INVESTIGATION: Canada Rush: What desperate Nigerian asylum seekers are telling Canada about Nigeria
Some Nigerians moving to Canada are telling immigration officials they are fleeing persecution over their sexual orientation, gender, and religious affiliations.
By Yusuf Akinpelu and Kabir Yusuf January 4, 2022
14 min read
By March this year, it will be three years since Gbenga Akinkunmi began scrambling to be granted asylum in Canada, based on unsubstantiated claim that almost every non-state actor in Nigeria was after his life and those of his family members.
In court documents reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES, Mr Akinkunmi claimed he fled from his home in Plateau State, north-central Nigeria, while his wife and two children fled elsewhere after members of the terrorist Boko Haram sect came after him for challenging herders who encroached on his property. He claimed that before that incident, he had survived two earlier attacks from the herders.
In Warri where he claimed he initially fled to, he said he was again kidnapped by Niger Delta militants and that he only escaped after paying a part of the ransom the abductors demanded.
Mr Akinkunmi said he later fled to New York on March 11, 2018, using a valid U.S. visa. The next day, he entered Canada and made a refugee claim the next year before the Canadian Refugee Protection Division (RPD), claiming he narrowly escaped being killed by militias in Nigeria.
His claim was rejected by immigration authorities, with the jury saying he could have embraced an internal flight alternative (IFA) in neighbouring Benin City if Plateau and Warri were unsafe. This means he should have sought refuge in another city in Nigeria rather than fleeing to Canada.
Benin City is 96.7 kilometres away from Warri and can be reached by car in about two hours. According to the transportation measurement platform, travel math, the total flight duration between airports in the two cities is 37 minutes.
After his application was rejected, Mr Akinkunmi petitioned the Refugee Appeal Division (RAD), arguing that Warri was too close to Benin and that deadly militants could be on his trail there. In Benin, he said, his six-year-old daughter risked forced genital mutilation. His appeal was dismissed.
With deportation imminent, last July, he sought the review of the verdict before the Federal Court of Canada. Again, his case was rejected.
“There was no credible evidence to establish, on a balance of probabilities,” Justice Walker ruled, “that Mr Akinkunmi and his wife and daughter had been persecuted or threatened by his family or that the feared family members had been able to locate them since 2017.”
Like Mr Akinkunmi, Prince Mctony Aire, 33, could
also not convince authorities to grant him asylum in Canada. He had told a panel there that Islamic extremists and security forces in Nigeria were after him because he was bisexual. He claimed he was “detained, tortured and issued death threats” in Zaria, north-western Nigeria, before fleeing to Canada.
His case was dismissed by Justice von Finckenstein, who doubted his narratives and upheld a decision that the claimant faced less risk if he relocated to Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, which is 958 kilometres away from Zaria and can be reached by road in 12 hours and by air in an hour 22 minutes.
Analysing the Canada rush
The immigration cases involving Messrs Akinkunmi and Aire are among those concerning 300 Nigerians that we accessed and reviewed.
Documents detailing the cases are held by the Federal Court of Canada (FCC) and at least 5,000 pages of them were analysed by PREMIUM TIMES. They revealed what Nigerians are telling Canadian immigration authorities to claim asylum in the North American country.
This newspaper’s yearlong examination of the immigration documents showed a striking pattern of claims made by the Nigerian applicants. Nigerians seeking residency in Canada have more than tripled since 2015 when it rose from about 4,000 to nearly 13,000 in 2019.
A 2020 survey conducted by the Africa Polling Institute (API), a non-profit research think-tank, found the key “push factors” for the exodus of Nigerian immigrants to Canada to be due to Nigeria’s weak economy, heightened insecurity, perceived poor governance and the huge appetites for foreign degrees by citizens.
Reasons for exodus for Nigerian immigrants to Canada
While these may be the underlying reasons for the exodus to Canada, some prospective Nigerian asylees sometimes make up stories about their personal situations and state of affairs in their country to convince authorities to grant them stay in one of the world’s most developed countries.
