On the surface it seems darkly consistent for Europe and the UK to respond to ever louder calls for slavery apologies with intensifying efforts to create a Fortress Europe laager and a ‘small-boat-free’ channel. The new ‘Stop the Boats’ law and the Rwanda plans in the UK, together with the EU’s barbed wire fences and Frontex patrols around Africa’s northern and western coastlines, send the very coherent message that Africans belong in Africa. Slavery was wrong, right? So these slave ships should never have brought them to live with us in the first place – remember, they want us to apologise for that.
African strongmen, therefore, are now paid by both the UK (in the case of Rwanda) and Europe (Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal) to keep Africans in their countries: in camps and jails if need be. This was the message sent to Senegal when aid was tied to the patrolling of its shores by Frontex ships; it was the message that came with funds and equipment for Libyan migrant interception towards torture-riddled detention camps; and it is still the message of the UK’s efforts to send its unwanted into the arms of Paul Kagame in Rwanda (1). You may be an oppressor, but here is money.
Now that the former slavers of the West learned their lesson, they are going to make damn sure that no one ever makes such a trip again.
For their own good
It really is in these Africans’ own best interest, too, the migrant-halters say. ‘These people are forced onto rickety boats’, tweets Dutch European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, sounding genuinely concerned. His painting of a picture of hapless and misguided Africans, forced into death trap dinghies by cruel human traffickers is often repeated in the Western mainstream political sphere. It’s wrong and dangerous to try to come here, so don’t. If you don’t head these warnings, you will be drowning, starving in the desert, or tortured in a Libyan prison. It will be your fault for listening to the traffickers whom you so stupidly followed. Those modern slavers and ‘small boat gangs’ are also blamed for it all by UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman, UK premier Rishi Sunak and EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, who went to Tunisia to ‘migration partner’ with the government there.
These politicians are actually not against the humans who migrate, they say. They just want to help. Help them stay at home.
“Don’t go”, the awareness campaigns say. “It’s terrible here!”
The help comes, besides with money for autocrats and coastal patrols, in the form of awareness-raising. Entire Western-sponsored campaigns, distributed via YouTube and ‘developmental partners’ in Africa have hammered home the message to stay. The trip is deadly! Illegality is horrific! There is racism here in the north! And the weather! In 2020, Africans working on Italy’s olive fields, interviewed by Deutsche Welle (2), all said themselves that others from Africa must not come because the pay is so low and the work so hard. Nodding at the interviewer, they agreed that it will be much better if Africans just stay and build up their own countries.
Not they themselves, though. None of them said that. They were staying in Italy.
When ZAM’s recent Transnational Investigation into migration looked at Europe-funded “resettlement projects for returned migrants” in Nigeria, it turned out that many or most of these “returnees” sold off their “starter packs” and left again. Probably because they know that, like the ‘stay home’ messages, the ‘build up your own country’ argument is, in the current African context, just as much of a fallacy.
Burned villages
In my twenty-odd years in investigative journalism in Africa, I have come across many examples -some my own, some reported by colleagues- of people who tried to build, if not their countries, then at least a life for themselves. Examples include a family who ran a fishing business in Senegal; a farmer who had cows to milk in the DRC; a village with cotton fields in Mozambique; communities who lived from, and tended to, a forest in Cameroon. But in Senegal the government sold the fishing licenses to foreign trawlers, leaving an entire village -and later a second and third and fourth one too- without income. The Congolese farmer saw his cows appropriated by a local governor. A mining company, in partnership with a ruling party general, came to bulldoze the village in Mozambique. And in the case of Cameroon: that forest was plundered by a European company that got all the approvals, and a dinner, and a trip, and a friendship association, from friendly government ministers and politicians (3). Also in Cameroon, a Special Forces Brigade paid by Israel and, through fudging (4), by the World Bank, burned down the rebellious villages around the forest.
