Ademola Araoye

By Ademola Araoye

“People who come because they think that Europe is a prosperous continent, … must be escorted back, that’s the rule,”

Francoise Hollande, President of France, on African and Middle Eastern immigrants to Europe.

The reverberations of the recent visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel would be with Africa for a long time. This is rather for many wrong reasons, including its expression of Europe’s continued hypocrisy and contempt for Africa. Also, Africa’s lack of respect for itself was on display. Angela Merkel was economical about the truth around the instigators of African illegal immigration to Europe. Also, it is reported that she refused to shake the hands of her host, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn. She visited the headquarters of the 53-nation African Union in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to formally open, as usual, a German funded Mwalimu Julius Nyerere peace building (AU). Germany is a regular contributor to the beggarly African Union. Half a billion euros ($557 million) were transferred from Berlin to Addis Ababa between 2004 and 2016. A third of the aid went to the AU’s ”peace and security” division.  Against this background, Angela Merkel had a license and was well suited as the emissary of a riled Europe to deliver a purposeless message.

Yet, she was graceful. Her symbolisms and statement definitely did not descend to the nadir of Nicolas Sarkozy’s insult to the continent, who in a controversial speech in Dakar five years ago, asserted before a fawning Senegalese parliament that the African man “has not fully entered history (…) never really launched himself into the future.” Africa, Sarkozy said to his Senegalese hosts, never had any glorious past that Africans were fond of recalling. Sarkozy’s speech was plainly insulting to the continent. Sarkozy’s contempt for Africa is a thick as his renowned duplicity and amorality. The man stole money from an octogenarian widow, Lilianne Bettencourt, who is ranked as France’s richest woman, by abusing the confidence of the heiress during fundraising for his 2007 election campaign. Morality makes no difference to Africa. Africa has hosted all sorts. Poor Merkel’s visit, more for Europe than on behalf of his native Germany, can be put on the same plane as Sarkozy’s successor’s more refined even if condescending and paternalistic tone during his 2012 visit to the same Dakar.

To rousing applause, Francois Hollande alluded to Senegal as an example for Africa to follow, citing the country’s three successive and relatively peaceful transitions of power since 1980. He forgot to mention that Leopold Sendar Senghor, the first president of Senegal, with French connivance ruled for over two decades. Senghor was, through his version of negritude, a major proponent of integrating black interests and destiny into French global cultural life, while at the same time, weeping for blacks to be treated as equals of a bemused white France. Such was Senghor visceral opposition to Cheick Anta Diop’s vision of a fully culturally, socially, economically and politically integrated federated Africa, that he threw the latter into jail. In an insult to the man, Senegal then named a University to his name. Hollande, in his visit to Dakar, emphasized the prominent role Africa had to play in the world, noting that Africa is a great continent that is now ready to become a great emerging continent.

Finally, Hollande after intoning the end of Françafrique, a term used to describe the secretive use of political and economic influence between elites in France and former African colonies beginning from the 1960s, delivered his main message to Senegal. That was that the French parliament and the Senegalese parliament would soon ratify a defense treaty between the two countries, but that the agreement would not have any “hidden clauses”. Viola. So much promised change with so much continuity of a fossilized past. Senegal, the France acclaimed model African state, as with the rest of Francophone Africa would remain in the clutches of France. Democracy or no democracy.

In Alhassan Ouaattara’s Cote d’Ivoire, Sassoue Nguesso’s Congo (Brazzaville), Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo, Paul Biya’s Cameroun, and less so in Ali Bongo’s Gabon, good African democracy must produce a French stooge. Whether in Islamic Niger or Mali, all Presidents of Francophone Africa belong to one or other version of the French Freemasons. The same scenario plays itself out in Lusophone Africa, where France is trying hard to muscle out the influence of a poor Portugal. Liberia would be nothing other than a lost dream of bold American Freeedmen and mavericks like Marcus Garvey; a residue of a lost African hope that is equally lost in time. Why stay in Africa if you can smuggle yourself to the metropole?

Libya’s former leader Muamar Gaddafi learnt a hard lesson about messing around with the interests of hegemonic forces in Africa. Some reports indicate that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was killed by a French secret service agent, acting on the direct orders of France’s ex-President Nicholas Sarkozy. Before NATO launched a bombing campaign, aimed at ousting Gaddafi in 2011, the Libyan leader appeared to have strong ties with several European leaders, including Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Britain’s Tony Blair. A few Libyans, post Gaddafi with all his warts, now know the true character of the West. Under the guise of helping to overthrow Gaddafi, France destroyed most of the strategic infrastructure of the country, in the hope of being invited to rebuild them post Gaddafi. It then froze Libya’s reserve of over 500 billion dollars to repay this imagined rehabilitation and reconstruction project of that unfortunate country.