In the documents we reviewed, majority of the asylum seekers, 270, gave a single reason for wanting to leave Nigeria. The remaining 30 applicants gave more than one reason.
Majority of the claimants, 52, or 19 per cent, claimed they needed to escape persecution due to their sexual orientation.
“This positions Nigeria as a country where sexual rights are not considered as human rights, and it opens spaces for conversation on the rights of the people in the LGBTQ communities,” Kudus Adebayo, a research fellow on diaspora and transnational studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, told PREMIUM TIMES.
“The country becomes a place where people can be forced out of their communities, separated from their families and lives because of their sexual orientation,” he added.
The Nigerian government outlawed same-sex relationships in 2014. The law stipulates up to 10 years jail term for belonging to a gay rights group and up to 14 years imprisonment for engaging in homosexual activities.
“Having a swelling asylum plea linked to the LGBTQ community is not shocking at all. The Nigerian state, with the anti same-sex law, and the general negative attitude towards non-heterosexual citizens, means that some people are constantly at the risk of losing their freedoms and lives,” Mr Adebayo said.
Alerted by this in 2017, Legal Aid Ontario which provides legal services for low-income people said it found an “unusual” pattern in sexual orientation claims by Nigerian asylees in Canada, a worrying trend it said may sometimes be fabricated.
“It galls me because of the potential impact that it could have on the refugee system and the Canadian public’s perception of refugee claimants and refugees in a very vulnerable time globally,” Jawad Kassab, who leads the agency’s refugee and immigration programme, said. The agency declined comments on its latest position.
Mr Adebayo, who is also a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, did not rule out the possibility of “an industry of emigration built around the narrative of sexuality and persecution of those in the LGBTQ community.”
“Those making money off the emigration economy would package travels around possible false claims of sexual persecution. This trend will surely make it difficult for the receiving states, that is Canada and others, to determine which claim should be granted and those to be rejected,” he told PREMIUM TIMES.
When Legal Aid Ontario suggested in a letter that lawyers may be coaching clients to fabricate their stories, Richard Odeleye, an immigration lawyer, described the accusation as “insulting” and “discriminatory.”
“It’s almost like a war zone for homosexuals,” Mr Odeleye said of Nigeria to CBC News. “You cannot expect people to put up with that, and they have to leave.”
Other immigrants said they were fleeing Nigeria due to forced female genital mutilation (FGM) and cultural rituals, political and religious persecution, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), insecurity, attacks from militia and threat to life, domestic violence, socio-economic and family reasons.
The allure of Canada
Second only to Russia by land size, Canada’s total land area of approximately 3.9 million square miles (10 million square km) means it is about 11 times the size of Nigeria, or accounts for roughly the northern two-fifths of the continent of North America, or about half the size of South America.
But despite this spaciality sprawling beneath the grandeur of its arctic frozen tundra and archipelago, the bilingual country (English and French) is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world.
Nearly 80 per cent of Canada’s 38 million population live within 93 miles (150 kilometers) of the Canada-United States border, leaving a vast swathe of the nation’s territory unoccupied. Senior citizens outnumber children too.
Pressed by the push to expand its labour force by offsetting its aging population, Canada started an Express Entry programme in 2015, offering successful skilled workers permanent residency permits. This “pull factor” attracted tons of migrants.
In a quest for upward mobility, more than 7 in 10 Nigerians (73 per cent) would relocate abroad with their family members if they had an opportunity, the 2021 Nigeria Social Cohesion Survey published by API found.
This explains why Nigerians are enamoured of the Great White North as the exodus to the North American country has shown no sign of slowing down.
For the fifth year running, more Nigerians emigrated to Canada than the year before and the number of Nigerians granted permanent residency has more than tripled since 2015, rising from 4,090 to peak at 12,600 in 2019, before COVID-19 slowed it.
The spokesperson of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM), Abdur-Rahman Balogun, said what informed this “may be Canadian immigration policy.”