Corrupt elite rule drives poverty
Oppression by corrupt political elites who use the state mainly to extract wealth for themselves was identified as a major driver of increasing poverty both by the IMF and, remarkably, in a study done by the Nigerian anti-corruption commission (5). Sadly, (often West-funded) corruption commissions have been of little help in the face of African kleptocrat state power. In spite of their sage reports, many if not most African state structures, ruled by those dispensing and benefiting from patronage, routinely purge those who want to do their public service jobs in the interests of citizens. African investigative journalists have described how ‘good civil servants’ who wanted to administer justice in courts with integrity or monitor free and fair elections, have been victimised, rendered superfluous, and attacked in the streets. In Malawi, officials who want to do their jobs get exiled to what is known as ‘Guantanamo’: an office where you must just sit and not be a spoiler (6).
The despair that engulfs citizens in such countries was described in a just-launched ZAM investigation on migration, in which an overwhelming majority of people randomly interviewed on the streets of Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria, said they would leave if given any chance at all, even when they knew they would face starvation and abuse by smugglers, jail in Libya, a desert brothel, an endless stay in a muddy refugee camp, an exploitative olive field, or death. Overriding all such fears is the knowledge that they have little choice other than to try and leave. What other scenario is there, after all? “Voting them out” keeps being proven impossible, as shown once again in recent elections in Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, all again riddled with fraud and intimidation (7).
“Our leaders don’t allow you space to breathe”
‘Our leaders don’t allow you the space to even breathe,’ says Elizabeth BanyiTabi, journalist and ZAM team member in Cameroon. She does not like the violent and criminalised anglophone rebels who have taken up arms against the French-speaking ruling elite. But she understands what drives them, as does her Mozambican colleague Estacio Valoi when he reports on the ‘Al Shabab’ that has recently risen in his country, recruiting youth from the barren gemstone fields that were once villages. “Everything has been stolen from them and they don’t know what else to do,” he says.
Embracing the kleptocrats
This is why the argument for more development aid, advocated by Western leaders as a tool to discourage emigration away from Africa, is a fallacy, too. The DRC gets US$ 3,5 billion every year and still remains one of the poorest countries in the world, in spite of it being the richest in terms of its mineral wealth: while aid in Euros, pounds and dollars pays mostly for state jobs in the patronage system, the mineral proceeds hardly ever reach state coffers (8). “Our people don’t rise up in revolt”, says my colleague Eric Mwamba, who hails from the DRC, about his country. “But when I look at them I think: they are just too hungry to do that.”
In the new Dutch ‘Africa strategy’, the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs -a paper that is, except for the below bragging, on the whole not very different from those produced by EU and UK- says that its aid in Sub Sahara Africa ‘frees 32 million people from structural malnutrition, increases the income and productivity of 8 million small-scale farmers, and ensures that 8 million hectares of land are sustainably managed and used for food production.’ I marvel at such phrases. Where, then? How? Under which kleptocrat ruling party governors? Every single such project investigated by African journalists was shown to have been appropriated by local landowners and/or elite politicians; even Fair Trade chocolate was no exception (9).
“It’s all about who gets the contracts”
The question is if those in the business of ‘aid and trade’ believe such phrases themselves. European development aid specialist Tsiguereda Walelign, advisor to the Green Left in Brussels, told me that she doesn’t. “In our discussions about where to invest what, the values that you want to share with your development partner don’t come into it at all’, she said. “It’s all about who (among European companies) gets the (state infrastructure) contract.” The Dutch strategy admits this, too, albeit under the veil of that other European buzzword, sustainability. On page 28, for example, the Dutch government aims to “safeguard access for the Netherlands and the EU to critical raw materials”, while it simultaneously “help(s) African countries increase their share in sustainable value chains with the EU.”
