There is something deeply uncomfortable about celebrating what Omega Power Ministries is doing for Nigerian returnees from South Africa, not because the intervention is unworthy of praise, but because it should never have been necessary in the first place.
Nigerians, some of whom spent upwards of three decades building lives, businesses and futures in South Africa, have returned home with nothing. Xenophobic violence stripped them of their shops, their properties and their dignity.
They came back to a country that had given them no reason to stay in the first place, and found, unsurprisingly, that it still had nothing waiting for them. No government resettlement programme. No emergency housing. No economic inclusion plan. Nothing.
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Into that vacuum stepped Reverend Chibuzor Chinyere and OPM, who have provided 15 returnees with accommodation in a Port Harcourt estate, enrolled their children in school, and committed church funds to feeding them and eventually establishing businesses to restore their self-reliance.
A welfare committee will even supervise the process to prevent mismanagement. It is, by any measure, a more structured and compassionate response than anything the Nigerian state has offered.
Chinyere himself has named the problem plainly: Nigerians migrate irregularly because of economic hardship. Poor electricity. Inadequate infrastructure. A hostile business environment. These are not new revelations. They are the tired, familiar indictments of a government that has heard the diagnosis a thousand times and chosen, repeatedly, to do nothing.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Nigerian state has outsourced its duty of care to the Church, and the Church, to its credit, has shown up. But faith-based charity, however generous, is not policy.
Accommodation for 15 returnees, however welcome, is not a reintegration strategy. And the love of humanity, however sincerely invoked, cannot substitute for functional governance.
Nigeria’s returning emigrants, particularly those expelled or displaced from host countries where xenophobia has become increasingly violent, deserve more than private mercy.
They deserve public systems: a national returnee welfare policy, emergency accommodations, government-backed economic reintegration programmes, and diplomatic pressure on host nations to protect Nigerian citizens abroad.
Until the government treats the welfare of its returned citizens as a state obligation rather than a charity case, it will continue to rely on the kindness of clergymen to patch the wounds its own failures have created.
That is not governance. That is abandonment dressed in borrowed grace. The Church has done its part. It is long past time for the state to do its own.
