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Nigerian combatants
who helped end the bloody years of Liberian civil war between 1989 and
1996 left behind peace, and about 250,000 children, a senior Foreign
Affairs official said yesterday.

The Director
General of the Directorate of Technical Cooperation in Africa, Sule
Bassi, told the House of Representatives Diaspora committee yesterday
that Nigerian soldiers, who almost single-handedly restored peace to
the West African nation, had affairs with the local women which
produced the large number of children. Thousands of Nigerian soldiers,
under the ECOWAS monitoring group force (ECOMOG), deployed to the
nation in the nineties after violent clashes broke out between
government forces and a rebel group led by a former president, Charles
Taylor. The conflict is said to have claimed more than 200,000 lives,
and displaced millions more. Mr. Taylor has been accused of war crimes
during the period and is standing trial at the International Criminal
Court. But the our forces did not only fight. According to Mr Bassi,
they also engaged in dalliances with the locals and the children
produced are in hundreds of thousands, with majority of them left back
in the country.

“Many of the kids
have undergone registration and naturalization as Liberians, having
waited for years without seeing their fathers,” he said. “The mothers
are trying to make sure they are properly documented as Liberian and so
on.” Many of the mothers too, according to him, have been undaunted in
locating the fathers to the children and are said to be continuing with
the search. He however assured that although his agency is only
concerned with the issues of experts and professionals in the Diaspora,
the Nigerian embassy in Liberia is offering the matter attention and
has made effort to assist with the situation. “Definitely, you can’t
run away from your our people there are our people; they are still
young and they need schooling and they will also need to be nurtured
just like every other Nigerian,” he said.

Expulsion from Gabon

The House committee
on Diaspora, headed by Abike Dabiri-Erewa, said its members will visit
the country on a “fact finding mission.” Meanwhile, the Nigerian
community in Gabon say they face expulsion threats by the Gabonese
authorities who have allegedly warned that legal and illegal Nigerian
residents will be forced out of the country in response to rising
migration to the oil-rich nation. Over 210,000 Nigerian would be
affected if the threat is carried out, the Chairman of the Nigerian
Community in Gabon, Babatunde Yekini, told the House committee. Mr.
Yekini said that the Gabonese authority complains that large number of
Nigerians has continued to drift into the nation inspite of repeated
representations to the Nigerian government for an intervention.