By April 2011, with the insurrection still raging, the struggle among western countries, mainly France and the United Kingdom, had started on sharing Libyan oil. An undertaking by the National Transitional Council (NTC) to reserve 35% of total crude oil in exchange for the total and permanent support for our council had been deposited. Bids by Britain and other western powers to secure a slice of the oil prize in Libya was heightened when France said it was “fair and logical” for its companies to benefit from the post Gaddafi oil regime. The United States was not on the sidelines. Everyone in the West wanted a piece of the Libyan carcass.

Like heavily armed unconscionable poachers, they were bent on killing the beast for its horn. Against this background, Africa’s feeble reasonable proposal (Nigeria did not support Africa’s voice, it supported the West on the regime change plan) that a political solution would be the best course of action was not heeded. Africa, the United States, Great Britain and France argued, was not a legitimate stakeholder in Libya. Libya, they conveniently advanced was an Arab state. Muammar Gaddafi’s final murder, some evidence suggest, was effected by a French agent. It was part of a western plan to reinstate the dependency status of a small African rich nation that had managed to spring forth a gadfly to seek real autonomy and even had the temerity to aspire to bring African together. Any progressive proposal to bring Africa together to empower it to give it a real chance to build its future outside the influence or dependence of the West, is a virtual declaration of war.

The West would resist it. Muamar Gaddafi, notwithstanding his weaknesses, delivered more public goods internally than any of his peers. His critical role as a regional stabilizer has become more acknowledged since his overthrow. In fact, Horace Campbell concludes that Gaddafi was neutralized because he wanted to strengthen Pan-Africanism and had enough resources to challenge US hegemony in the region. These are by no means the main concerns of Europe. Their concern is how to stop African youth from coming from evading our territories. The European nightmare of uncontrolled black immigration is integral to perceived global immigration crisis.

Today, the Libyan humpty dumpty has defied western attempts to bring a pro western government together to garner the dividends of their bloody interventions in Libya. More importantly, Europe is overwhelmed by the law of unintended consequences associated with its very myopic calculus on Libya. Europe’s reckless stomping in Libya, the African Maghreb, has unraveled the fragile stability of a country with a very delicate sociological mosaic. In absorbing millions of job seeking African migrants, Gaddafi provided a safety valve for most of his more irresponsible peers in the sub region. By this he stabilized a whole region; West Africa. He focused the attention of Africans on Africa.

External interventions all over Africa, whether in Sudan, Kenya, Gabon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire is to reorient the gaze of Africa, including its spirituality outwards: to Europe, the Arab World and now aspiring China respectively. It is in the context of this unceasing assault that Africa’s future is on the run, as its youth end up as unwanted aliens in Saudi Arabia where the Saudi King must sanction their periodic beheadings, in merciless Thailand where they are tied to the stakes in periodic execution frenzies on accursed mornings on dismal islands, in a Europe traumatized by black faces in unprecedented numbers, in the Americas, China, where they are often brutalized and in India. These horrific alienation from the African homeland are integral to a hazardous process of a black Diaspora in flight. Wherever though the black Diaspora heads, it is confronted by the contemporaneous expression of the historic challenge of territoriality.

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel

The challenge of immigration and its management are global. It is estimated that migrants that traversed international boundaries more than doubled between 1980 and 2010. They increased from 103 million to 220 million. In 2013, the number of international migrants is put at 232 million and projected to double to over 400 million by 2050. Philip Martin, a professor of Comparative Immigration and Integration Program, also notes that about 60 percent of global migrants are in the 30 or more industrialized countries. Some 40 percent of migrants are in the 170 poorer developing countries. Almost half of the world’s migrants are women, 15 percent of migrants are under 20, and less than 7 percent of all international migrants are refugees. In the new millennium, immigration has acquired greater import and has become more complex the world over.

Immigration has historically confronted the idea of territoriality, the behavior of animals or people that try to keep others away from an area that they assert to be theirs or seize control of. Territoriality may also be directly associated with attempts by various animals and groups to protect the integrity of their communities in the long term. Accordingly mass movements, even if they are undertaken as individuals or in small groups at a time, have been problematic since the beginning of human movements. The human attitude of instinctive perception of threats posed by increased human movements, interpreted as invasion, encroachment or breaches of territoriality from the outside, has lagged behind historic advances in concepts in global modes of social organizations, political and economic.

