NOT EVERY CHILD BORN IN NIGERIA IS A CITIZEN

Jane sat in the plane as it cut through the
sky towards New York, her twin babies would be due very soon and she will most
likely be delivering them in the United States. The trip cost her and her husband
a lot of money but they believed it was well worth it. They trusted the foreign
health care system better than the system back home and they believed the
doctors would be more competent. The knowledge that her children will be U. S citizens
also wasn’t lost on her.

Jane’s story is quite familiar; many
parents always love to deliver their children abroad knowing they will be
citizens of these foreign nations. This was also the case in England until the
British repealed the law.

However, foreign nationals who have their
children born in Nigeria cannot have the same privilege Jane would have, as
children born in Nigeria whose parents are not Nigerian citizens do not
automatically become Nigerian citizens. The law on Nigerian citizenship can be
found in the Constitution.

Section
25 of the 1999 Constitution provides that only the following persons are
citizens of Nigeria by birth namely;

Every
person born in Nigeria before the date of independence either of whose parents
or any of whose grandparents belong to a community indigenous to Nigeria; Provided
that a person shall not become a citizen of Nigeria by virtue of this section,
if neither of his parents nor any of his grandparents was born in Nigeria