Nigerian detainee, Tine Okodeo Kings, 40, who was just released from the detention centre, is now married to a Trinidadian. Speaking to the media at the Emancipation Centre, Bergerac Road, Maraval, Kings said he came in, undocumented, through a small port in Cedros from Venezuela.
He said he did not know why he came to Trinidad. “I got a ticket to go to Brazil for a job and there I realised that the job I was promised was not actually the way it was explained to me and then I was stranded... so someone comes to me and says there is this land flowing with milk and honey, T&T, there are jobs, you could make some good dollars. That is how I came here,” he said.
Kings said he made a connection with a Trinidadian who owned a boat and paid the man US$250 for a ride “in a fig boat on the high seas” to Cedros. He said it was a small boat that travelled through shark-infested waters.
Back home in Nigeria, Kings was a teacher and was initially supposed to run a restaurant in Brazil. Describing conditions in the detention centre, he said: “The beds are like baby beds, the kind I buy for my six-year-old son and it is a double-decker, so when the man on top is shifting, it shifts. The windows are louvres so at night you get a lot of mosquito bites. Otherwise the place is not hygienic. It is a prison.”
Kings said he was at home last year with his wife of seven years when immigration officers picked him up. He said conditions at the centre were worse for the women and claimed a female detainee had committed suicide. His wife posted a bond for his release and even after it was posted, he was remanded for months. Kings was at the centre for over a year before finally being released into his wife's custody, according to a document signed by the Minister of National Security.