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Over 600,000 Nigerians sought asylum in other countries during the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari between 2016 and 2023 according to a report by Statisense.
Citing data from the United Nations Refugee Agency, the report released on Wednesday, July 17, 2024, indicated that 664,384 Nigerians filed for asylum in eight years.
Between 2016 and 2019, 355,792 Nigerians sought asylum, while 308,592 persons filed for asylum between 2020 and 2023.
On a year-by-year basis, 66,862 Nigerians sought asylum in 2016, 91,924 in 2017, 84,624 in 2018, 112,382 in 2019, 73,233 in 2020, 83,105 in 2021, 83,402 in 2022, and 68,852 in 2023.
Another set of data attributed to the United Nations Refugee Agency shows the Republic of Niger as the country with the most Nigerian refugees in 2023. The country received about 200,497 Nigerian refugees.
According to the data, the neighbouring country between 2015 and 2023 received 1,268,464 Nigerian refugees.
Niger Republic shares many porous borders with the northern part of Nigeria where many citizens run for their lives due to the growing spate of banditry and insecurity in the region.
Other countries with hundreds of thousands of Nigerian refugees include Cameroon (128,339), Chad (21,381), Italy (19,664), Germany (13,083), France (7,863), the United Kingdom (4,288), the United States of America (4,187), Canada (3,601) and Portugal (2,342).
Another data set showed that Nigerians topped the list of Africans who sought asylum in Canada in 2023, followed by Kenyans, Congolese, Ugandans, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, and Senegalese.
While Mauritania topped the list of African asylum seekers in the US, Nigeria, with 5,136 applications in 2023, came second on the list of Africans who filed for asylum in the North American country.