Permanent residence permit issued to Nigerians from 2015.This growth rate outstrips India, China and Philippines, Canada’s top three sources of immigrants over the last five years.
“Exiting the country is a survival strategy for millions (of Nigerians), and this is clear from what we can call the ‘Japa Movement’ of the last few years,” Mr Adebayo said, adding that “exodus of any category of the population means that a country loses human resources to the receiving countries.”
Still, Mr Balogun said the insatiable crave by Nigerians to migrate abroad is not a case of brain drain but rather “brain gain (and) investment opportunities.”
“We are harvesting our human resources for national development. Hence our initiative on Nigeria diaspora investment summit, Door of Return, National Diaspora Day on every July 25 and celebration of our diaspora icons as done in September. Over 600 of them were celebrated across various fields and sectors,” he said, downplaying the potential collapse of the nation’s skilled population and shrinking middle-class.
The head of public affairs at the High Commission of Canada in Nigeria, Oluwa-Demilade Kosemani, was on leave when he was contacted for comments. He promised to revert as soon as he could.
Demilade Kosemani, was on leave when he was contacted for comments. He promised to revert as soon as he could.
Japa Movement’
Aminat, 19, accompanied by her mother, Agnes, and her father, Ademola Adeniji-Adele, entered Canada on August 30, 2015 on a student visa.
The following year her father, the son of the 20th Oba of Lagos and former commissioner for youth, sports and social development, died, leaving behind a treasure trove which included an estate but without a will.
Agnes and her daughter later sought asylum in Canada claiming that the administrator of Mr Adeniji-Adele’s estate insisted on not paying the family its due except Aminat returns to Nigeria, marries his friend’s son, denounces Christianity, and returns to Islam, court transcripts read.
Agnes claimed the executor paid for her trip to Canada to bring Aminat back to Nigeria, the documents showed. Instead, on June 7, 2017 Agnes took her son, Musediku, 17, with her to Canada and refused to return to Nigeria.
“The executor has ceased to fund Aminat’s education, and has cut off Agnes’ monthly allowance from her husband’s estate,” the asylum seekers told the court.
But the Federal Court of Canada (FCC), which reviewed earlier decisions denying Agnes and her children asylum, said the applicants failed to justify their claims that they would be in danger in all parts of Nigeria if they returned to the country. The court specifically said the applicants could relocate from Lagos to either Port Harcourt or Abuja where they would not be at risk.
“Furthermore, some of the news reports submitted by the applicants were irrelevant to their personal circumstances,” the court ruled. “One example was a CNN World article that described women who were arrested in Abuja and assaulted by the police based on the suspicion they were working as prostitutes.
“Others concerned challenges encountered by the population in general, such as homelessness, unemployment, pollution and unsafe drinking water. These problems were said to be particularly severe for those who are impoverished or lack family connections. However, by their own account the Applicants are members of a wealthy and distinguished family, most of whose members continue to be well disposed towards them.
“The Applicants adduced no evidence to substantiate their assertion that the Executor would have access to government or corporate databases, would be able to trace them through their mobile telephone SIM cards, and would therefore be able to locate them in the Internal Flight Alternatives, IFAs (other Nigerian cities). There was no evidence of the extent of public awareness of the Applicants’ surname outside Lagos.
“The onus was on the Applicants to demonstrate that the proposed IFAs were unsuitable. They were unable to meet this high threshold. The Refugee Appeal Division (RAD) found that the Applicants have a comparatively high level of education and supportive relatives in Nigeria, including the Applicant children’s numerous adult half-siblings. The Applicants speak English, which is Nigeria’s official language and is widely used in both Port Harcourt and Abuja. The Applicants have not demonstrated that any of these findings by the RAD were unreasonable.
“The RAD’s reasoning is transparent and intelligible. There was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the Applicants will not have access to housing and clean drinking water in the IFAs, be unable to find employment, or be denied their family’s support.”
To be continued below
