And what is so special about Switzerland anyway?
I wanted to write about the awards presented by President Muhammadu Buhari to deserving – and less deserving – people on Tuesday. I thought I would read it today in Geneva, Switzerland.
I should have been in Geneva today to attend the 2022 World Cancer Congress organized by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) and taking place from the 18th to the 20th of this month.
I did not go to the Congress as a journalist covering an international event. no I went there as a delegate from Nigeria because I started a foundation – the Lami Fatima Babare Cervical Cancer Foundation – which is dedicated to raising awareness, early detection and first-line care for patients with cervical cancer.
The foundation on behalf of my late wife who died of cervical cancer in 2018 was launched in Abuja on March 16th this year. Two volumes of my book, The Arbiter, were also published, with proceeds going to the foundation. And to date, the foundation has donated money to some cancer patients and is building a ten-bed wellness center in Potiskum. The center, which has already hired and is training one registered nurse and three Community Health Workers (CHEWs), will screen for breast and cervical cancer and provide primary care and escalate secondary issues to appropriate agencies.
Given the noble intentions and efforts of those behind the foundation, the Nigerian Cancer Society invited the NGO to register as a member. Due to the privilege of being a member of the NCS, the UICC extended the invitation and made me a delegate.
The official invitation, signed by a Sincerely Yours and by Celine Francina, Head of Congress and Events, Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), 31-33 Avenue Giuseppe Motta, 1202 Geneva – Switzerland, was emailed to me on 26.
When I got the invitation, the first thing that came to mind was, of course, “Why Switzerland? What’s so special about Switzerland, a country that Walter Rodney might have had in mind when he wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa?” It didn’t break a sweat as Europe ran to Africa just for its wealth through its seedy institutions and thieving Bringing leaders to the surface and cornering them.
No country in the world has contributed to Africa’s underdevelopment by encouraging the continent’s dictators to shamelessly steal its national resources like Switzerland. Ever since African countries gained independence, African despots have evacuated their nation’s resources to Swiss banks notorious for their absolute secrecy.
While putting a poker face and presenting a moral face to the world, funds that should have gone towards the development of the poor African continent have been diverted to private accounts in that country. Their leaders always turn their faces away as if they never know what is going on. These are the resources they use to develop their countries. And you don’t even see them at the forefront of those providing “aid” to impoverished nations.
So I kept asking myself: “What is so special about Switzerland”, a country that without its invite-and-hide policy deep within its encrypted banking system would have done blood money, perhaps international organized crime?
All the illicit funds of the big drug dealers, the blood money of the arms dealers and the terrorists’ payment system find easy and safer transactions through the Swiss bank protocols. All monies funding tribal or religious wars in Africa and other third world countries go through that country’s banking system. What is special about Switzerland?
Fortunately, a larger percentage of those who have impoverished their countries and hidden their ill-gotten gains in that country die, leaving that plunder buried deep in that country’s financial system. Ditto for the whole bunch of international criminals who find sanctuary in their banking sector. They use these funds to develop their country and tell us we are backward.
Therefore, you can understand my dismay when I learned that I was to travel to this country for a congress that would serve the good of mankind. On the other hand, attending the conference would certainly add greatly to my foundation’s efforts to network with like-minded entities to provide assistance to cancer patients around the world, especially in Nigeria and my area.
Feeling like a person about to be euthanized, I decided to go because after careful analysis I concluded that the benefits of going there far outweighed the opposite. And so we registered four participants.
On September 15, as part of the visa application process, I forwarded the letter of invitation to the Swiss Embassy in Abuja. The embassy replied to me the next day with the request that “the letter of invitation has to be emailed directly to the embassy from the organizers in Switzerland”.
I immediately informed the organizers and a certain Swen sent an email, which was copied to me, to a certain Marie-Theresa A. Bou Younes the same day, asking her to “please assist the competitor with his visa application to be,” and gave her the e-mail address of the embassy. And on September 20 at 4:25 p.m. Marie-Theresia did this and copied everything that the letter had sent for us.
Confident and buoyed by the belief that I had been presented with an opportunity to expand and improve upon our noble works, I threw myself headlong into the process of the journey. Round-trip tickets for four people cost us about two and a half million naira. We booked hotel accommodation and generously bought heavy winter clothing that we don’t need here. And the embassy gave each of us 36,000 naira.
I then went for the visa interview on the 4th October knowing that I had complied with all the strict procedures including my bank statements, foundation bank statements and my company, Neptune Prime Nigeria Limited, required to qualify for a Schengen visa to qualify . Unfortunately, while I know people who accuse them of racism, the way they conduct their investigation – for I won’t call it an interview – was indecent and demeaning. It’s like being put to the test to enter paradise.
The “Inquisitors”, Nigerians affected by spiritual slavery, treat their compatriots as scum desperate to go to “God’s country on earth”, unaware that the majority of us love Nigeria more than any other country in the world . We make no apologies for this and we will not trade Nigeria for any country, especially a leech, whose wealth is the result of stealing from us for any reason economic or political or anything.
Agreed, I gave it back to the malnourished, cheeky Nigerian young enough to be my granddaughter, who interrogated me as if I wanted to go to her adopted country and confiscate Africa’s wealth to keep her afloat. She told me to come for the visa on Friday October 14th while my trip will be the next day.
And then they refused me a visa when I came back. They justified this by saying that “the information provided to justify the intended purpose of the stay and the circumstances of the stay were not reliable”. A diplomatic way of saying I lied through my teeth just to enter their damn country! The same reason was given to turn down my other partner, while the foundation’s secretary, a lawyer and collaborator with Médecins Sans Frontières, was turned down because he “will not return,” they said. I just laughed and asked myself what is so special about Switzerland? A country that refuses visas to people of integrity who are pursuing good causes and yet not only opens its gates to kleptomaniacs of all kinds, but also to pedophiles?
According to SWI swissinfo.ch As published on December 27, 2020, a Swiss couple convicted of child molestation in India and sentenced to seven years in prison fled to Switzerland on bail.
The Brussels Times of June 15, 2020 reported that a priest, Frédéric Abbet, who had been found guilty of sexually abusing a nine-year-old boy at a boarding school in Belgium between 2010 and 2011, was arrested in Switzerland, where he was living freely though he was sentenced to three years in prison by a Brussels appeals court in 2017
And by the way, what is so special about Switzerland?
Gimba is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime.