The Director-General of the Directorate of Technical Cooperation in Africa, Dr. Sule Yakubu-Bassi, on Wednesday alled that Nigerian soldiers who participated in the ECOMOG peace operations in Liberia fathered over 250,000 children.
Nigeria and some member-states of the Economic Community of West African States contributed troops to the ECOMOG peace operations during the civil war that ravaged the West African country, beginning from 1990.
Yakubu-Bassi made the disclosure in Abuja during a meeting with the House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora, which is chaired by Mrs. Abike Dabiri-Erewa.
According to the DG, the soldiers abandoned the children in Liberia when they returned to Nigeria.
He added that the children’s mothers were now worried over the development and had made series of failed attempts to trace the soldiers.
Yakubu-Bassi called on the committee and the Federal Government to intervene in the matter by re-uniting the children with their fathers in Nigeria.
“Their mothers are trying to make sure they are properly documented and so on.
“The Nigerian Embassy in Liberia is doing something about it.
”Definitely, you can’t run away from your people. These are our people; they are still young and they need to go to school and they will also need to be nurtured just like every other Nigerian,” he stated.
The DG expressed the support of his agency for the proposed Nigeria Diaspora Commission, adding that such a body would help in reducing the lack of coordination between Diaspora Nigerians and their people back home.
According to him, an estimated $17 bn was remitted home yearly by Nigerians in the Diaspora.
Some Nigerians resident in Gabon also complained to the committee that their host government was about repatriating around 210,000 Nigerians.
The leader of Nigerians in Gabon, Mr. Babatunde Yekini, said that the authorities just wanted to send the Nigerians home because of their rising numbers.
Dabiri-Erewa assured the two groups that the committee would look into their complaints by drawing the attention of the appropriate government agencies to their plight.
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