Africa’s Europe-bound migrants: How informality and corruption define the journey across cities
Aliyu Barau, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Bayero University, Kano
The mass media is awash with over-hyped stories of migrants from Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world aiming for Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. Such migration narratives feed into political discourse in Europe and underpin some of the electoral equations, calculations and political tremors shaking the continent’s political landscape. In the European Union, migration is a part of institutional architectures — laws, internal and external policies, involving agencies and other various actors. In other words, the EU’s migration challenges — and opportunities for the protection of the rights of migrants — are situated in formal and legal realities. However, the same cannot be said of African irregular migrants crossing the risk-infested Sahara desert as they aim to reach Europe through bus stations.
In this blog I look at the role of institutions — their strengths and weakness — as well as formal and informal arrangements that serve as driving forces of Africans’ migration bids to reach Europe. The aim here is to show the dynamics in an individual’s decisions, experiences and journeys to reach the dreamland — Europe. I want to tell the story of a typical experience of an individual’s journey from one part of the African forest belt, through the grasslands and desert, all in an arduous attempt to reach European soil.
These stories come from personal observations and insights gained from interviews. From Kano, the largest city in Northern Nigeria, I’ve watched how the cross-country move to Europe unfolds, and observed how a mix of factors in the urban informal transport sector, corruption and weak institutions create an enabling environment for irregular migration to thrive and persist almost unhindered. The urban informal transport sector in most African countries is unplanned and unregulated. Data and documentation, which are important for decision-making in the business of transport, are not taken into consideration.
Buses arriving to Kano from the Southern part of Nigeria are hardly documented or monitored, other than by the odd undercover agent looking for child traffickers or drug pushers. Migrants are assisted by invisible agents who arrange their connecting cars and buses from Kano to Zinder in Niger. Drivers can spot those intending to migrate by their ethnicity. Migrants and their agents pay extra money to drivers, in case of the need to tip off security agents on the road. Along the Kano Daura road, drivers offer tips to security in style — decelerating and offering fake handshakes in which money changes hands.
At Kongolom, on the Nigeria-Niger border, Nigerian security agents already know most of the drivers. Passengers’ passports are not checked or stamped every time they pass. Sometimes, drivers take the passports while their rightful owners wait inside the pseudo-taxi. At Dan-Barto, Niger’s border post, their police, douane (customs) and gendarme (military police) units pay more attention to the laissez-passer papers for each car or bus. Most of the time, no one cares about valid travel documents, except for those related to the car and evidence of road tax payments. Border tax is very important in a poor country.
In Zinder, a driver shuttling between Kano and Zinder told me that Europe-bound migrants, after a problem-free arrival, would be handed over to a new set of agents who would house them in special accommodation pending the final arrangements for their departure to Agadez. More fake papers would be made for them in Zinder and more money found to settle Nigerian security agents on the road. Reaching the ancient city of Agadez is the travelers’ first hope that the proper journey has started, despite no knowledge of the actual date of reaching Europe. Agadez is the first bridge between Niger, Libya and Europe. While in Agadez, migrants are at the mercy of agents who shelter them in makeshift camps as they await departure to Libya. One question worth asking is why Libya? Is it proximity? I want believe that Libya became attractive to African migrants after former Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi beat his drum of pan-Africanism.
Other North African countries are not so friendly to migrants moving to Europe. While visiting Rabat in 2009, an embassy official at the Nigerian embassy, who worked on saving and repatriating Nigerians, informed me that Moroccan security would sometimes deceive the migrants by leading them towards Algeria as the final route to Europe. He alleged that by crossing the Algerian border the migrants would then be killed for trespassing. In contrast, the then rich and stable Libya provided a breathing space for the migrants, who took on paid menial jobs. Here also there are agents who secure jobs for the migrants, and act as overlords until their savings are ripe enough to pay for boats to ferry them across the Mediterranean Sea. Some of the migrants end up as servants or even sex slaves in the Libyan villages. The situation worsened in the instability and power vacuum of the post-Ghaddafi era — the antics of pan-Africanism having disappeared — with some agents capitalizing on the situation to strengthen their business of handling African migrants to Europe.
What I want to make clear in this story is the connection of failed and weak institutions in African countries and the thriving business of irregular African migration to Europe. At the same time, one cannot lose sight of corruption, a virus that undermines all existing efforts to check the influx of irregular migration from Africa into Europe. It is high time for African national governments to realize that migrants will continue to defy and escape their security watch as long as no genuine measures are put in place to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of this migration system. It’s a complex system, and one that thrives in informality across African cities. From what I’ve seen, the existing roundtables, cooperation and initiatives between European and African countries do not pay much attention to the informal sense of this migration system. From Nigeria, Niger and Libya, an atmosphere of corruption and informality strengthens individuals that benefit from migration. What’s most unfortunate is that the culture of bribery and corruption not only jeopardizes the national security of all the countries involved, but also the fundamental human rights of the migrants themselves. Whether they fail or succeed in reaching Europe, migrants are exposed to the business of human trafficking and the other forms of illicit activity that often accompany it.
African countries have full responsibility for addressing the challenges of irregular Europe-bound migrants. The agents and people involved in the business of migration act with impunity and openness. Of course Africans should be free to move across borders without barriers. But tracking suspected migrants and traffickers must take place along our borderlines. African countries ought to institute data collection and monitoring along our land borders, much as we do for our airports. People travelling by air undergo screenings and strict documentation. Our land border posts need such documentation processes. Local municipalities have a critical role in monitoring the movements of migrants through facilities such bus stations — a practical and achievable step that would make a big difference.
Dr Aliyu Barau is from Kano in Northern Nigeria. Barau was trained as a geographer and has a PhD is in Urban and Regional Planning. He is passionate about multidisciplinary studies and thus his interests are (but are not limited to) exploring socio-ecological dimensions of urbanization, globalisation and environmental change, population and development issues, transformation and development crises in developing countries. Aliyu Barau is a World Social Science Fellow (Sustainable Urbanisation) and currently teaches at the Department(s) of Geography and Urban and Regional Planning, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria.
