Nigerian students stranded in Ukraine amid Russian invasion

Shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s half-hour speech declaring war on Ukraine, Annora Omolu, a Nigerian scholar at Kyiv Medical University heard a small explosion at the window of her apartment.

The explosion shocked the 20-year-old lady who started shaking and praying simultaneously. In the days before Putin’s speech, she was calm because everything in Kyiv seemed normal.

But as she remained glued to the television, her calmness quickly turned into a crippling fear.

“I don’t even know right now how I feel because I cannot think,” she said speaking to Al Jazeera. “I’m literally shaking.”

As dawn broke, she tried to book a flight to Lviv in western Ukraine, about 469 kilometers from the capital, to join other Nigerians there and cross into Poland. The Ukrainian government has closed its airspace.

Over the past two decades, Ukraine has emerged as the destination of choice for African students, especially those in medical-related fields, as it is cheaper than elsewhere in Europe, and the United States. Even during the Cold War era, students of African descent were awarded scholarships to study in various states throughout the Soviet Union as the communist enclave sought to increase its soft power in Africa.

An estimated 4,000 Nigerians are studying at colleges across Ukraine by 2020, according to data from the government – the highest number of African nationals there, along with Morocco.

Ahead of the Russian invasion on Thursday, more than a dozen European and Asian countries urged their citizens to leave Ukraine. The United States, Canada, Germany, Australia and other countries have evacuated members of diplomatic staff and their families.

But even after the invasion, no African country announced concrete plans for the evacuation of its citizens.

Morocco, as well as Egypt, which also has many citizens studying in Ukraine, simply urged them to ensure their personal safety.

“Many African governments don’t just have a sense of responsibility to their citizens,” Ibrahim Anoba, a fellow at the US-based Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, told Al Jazeera.

The Nigerian student union in Ukraine said it made several calls to the Nigerian embassy in Kyiv without getting a response.

“There has been no embassy response,” Anjola Ero-Phillips, president of the Nigerian Students’ Union in Lviv, told Al Jazeera. “All they said was to check the website and the last update on the website was January 26. Everyone was completely alone,” he said.

Al Jazeera called one of the embassy representatives who said it had to get Abuja’s approval to be able to start any form of evacuation. A statement issued by the embassy on Thursday only urged Nigerian nationals to “remain calm but be extremely vigilant and take responsibility for their personal safety and security”.

Aanu Adeoye, a London-based Mo Ibrahim Foundation Academy Fellow at Chatham House, who researches African-Russian relations, told Al Jazeera that a number of supposedly “first world” countries also do not have mass evacuation plans for their citizens. “I think where Nigeria hasn’t covered itself in glory is that their communications have gone haywire,” he said.

“They basically don’t have a unified message to Nigerians,” Adeoye added. “Even something as basic as having a functional website, it just shows a lack of strategy.”

In Ukraine, Nigerian students remain unsure of what will happen next. They continue to raise complaints with the embassy, ​​accusing authorities of ignoring their concerns even though they say they already have low expectations.

“From experience, I don’t think we can rely on the Nigerian government to do anything,” Owolabi Gbolahan, former president of the Nigerian Student Union in Ivano-Frankivsk, told Al Jazeera. His tenure coincided with the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when he accused the government of neglecting Nigerian students as other countries evacuated their citizens from Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Omolu is desperate to get back to Nigeria or even get to Lyiv first but remains stuck in Kyiv where he can’t even move. “I was just tensed but thinking of a plan to leave,” he said.