Telegraph: Nigerians and Crime

The New Observer
February 7, 2016

There are so many Nigerians in prison in Britain and other countries that their “reputation for criminality has made it hard for them to be accepted abroad,” the Telegraph newspaper in London has admitted.

The Telegraph’s admission of a link between race and crime came on the same day that the Daily Mail made the same admission about gang rapes in Britain—although the Nigerian criminality is of a slightly different sort.

In an article titled “Nigerians’ reputation for crime has made them unwelcome in Britain, says country’s president,” the Telegraph quotes the president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, as the source for their story.

Speaking during an interview with the Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent, Colin Freeman, during a trip to London to attend an international conference on the” Syrian crisis and the ongoing war on terror,” Buhari also warned his fellow citizens to “stop trying to make asylum claims in Britain.”

He said that those Nigerians who had “joined the migrant exodus to Europe were doing so purely for economic reasons rather than because they were in danger.”

He went on to say that “because of the number of Nigerians imprisoned for law-breaking in Britain and elsewhere, they were also unlikely to get much sympathy.”

“Some Nigerians claim that life is too difficult back home, but they have also made it difficult for Europeans and Americans to accept them because of the number of Nigerians in prisons all over the world accused of drug trafficking or human trafficking,” he said.

“I don’t think Nigerians have anybody to blame. They can remain at home, where their services are required to rebuild the country.”

Earlier in January, the BBC reported that British airports such as Gatwick are increasingly used as entry points to the European Union by Nigerian trafficking gangs seeking alternatives to perilous Mediterranean Sea crossings.

The BBC quoted a crime squad officer in Barcelona as saying his team had broken a notorious Nigerian crime organization running a network of trafficked prostitutes across the city. But the gang, known as the “Supreme Eiye Confraternity” (SEC), is also “using forged documents and passports to fly its Nigerian victims into places like Gatwick,” Xavier Cortes, head of anti-trafficking at Catalonia police, said in a BBC interview.

The word ‘Eiye’ means ‘bird’ in Yoruba, the main language of southwestern Nigeria where the group originates, the BBC report said.

Spanish police officer Cortes said the English-speaking SEC and other Nigerian gangs preferred the British trafficking route, suggesting they may have official help in their home country to obtain forged passports. “These (fake) documents are expensive, though, and need cooperation of people working in the government to get,” Cortes was quoted as saying on the BBC’s website.

In 1998, the Independent newspaper reported that a “Nigerian crime wave [is] sweep[ing] through Britain”—and they are being aided and abetted by Nigerians employed by the British government, saying that the “mainly Nigerian criminals” have been found working inside government departments, the police, and tax offices all over the UK.

Some examples cited include a Nigerian working at the Treasury Solicitor’s office (the Government’s official lawyers), using the fax to work a scam involving advance fees; a Nigerian working at the Department of Social Security creating false National Insurance numbers and identifications, which were being used to claim benefits such as education grants and child allowances (with one individual found to be in possession of 100 separate identities); and a Nigerian working at the Inland Revenue’s accounts caught photocopying incoming company tax returns, and checks for use in many well-known “Nigerian scams.”

In addition, London’s Metropolitan Police reported that Nigerian cleaners in a major West End police station had been caught looking up data and addresses.

The Independent reported that the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) had launched a specialist “anti-crime initiatives aimed at organized West African offenders.”

However, the Nigerian crime problem is so severe that even “agents and eavesdropping equipment from MI5, MI6, and the listening base at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham are being used to investigate Nigerian crime.”

Once again, there is a clear correlation between race, crime, IQ, and behavior. The average IQ in Nigeria is 84—significantly higher than Somalia (average IQ 68)—but still, according to the internationally-accepted Sanford Binet intelligence scale, officially classified as “Dull.”

Nonetheless, the comparatively higher Nigerian IQ (that is, compared to other tribes in Africa, where the average IQ can drop to as low as 62), enables them to engage in the crimes and scams for which they are famous, in addition to their well-known propensity for violent crime.