The Value and Use of Residency

Nigerian public officials are used to employ self – righteous indignation or issues of general interest which in most cases, is not in accord with reality or even in the best interest of majority of the people. By so doing, they open up themselves to accusation of serving certain interest other than for altruistic ends. Not just that, as leaders of the people they mislead their followers and create confusion, the effects of which they are ill – prepared and ill – equipped to contain. Residency in another country is a permission to live in a place for some length of time, the state of living in a particular place on a long term basis. In other words, a resident is a person who by choice or necessity elects to live in a place other than his/her place of origin or birth. The operating words in this description of a resident are: choice or necessity. Now every choice has a price which includes, but not limited to fore-going certain privileges so as to have your way. Since no one can eat the cake and still have it, there must be a forfeiture of one thing in order to acquire something else. If taking up residence in another territory different from your own is by necessity or compulsion, it connotes that you cannot foist your values or foibles on the people of your host territory. You will need to pay the price of conformity if you are to live in peace with your hosts. In a traditional society of a multicultural nature, the unwillingness or non-conformity on the part of a resident is a violation of the norms of the host community for which prescribed sanctions are applied. Refusal to comply with the sanctions is the harbinger of disagreement or trouble between the resident and their hosts. Residency rights cannot be compared to the rights of aborigines of a place. A territory inhabited by a people serves as their place of origin; and every human originates from a territory as none has been known or confirmed to have dropped from the sky. And so, if you are a resident of your territory of origin, your place of origin confers on you the rights of an indigene. On the other hand, if you are a resident of a territory in which you are an immigrant, you are a resident with the status of a settler. Thus, the relationship between a place of origin and residency or that of a settler and indigene is guided by different rights and privileges, both moral and legal rights which no republican norms can wish away. A resident or settler is a temporary sojourner who has a permanent home territory elsewhere and whose loyalty to his own home people is most often, taken for granted. Meaning, that his loyalty to the people of his host territory can never be guaranteed, regardless of his protestation to the contrary. A settler may not have visited his home – territory in 50 years, but he is always supportive of and loyal or faithful to the aspirations of his home people. A successful settler may create jobs for the people of his residence but still repatriate his profits back home. That he pays his taxes where he resides is one of the requirements for residency everywhere, and so not a special or extraordinary service enough to translate him into becoming an indigene. A resident or settler who craves for the rights and privileges of an indigene but who periodically travels to what he calls ‘my home town’ does not qualify to be accepted as an indigene. A settler is so because he has another more permanent home in addition to his place of residence. An indigene is so defined because he lives in his ancestral land and has no other land he could call as his home town. He has the onerous duty to defend, preserve and uphold the integrity of his home territory as absolutely inviolate. Do we need to be told or is it not self-evident that no one can be a settler as well as an indigene in the same territory at the same time? We are all indigenes of some places and may be settlers in some other places. The only alternative to this is to carry along your ancestral territory to your chosen place of residence. But you know it to be impossible! No one must be made to live in delusion that he can be at home and abroad at the same time. However, this was the notion the statement credited to Senator David Mark promotes. He was quoted to have said that it was time the country do away with state or place of origin in favour of residency. Privileged people like David Mark who have been in government as Governor, Minister, Senator and Senate President in the last 25 years have lost touch with reality, in addition to his wealth which enables him to be able to live anywhere of his choice. His stupendous wealth speaks for him and serves as a defense. Even at that, Mark will undoubtedly baulk at the idea of a Tiv man becoming the Och’ Idoma on the premises that he is a long-time resident of Oturkpo! Bonaventure Mark may venture to grant a large portion of land to a Yoruba industrialist in Benue State for a factory, but he certainly will frown the day the industrialist bids to represent his constituency in the senate!! A tussle between Mark and the industrialist will certainly be decided on the scale of place of origin and residency rights and not on the volume of tax or number of employment created by either of them!!! Are you reminding me of citizenship? Citizenship rights is said to be a social contract between the state and the individual citizen in their aggregates. However, the Nigerian state does not appear to acknowledge, not to talk of enforcing the contract. If a murderous mob could be stirred up to kill Nigerian citizens at their place of residence for no sane reason, and the state stares in askance as it were, it proves that the social contract is void of substance and useless in practice. What is citizenship right which are so discriminatively applied or not applied at all? The Nigerian nation state lacks the capacity to enforce citizenship rights partly because Nigerians do not and have not been granted the opportunity to decide and agree on the contents of their assumed common citizenship. No one has told any Nigerian what he stands to gain if he agrees to surrender his ethnic identity, ancestral territorial inheritance and God given language to a Nigerian citizenship that remains ill-defined and non – existent. It takes the freely given consent of the people of Nigeria to confer on the nation - state the capacity to remedy the deficit between state of origin and residency and between settlers and indigenes. Until then, state of origin and indigenousness prevails.