Brown Card: Only Constitution Amendment Can Review Nigerian Citizenship Eligibility – CSO
POLITICS DIGEST – A civil society group, under the aegis of Save Nigeria Movement, has declared that the eligibility conditions and process for granting permanent residency status or Nigerian citizenship to a foreigner could only be reviewed through a constitution amendment.
The group’s convener, Reverend Solomon Semaka, made this known in a statement obtained by Politics Digest.
He was reacting to reports that the Federal Government of Nigeria had introduced a Brown Card as a document that confers permanent residency status and citizenship on foreigners.
Semaka, in his statement, said that it is important for the country to have easier pathways for acquisition of citizenship for foreigners, than what is obtainable now.
Recall that part of the reasons put forward by the immediate-past Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Oregbesola, for introducing the Brown card is to shorten the 15-year waiting period for foreigners as eligibility criterion for being granted citizenship to five years.
Aregbesola argued then that it would be better to align such policy with countries like the United States of America.
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But Reverend Semaka said, “The Minister of interior acknowledged that only a constitution amendment could change the eligibility criteria for gaining Nigerian citizenship in speech delivered during the conferment of citizenship on foreigners on May 27. So any pronouncement to this effect that does not accommodate constitution amendment is only a wish.
“Introducing the brown card is tantamount to introducing a parallel platform for escapee defaulters in the payment for existing programmes.
“Our investigations have shown that unscrupulous agents have already started calling expatriates in their data base to pay as much USD 5,000 with the promise that they could grant them residency and citizenship application waivers in the guise of Brown Card, even when the process to its introduction is still a long way to go.
“This is the sign of things to come if you open multiple channels of granting permanent residency status to foreigners in Nigeria,” Semaka stated.
According to him, the focus should rather be to sustain and strengthen existing structures to tighten the security of the country, especially in this time of heightened global terrorism.
“Earlier this year, over 500 hundred foreign nationals were arrested with permanent voter cards. Also, a British national paper reported that Chinese nationals in the mining sector are financing terrorists groups in some parts of Nigeria to gain access to the country’s mineral resources.
“All these are pointers to the fact that some unscrupulous foreign nationals could take advantage of multiple channels of naturalization which could render Nigeria’s already threatened security more porous,” he said.
