Wolexit, Trump, and Adebayo Ogunlesi

Looks like America’s President-elect, Donald Trump, won’t make good his vow to expel all Nigerians from the US after all. Turning a 180 degree about-face to appoint Nigerian Adebayo Ogunlesi into his

Strategic and Policy Forum makes that clear.

“This forum brings together CEOs and business leaders who know what it takes to create jobs and drive economic growth,”says Trump. He adds: “My administration is determined to draw private sector expertise (including Nigerian expertise apparently) and cut the government red tape that is holding back our businesses from hiring, innovating, and expanding right here in America.”

Ogunlesi joining Trump’s economic counsellors that will put America back to work reminds one of Pharaoh who sought slave boy Joseph to deliver Egypt from famine. Trump had reportedly declared: “We need to get the Africans out… Especially the Nigerians…. Why can’t they stay in their country? If I become President, we’ll send them all home. We’ll build a wall at the Atlantic Shore.”

Ogunlesi, whose 93-year-old father, Theophilus Oladipo, is Nigeria’s first professor of medicine, studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University, England. He also has an MBA and a Juris Doctor of Law degree from America’s Harvard University.

He is Chairman and Managing Director of Global Infrastructure Partners, a joint venture between his employers, banking general store, Credit Suisse of Switzerland, and America’s energy giant, General Electric, whose former Chairman, Jack Welch, is his colleague on Trump’s economic advisory team.

GIP, valued at $36 billion, provides loans or equity investments in infrastructure, like energy, water, and transport to North American, European, and Asian member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Its $2.5 billion attempted incursion into such Nigerian economic sectors as energy, transport, water, Greenfield (forest land), and brownfield (built up areas) floundered.

With Trump so magnanimous (or contrite, as some claim on his behalf), some wonder why Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, still went ahead with “Wolexit”, his personal vow to relocate to Nigeria should Trump be elected America’s President.

To borrow his humorous imagery, Prof Soyinka held rapid dialogue with his feet because: “I was in New York during the run-up to the elections. I watched (Trump’s) face, its body language, listened to his uncouth, racist language, his imbecilic harangues, the insults to other people, other races, especially the Hispanics, Africans, and the Afro-Americans, even citing once –I was told-Nigeria as an instance of burdensome occupation of global space.”

“This,” he concludes, “is how… humanity ends with Cambodia, with Rwanda, with Da’esh (theatres of horror)…. We are watching a Hitlerite phenomenon… I said if this man wins, I am relocating.”And so, “Wolexit”.

New York City Police Department claims that reports of hate crimes increased by 115 per cent, from 20 to 43, for the same period, after the November 8 presidential election. In addition, arrests for hate crime reports increased by 45 per cent.

Some think that Soyinka left America just because he warned the world against a possible doom; a possible noblesse oblige triggered by unforgiving persecutors who thought that a mere manner of speaking was a grand Herodian slip: King Herod beheaded John the Baptist to fulfil his vow to a vengeful damsel.

Others, disagreeing with “Wolexit”, argue that nothing should compel anyone to return to Nigeria. Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, will tell you the grilling she gets from emigrant Nigerians that she is trying to woo back home.

They query that if Nigeria cannot guarantee basic infrastructure and social amenities, why would they, who even sent about $21 billion to support their pauperised folks back home in 2015 alone, be hurried to return home?

But the patriotic others argue that “Wolexit” is expedient; Nigerians in the Diaspora should return to rebuild the homeland. The more sentimental amongst them go, “ajo o le dabiile,” a foreign land cannot be like home.

Estimates put Diasporan Nigerians somewhere between five and 15 million, with most, resident in America, Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Americans of Nigerian descent are the single largest African group in America. But in Britain, the “omnipresent” Caribbean populace probably exceeds Nigerians.

Today’s Nigerians in America are far more confident than their improperly documented predecessors who had to tread gingerly, to avoid deportation by “ejire,” America’s immigration officers. They openly express themselves through platforms like the global Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation that promotes “the spirit of patriotism, networking, and cooperation among Nigerians in the Diaspora.”

The Igbo and the Yoruba have managed, over the years, to maintain strong cultural identities through culture clubs, their churches, languages, dressing, practices, and boisterousness.Clearly now, Nigerians resident in America need fear no compulsory mass exit notice from President Donald Trump.

Probable proof positive that “Wolexit” indirectly got Trump to return to the straight and narrow path, maybe in his “beatification” of Adebayo Ogunlesi. This leads to a theory; that “Wolexit” probably made Trump do a rethink, recognise the Nigerian genius, and extended to them an olive branch.

They insist that the “Wolexit” snub could earn Trump or America a backlash from the unwritten code of solidarity among Nobel laureates; probably a long shot. “Incorrigible Trump,” they hold, may have done his reverse waltz to appease these “gods,” and they faithfully await his offerings to the Latinos and the Muslims that he also insulted.

A few weeks ago, the argument on this page was that “Nigerians who break American laws will go to jail-in America…. Those who violate visa laws, but stay out of trouble, will still keep their jobs. (And that) America loves illegal labour that won’t complain about low wages and poor working conditions.”

The opinion still holds because many Nigerians possess expertise that America needs. The Association of Nigerian Physicians represents more than 4,000 Nigerian physicians, dentists, and allied health professionals practising in America.

Nigerian Prof Oluyinka Olutoye, a paediatric surgeon, recently performed the rare surgery of removing a 23-week foetus from the mother’s womb, operated upon it, returned it to the mother’s womb, and safely delivered a baby girl after 36 weeks. Phew!

Nigerian Robert Agbede owns Black America’s biggest engineering firm, Chester Engineers Inc., based in Montana; Dehlia Umunna is a professor of clinical law at Harvard University; Ilesanmi Adesida is professor of physics at University of Illinois; and Kunle Olukotun is professor of Electrical and Electronics engineering at Stanford University.

If Profs Soyinka, Olutoye, Adesida, Umunna, Olukotun, engineer Agbede, and investment attorney, Adebayo Ogunlesi, and others like them quit America, the brain gain to Nigeria will be enormous. Many don’t realise that America uses its I-130 immigrant visa to replenish its intellectual capital.

More Nigerians need to join Soyinka, get mad at America and other comfy countries of the Western world, and return home to enlist in the job of building up Nigeria. This task has been neglected for far too long.

Of course, no one wants to waste the one life they have. Therefore, Nigeria’s political elite must quickly get it together, so that the prodigious intellectual energy in the likes of Adebayo Ogunlesi can be harnessed for Nigeria’s prosperity. And then, boo to the American Green Card.

PUNCH