“The North/South
destabilizing trade imbalance can no longer be sustainable. It is time to stop
playing the ostrich…” – Refugees crisis: Chickens coming home to roost; The
Guardian, October 2, 2015.
The 28-member European Union (EU) has yet to brace up to the real
causes of millions of unsolicited migrants on its doorsteps, even as one of its
leading members, the United Kingdom (UK) voted in 2016 to leave, and few others
now threatening to borrow a leaf from the would-be leaver. Immigration is at
the top of the issues threatening the Union. The essential causes of those problematic
migrations are historically evident, but the EU apparently regards that
evidence as inconvenient. So denial provides provisional convenience to the
European bloc; meanwhile thousands of economically dislocated humans perish in
the bordering Mediterranean Sea every month, as the EU erects both physical and
legal walls to fence off its unwanted guests. Latest reports on the vexed
challenge show that these walls are composed of: a) disrupting humanitarian
rescue missions in the Mediterranean(!); b) offering aid to countries that
commit to stemming the flow of people; c) funding the United Nations (UN) to
repatriate migrants stuck in Libya; and d) beefing up the Libyan coastguard to
nip migration in the bud. (This should partly explain the harsh treatments
Nigerian returnees received in the hands of Libyan authorities)
Only recently the EU has opted to increase its expenditure on
Africa by over 20% spread across 7 years hence, to a minimum of €36bn (£31bn)
in a bid to reduce the number of migrants and refugees crossing the
Mediterranean Sea. A large part of that amount is said to be targeted at
funding the Italian-trained Libyan coastguard, whose primary task it is to
force migrant-boats back to Africa. But so far, the effect of all these
international efforts to stem mass migrations northwards is comparable to the
effect of water on a duck’s back. The migrations have increased with time. And
rather instructively, a recent study by a watchdog, Eunpack, to closely examine EU’s efforts to tackle the migrations
challenge has revealed “a mismatch between the grandiloquent declarations and
the action actually implemented on the ground…” and “a troubling lack of
monitoring and impact evaluation schemes across most of the EU crisis response
initiatives…” The study then concludes that, “outsourcing of migration
management to Libyan authorities and the dramatic increase in the number of
people in custody in Libyan detention centres is fuelling a criminal economy
and traffic”.
Sequel to that disheartening report, EU’s foreign affairs
chief, Federica Mogherini, suggested that, “If you want to manage migration and
if you want to prevent further security threats in particular terrorism, there
is one single place where you have to invest all your political, economic and
diplomatic efforts and that is the belt of the Sahel and the Horn of Africa”.
For its part, the European Commission (EC) has entered a “compact” with five
African counties: Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal that is
inextricably tied to development aid, trade and other EU’s policies to the
original agenda of returning unwanted migrants from Europe. In the first year
of the compact Mali accepted EU funds in exchange for 404 returnees; those
funds are tied to beefing up internal security forces, border control, and
crack down on smugglers. One fact however stands starkly out of all the
foregoing: the efforts fight shy of the real causes of the 21st century
mass migrations from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere. But William
Swing of the UN International Organization for Migration didn’t fight so shy of
that inconvenient historical fact when he recently asserted thus, “For three
centuries Europe populated the world…and today, because of demographics and the
low birth rate, it has become a continent of destination. This is a psychological
adjustment that has not been made…”
The UN official has stated a fundamental fact only peripherally.
Population and demographics are not at the core of the issue, but material
wealth and economic opportunities are primary to the discussion. Until some two
hundred years ago when the United State of America gained her independence,
Europe was a net receiver of global wealth. But even with the US independence,
global wealth continued to flow from the south to the north. For a planet that
was evidently designed for a circular flow for its equilibrium, a
unidirectional flow would inevitably result in catastrophic disequilibrium. It
therefore requires little imagination to see that the ongoing mass migrations
are naturally following the flow of global wealth for, as a popular adage makes
plain, bees always follow honey. It is understandable that the EU is presently
having difficulties coming to terms with this reality. But we should make bold
to remind the Europeans that the short term pains of facing up to this touch reality
is as nothing in comparison with the unending nightmares of looking the other
way. Token gestures which results from looking away from reality will not wish
away the migrations challenge. What the moment calls for is an all-encompassing
infrastructural development progamme for Africa – the equivalent of post World
War II Marshall Plan for the redevelopment of Europe.
The need for such a plan was proposed at UN Roundtable
discussions as early as in the last months of the 20th century.
Other forward looking groups have since continued to call for a Marshal Plan
for Africa. One of the more dedicated of these groups, The Club of Rome, in the early 1970s published its detailed studies
of human exploitative activities and their consequences on global stability, The Limits
of Growth. As the over 200-page book indicates, employing empirically
derived data, trillions of Euros, rather than tens of billions, are the
realistic sums required to sustainably check the present global socio-economic instability;
and by extension, the mass south/north migrations. Of course the impulsive
response to that suggestion would be to exclaim that the sums are simply
unaffordable. But I would counter thus: if the northern hemisphere’s
unsustainable consumption and undifferentiated growth patterns could be
reasonably adjusted, funding for Africa’s Marshall Plan would materialize. The
EU as a bloc and her North American neighbours need to make a fundamental shift
in their existing social values; that is the “psychological adjustment” William
Swing of the UN was talking about.
There is little doubt that a painstaking digestion of The Limits of Growth and countless
related studies on the subject would facilitate this all-important adjustment of
mindset. This is not an option for the EU, but the only option for the entire
northern hemisphere. To persist in denial could be likened to a bomb waiting to
go off.
Afam Nkemdiche is an engineering consultant; June,
2018
