The University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation held a meeting in Brussels last week on African Migration to Europe with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the 79-member African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group. In December the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration is due to be agreed in Marrakesh.
My brief presentation in Brussels focused on issues relating to Africa’s “boat people” crossing the Mediterranean to try to reach “Fortress Europe”, one of the world’s most under-reported tragedies. An estimated 3,200 Africans died last year in aquatic graves, and 1,730 have already perished this year. This phenomenon — though much smaller in scale and voluntary — echoes the deaths at sea of hundreds of thousands of Africans during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade.
This issue must be seen in the broader context of the politicisation of migration issues. Many of the EU’s 28 governments view migration largely through a security prism. Large sections of their citizenry have shown often irrational hostility to migrants and asylum-seekers, resulting in the electoral success of racist right-wing parties and the donning of the xenophobic garb of extremist politicians by mainstream parties — not only in previously progressive Nordic countries, but also Hungary, Poland, Italy, Malta, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria.
Several African governments, including Eritrea, Nigeria, and Senegal, have shown scant regard for the plight of their citizens embarking on perilous voyages across the Mediterranean in search of an elusive European El Dorado
The UN has consistently urged EU governments to live up to their legal obligations, while Amnesty International blamed the deaths of 721 migrants in June and July directly on the blocking by Italy and Malta of rescue ships from their ports, and allowing the Libyan coastguard to return migrants to the anarchic country.
EU governments have proposed more draconian responses such as the forced returns of migrants and establishing “disembarkation platforms” in autocratic North African countries such as Egypt and Morocco. This is despite the ghastly, atavistic slave trade of black African migrants in Nato-destroyed Libya, with 10,000 migrants still stuck in detention camps. About 30,000 migrants were repatriated from Libya to their home countries last year.
Structural issues such as the EU’s grotesque Common Agricultural Policy, that provides wasteful subsidies to European farmers while 70% of Africa’s populations are employed in agriculture with minimal support, must also be urgently addressed.
African civil society has argued that migration can be a developmental opportunity; noted that most African migrants remain on this continent; observed that only 20% move to Europe; and highlighted that remittances from diaspora communities were three times larger than development aid last year.
Several African governments, including Eritrea, Nigeria, and Senegal, have shown scant regard for the plight of their citizens embarking on perilous voyages across the Mediterranean in search of an elusive European El Dorado. Many have also failed dismally to address the conditions of poor governance and massive youth unemployment that have provided the push factors for the contemporary African exodus.
Though not legally binding, seven of the 23 key goals in the UN’s draft Global Compact on Migration to be agreed in December provide some sensible ideas for moving this “dialogue of the deaf” between Africa and Europe forward. Implementation at the domestic level will be particularly important.
First, EU governments must ensure that evidence-based research and policies — rather than scare-mongering stereotypes and short-term populism — guide migration debates; second, African governments should address the factors that push their citizens to leave their home countries at such great personal risk.
The third goal is that labour mobility must be facilitated through free movement accords, visa-liberalisation regimes, and labour mobility cooperation; there must be a clear legal pathway to the regularisation of the status of migrants. It proposes that migrant deaths must be urgently prevented, and search and rescue operations should not be criminalised (though the EU claims to have rescued 600,000 migrants from sea).
Fifth, smuggling — which increasingly targets young children — must be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted; sixth, any detention of migrants should be based on international human rights law, and migrants must have access to basic social services; and finally, African governments should incorporate migration into their development planning, while the more efficient use of remittances from diaspora communities must be facilitated.
It is only through implementing some of these sensible ideas that the tragic deaths of thousands of Africans in the Mediterranean during often fatal bids to breach “Fortress Europe” can be stemmed.
• Prof Adebajo is the director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.
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