Expel and Lure
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz presses Nigeria to supply Germany with liquefied natural gas and accelerate refugee repatriation. Austerity measures threaten to plunge Nigeria into severe poverty.
ABUJA/BERLIN (Own report) –Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants Nigeria to increase LNG supplies to Germany and is demanding that Nigerian refugees be accepted back swiftly. Scholz, who held talks on Sunday and Monday in Nigeria's capital Abuja and subsequently in its commercial capital Lagos, is thus continuing his efforts to increase LNG imports from African countries to replace Russian gas – a step that last year had already raised a few eyebrows. The German government had repeatedly urged African countries to abandon fossil fuel extraction. While increasing deportation of Nigerians, Berlin – according to Scholz – is trying to lure more “talents” from the country to work for German companies –a contribution to the brain drain depriving developing countries of urgently needed and expensively trained skilled labor. In Nigeria, Scholz also held talks on the developments in Niger. Last summer, with Nigeria's help, the EU sought to overthrow the military government in Niger that previously had ousted a pro-Western president and is seeking to lead the country to genuine independence from the former colonial powers. Read more
BERLIN/DAKAR/ACCRA/ABUJA (Own report) - A central theme of Chancellor Angela Merkel's tour of African countries, which began yesterday, will be the expansion of the EU's defense against refugees. As government circles confirmed, following Merkel's talks yesterday in Senegal, she will also negotiate today in Ghana and tomorrow in Nigeria, steps for stopping people fleeing poverty, hopelessness and war and facilitate the deportation of refugees from Germany. In opinion polls, nearly half of the Senegalese, and around three-fourths of the Ghanaian and Nigerian respondents, signaled their wish to leave their country, because of dire poverty and a dramatically high youth unemployment rate. European companies are systematically destroying African jobs, for example, by overfishing the Senegalese coastline, thereby heavily damaging Senegal's fishery sector or by the EU's poultry dumping in Ghana, ruining the domestic poultry industry. Merkel does not intend to address these EU practices causing people to flee their countries. Read more