libya where I engaged in menial jobs in order to make both ends meet.”
“As a black man, what you read in the university does not count in Libya. A Libyan man doesn’t work for another Libyan man. All of them are rich and, therefore, they always look for us to work for them.
“The greatest irony is that Libyans pay better. If you lift a 35 kg bag unto the boot of car, they can give you 20 Libyan Dinar, which is equivalent to N2,000 in Nigeria. Tell me, even as a graduate, can you get that amount?” Ijesurobo asked rhetorically.
He said, like the area boys’ in Lagos or the ECOMOG in Maiduguri, there are irate youths in Libya, called Asma. “They were wicked and heartless and once they see you, they will speak in Arabic and say “jim phone” or “jim flus”, meaning (surrender your phone or surrender your money). Once you resist, they will mercilessly beat you,” he said.
Efosa added that many young girls were raped repeatedly. “I don’t want to hear anything about North Africa. If anybody says “Li” I will runaway because I don’t want anything that will remind me of Libya. Those who fled in the early days of the conflict are lucky. As for us, we hope the Nigerian government will make good use of our intellect,” he said.
In Maiduguri, as the returnees disembarked from the buses that conveyed them from Ndjamena to Gamboru Ngala, a border town between Nigeria and Chad Republic, last week almost all of them wore long faces that depicted the apparent unhappiness and dilemma in which they found themselves.
While a fraction among them were grateful to have been delivered from their sufferings, by being brought back home, a substantial majority had long tales of the initial woes that drove them from their fatherland to another land where their status was reduced to that of glorified slaves.
Even their rough physiognomy was enough to give them away to any discerning observer as people who were caught in between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Hope Abani, 22, one of the returnees, stared at her bare feet dejectedly as she leaned against one of the Cameroonian Touristique Espress buses that drove her and other returnees to Maiduguri.
She rubbed her hands backwards over her dirty, spiky hair and sighed heavily when journalists accosted her and demanded comments on her experiences in Libya.
“After completing my secondary education here in Nigeria, I crossed to Libya through the deserts three years ago with the help of a friend, because I had no work to do and my aging parents had four other siblings to cater for,” she said.
According to her, “I couldn’t resist the temptation to travel because my friend who spent about five years in Libya told me that life was more rewarding there. She said she did not lack all the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing and shelter, throughout her stay in that country.
“As a housemaid who worked with an Arab family in Libya, it was obvious that luck was on her side because even the clothes she wore when she came back to see her parents distinguished her among us, her appearance aroused envious curiosity in us.
“As a good friend of mine, she understood my predicaments and asked Samson, her boyfriend, with whom she was living in Libya to help me out. That was how I got to Libya and I was doing well as a domestic help before the conflict began.”
Abani said the crisis in Libya had dealt a big blow on her: “Now, I have lost all my fortunes to the conflict because survival was the only concern for all of us after Ghaddafi was killed. The rebels are violently intolerant of blacks for no other reason than that they are blacks,” she said.
Corroborating Abani’s lamentations in refined English diction, Gius Philips, 29, also a native of Edo state said he migrated to Libya two years ago as a graduate of Electrical Engineering from the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State.
“When I graduated six years ago, I found myself roaming the streets of Port Harcourt in search of a job, but without success as all the places I had been to said they had no vacancies, a phrase I became much used to later when I returned to my hometown of Benin,” he said.
According to Philips, “As I kept searching for jobs online, I came across several contacts of people, many of whom were from my state who told me interesting stories about the beautiful lives they lived in Libya and Europe, especially in the tiny Islands of Malta which is close to Italy.
“Initially when I began processing my journey to Libya, which I was told, was the easiest route to Europe; my dream was to be in Italy. Nevertheless, when I found myself in Libya after spending about two months in the desert I discovered that the mode and standard of living there was not too bad and I decided to stay,” he said.
He added that “I was working as an electrician with a construction company in Libya on a very modest salary before the company was forced to close because of the civil strife that exploded which displaced many people,” he said.
Philips told Sunday Trust that few weeks into the uprising, the revolutionaries became brutally hostile to non-Arab minority populations.
“They developed an unusual fetish for our women and raped them indiscriminately even in some of the households they worked as maids. As for the men, they just killed or threw us into detention because they were made to believe through western media coverage that the late Ghaddafi hired black African mercenaries to fight against them,” he asserted.
The story of Helen Benjamin was equally legendary. She and her colleagues drove on top of trucks in the Sahara Desert for 33 days before they arrived the Nigeria border.
Among all the returnees, Helen was exceptional because she was heavily loaded with pregnancy of twins. “I delivered the twins through a caesarian section in one of the United Nations camps. I was lucky because the health officials took care of me and my children,” she said.
Another girl, Joy Godspower said her husband took her to Libya and left her there in the heat of the crisis. “Many girls were consistently raped while in Libya and boys were forcefully accused of either working for Ghaddafi forces or for undermining the revolutionaries. I am sure more than 20,000 Nigerian men are now in Libyan prisons,” she said.
“Out of about 600 of us who attempted to travel to Saba from Tripoli for repatriation back to Nigeria, little above 100 made it to our destination. All the others have been arrested and jailed before they could reach the IOM refugee camp”, Gabriel Nwankwo, a native of Abia state further told Sunday Trust.
“I feel our country Nigeria is not bothered about the plight of its citizens because other countries are making commendable efforts to reclaim the freedom of their citizens”, he further complained.
Reacting to the misgivings of the returnees, Mr. Ibrahim Farinloye, the Assistant Zonal Coordinator of NEMA in the North-East, said the agency works in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and had succeeded in bringing back many stranded Nigerians who had been living in dehumanizing conditions in the crisis-stricken Libya for months.
Sunday Trust recalled that 55 Nigerians arrived Maiduguri from Libya on Wednesday December 7, 2011. They included 10 women, 43 men and two male twins. Additional 74 others arrived home on Friday, December 9, 2011. They included 47 men, 16 ladies and 11 children.
On October 27, 2011, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) brought to Maiduguri, 250 Nigerian living in Libya. They were camped, fed, resettled and then dispatched to their states. Few days after, additional 79 people, including men, women and children, were received and dispatched to their states.
“NEMA has been able to locate Nigerians in Libya with the assistance of IOM, which only operates in safe environments that have not been much affected by the crisis,” Ibrahim Farinloye, the assistant zonal head of the NEMA in Maiduguri said.