Putin
The contracts are where the buck stops, I guess. The West needs the contracts and therefore Africa’s autocrats, as the aforementioned document keeps repeating, are our “equal partners.” And the reason why, besides the Dutch, the European Commission and the UK, too, have recently doubled down on renewed and stronger partnerships with African governments and their “abundant natural resources” (the Tony Blair Institute, very frankly, even puts the term in the intro of its thick new geopolitical report) (10) is, of course, Putin.
Whether it is a “Russian disinformation war” to which African urban youth are deemed vulnerable, Russia’s increasing “competitive edge” for resources, or outright Russian “state capture,” the fear of ‘Putin in Africa’ appears to be so immense that the poor West, it seems, feels practically forced to kiss the behinds of the likes of Paul Biya and Yoweri Museveni. That increasingly stronger 'equal partnerships' with oppressive rulers could well lead to a complete loss of the confidence that Africa's tormented and restless citizens still have in 'the West', seems less of a concern. But it should be.
For now, Western democracy and its still-professed equality of all people before the law continue to appeal to those not enjoying these in Africa (they are also the reason why so many people want to come here). But people on this continent are also not blind to the fact that a large part of the money that the West invests there ends up in the pockets of the very leaders who drive away their citizens. Or the fact that Africa’s plundering politicians are free to house their loot in Swiss banks, run offices in London, seek treatment for their ailments in Germany, and take long vacations on the French Riviera while their subjects die in the same Mediterranean. Indeed, it doesn’t augur well that people in Gabon danced in the streets after the coup against the Bongo kleptocracy, but the Western response to this should not be to embrace the likes of the Bongos even tighter.
A strategy of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited in Africa will not be easy to devise. Many countries do not have well-organized opposition movements that could simply take over governance if the despots were to leave the terrain. But it would be a good first step if, instead of staying locked in embrace with these despots, leaders in our neck of the woods would venture out and start to listen to, for example, the courageous pioneers who trained me in African investigative journalism; the good civil servants who vegetate in Guantanamo; the artists and filmmakers whose work is often even more illuminating than journalism, or the activist on the Tunisian beach who held up a sign that read 'don't reward my fathers jailer.' Or the Cameroonian democratic leader who, when asked whether his president might "defect to Putin" if the West no longer supported that same president, asked: "but why doesn't the West support us?"
Amid all the guilt and musings about slavery reparations (and we run the risk that some of these, if materialised, will end up in dictators’ Swiss bank accounts, too), Europe has not yet listened to people who have been asking to be heard since the days of slavery.
Maybe we could start with that.
Evelien Groenink is an investigative editor at ZAM, www.zammagazine.com, and a member of the African investigative journalism collective NAIRE, Network of African Investigative Reporters and Editors.
(1) See “Plans to send Frontex guards to Senegal illegitimate attempt to stop migrants, asylum seekers” and “Already Complicit in Libya Migrant Abuse, EU Doubles Down on Support” and “UK plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda unlawful”.
(2) See Deutsche Welle, “The shattered dreams of African migrants”
(3) See ZAM, “67 Suspicious transactions”
(4) ‘Fudging’ is the term, used in circles of development cooperation, for dictators using aid moneys for the public sector, while freeing other budgets for no-nos like weapons and police equipment.
(5) See “Does corruption affect income equality and poverty?”
(6) See ZAM, “The Good Civil Servants” and “Punished for not being corrupt”.
(7) See on African elections fraud website.
(8) See ZAM, “How aid helps the rich get richer” and Global Witness, “DRC regime cash machine”.
(9) See ZAM, “The Fairtrade Chocolate rip-off”.
(10) See “EU Chief seeks new approach to Africa to counter Russia” and “Security, Soft Power and Regime Support: Spheres of Russian Influence in Africa”.
Read all the investigative articles in this series:
• Introduction: Migration is not the West’s problem, it is Africa's
• The full investigation in 4 parts: Losing Hope (Part1), Cash Cows (Part 2), Brain Drain (Part 3), Paying Dictators (Part 4)
• Five Countries: Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe
• Essay: The West's Slavery Apology Rumblings Are a Cynical Diversion