At the same time, it is clear that profound transformation in the sensibilities of international society has impacted the new definition and anticipated responses to this historic conundrum. Territoriality has thus remained a serious anachronistic impediment to contemporaneous social advancements that are represented by globalization, including free movements of finance and labour, and more profoundly the evolution of the Westphalian statehood to the emergence of the post-modern, post statist and post material era. In Africa, these have been manifest in the challenge of sustaining African solidarity in a system still denominated on the outmoded planks and ethical gaps of a post colonial statism of the African state.

It may be posited that the transformed or evolving international sensibilities have impacted the expectations of how immigrants are treated. These emerging new impulses are however at variance with the overall postures of state policy that are still founded on realist principles in a significantly or struggling post realist international environment. For realists, the most important national interest is the survival of the state, including its people, political system, and territorial integrity. Realists contend that, as long as the world is divided into nation-states in an anarchic setting, national interest will remain the essence of international politics. Accordingly, realist perceive danger posed by mass immigration to the integrity of national interests including the dominant culture as a result of mass infusion of new immigrants. Post realists focus less of power and depreciate the centrality of power in relations between state. In fact they challenge the legitimacy of force in the interaction among states.

They are less resistant to immigration. The post modernists, often referred to as transnationalists, have faced a stiff rebuttal from the conservative citizens on immigration who have derided them as trendy philosophical internationalists who are advocating the juggling of conflicting national and cultural allegiances, and call for the attenuation of specific national loyalties. The post-modernists on immigration are dismissed as mostly privileged academicians insulated from the realities of the world by tenure, who strenuously oppose the right to select and emphasize one aspect of the multiple cultural and national identities human beings possess. They are seen as constituting an intellectual advocate for the breakdown of law, repudiation of historical notions of what makes for nation states and civil society, undermine civic traditions, profess the violation of the sanctity of borders that once commanded unquestioned assent, and use a term like patriotism only jokingly.

The reality however is that neo-liberals and the extreme left would agree, from different premises, on the beneficial impact of an open immigration regime. In the United Kingdom, a neo-liberal commentator was clear that high levels of immigration are part and parcel of neoliberalism, because they offer speedy, few-questions-asked economic growth. For some reason, however, both Labour and the Conservatives have shied away from explaining to “ordinary people” that immigrants provide a steady supply of labour, stopping “ordinary” wages and expectations from getting out of hand. For those on the left, international solidarity imposes the imperative of joining forces to liberate workers, irrespective of nationality, race or gender. The division is thus strictly not onlyideological but in differing attitudes and orientations thathave impacted policy on immigration in Europe, the United States of America, Asia, Latin America and Australia.

Yet it may be highlighted at the social and economic level, globalization, in principle, integrates the world. From a left of the center perspective, the integration of the World’s system is achieved by keeping one part of the system, the South to which , Asia and Latin America, perpetually exploited and territorially distinct. A territorially and human integrated World system destroys the very foundations of a globalized system that has been exploited by Europe and America. True liberal globalization thus impedes the purposes of the West. Europe for Europeans. Africa for Africans. The only problem is that while Europe is for Europeans, Africa is fair game for Europe. This has been possible only because African governance has been complicit in mortgaging Africa’s public good to Europe, China and the United States. Our leaders seek their validation from these external powers. Europe is thus complicit in the internal challenges that force African youths to put their souls on the lines in pursuing perilous adventures to Europe and across the globe to escape horrendous conditions on the continent. Given the tough realities at home, they can hardly be blamed.

Horrible governance paradigms persist that continue to lead to defection of a disenchanted middle class to the down and out constituencies of the wretched cross the continent. Current challenges of human hemorrhage and undesirable cargo from Africa to the world constitute an egregious abuse of global solidarity. The state is at the heart of the global crisis. The grounding of the nation state as a defining autonomous sociological enclave, sovereign political space and basic economic unit is a major culprit in the contemporaneous problematique of immigration and migrants. The nation-state’s clear demarcation of territory under its sole control and the entrenchment of concept of nationhood that defines identities in nationality and statehoods as the normative institution regulating large scale human communities have ossified the human proclivity to contain movements of those considered outsiders.

The management of challenges ensuing from the ascendance of the nation state in relation to basic human freedom of human movement have very often been associated with tragic consequences as the world currently witness in the carnage of African and Asian migrants at sea in the West of Mediterranean straits off the coast of Libya to Italy or again in the plight of the over eight thousands’ of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants, “Myanmar’s unwanted people”, stranded at sea off the coast of Thailand for weeks unending.