The statistics make grim reading. In the past six months, some 4,000 young West African men have died on the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to enter Spain – and eventually the European Union.
Yet they are still prepared to pay the massive sum of £3,000 for the short but risky trip from North Africa to the Canary Islands.
Why are these young men ready to fork out the equivalent of 10 years’ salary to travel to Europe, when there is no guarantee that they will make it there? Is it because there is something fundamentally wrong with the countries from which they are running away? is obvious that these young men do not have any confidence in the present or future state of their countries. How else can one explain their actions?
Let’s face it, £3,000 is a hell of lot of money in West Africa and it could go a long way in making the difference between living and merely surviving. But these desperate young men don’t see it that way. And those who make it good (relatively speaking) in Europe don’t help matters either.
When they return home on holidays, flushed with money earned through menial jobs, they tend to spend it like drunken sailors on shore leave. They give a totally wrong impression of life in Europe to impressionable young West African men who are only too willing to listen to tall tales – until they themselves arrive to find out that the reality is completely different.
It was with this in mind that sometime ago Alioune Tine, the secretary general of the Senegalese human rights human rights body, RADDHO, spoke out against visiting young Senegalese men driving around Dakar in flash four-wheel drives. It is not surprising that Senegal provides the bulk of these young illegal immigrants trying to make it to Spain.
There is indeed a major problem with regards to the state of young people in West Africa today. This was highlighted recently in a UN report, which spoke of the high rates of unemployment among young people in the region, and their feeling of despair.
As the report noted, the situation is a ticking bomb. But it seems that it has already exploded – and the effects are being felt in Spain.
ATTENDING the conference in Lome to establish a code of conduct for West Africa’s armed forces and security services was the Chief of Defence Staff in Liberia, Major-General L. Yusuf. He is a Nigerian who was ECOMOG sector commander in Liberia. This harks back to the days when the Nigerian task force commander, General Maxwell Khobe, whose troops restored President Tejan Kabbah to power in Sierra Leone in 1998, was appointed head of the Sierra Leonean army.
These appointments should be encouraged. And they should not have ended there. Nigeria should have also been allowed to train the new armies in Sierra Leone and Liberia. But the task has gone to the UK and the US even though the Nigerians had expressed interest in reforming the armed forces of these ECOWAS member states.
In the case of Liberia, the US government has contracted a private military company to do the job on its behalf. What did the Americans do in Liberia to warrant this? After all, it was the Nigerians who went in a second time to restore order and get Charles Taylor to step down. The Americans were stationed offshore in the safety of their warships watching the Nigerians do the hard work. At least the appointment of a Nigerian CDS in Liberia should ensure that Nigerian influence is maintained within the new Liberian armed forces.
It was a similar case in Sierra Leone.
By the time UN and British troops were deployed in Sierra Leone in 2000, the rebel Revolutionary United Front was a spent force, decimated by the Nigerians in the bitter fighting that engulfed Freetown for 12 days in January 1999. But, again, it’s the UN and Britain that have taken all the credit for the superb job done by Nigeria.
IT’S not often that one agrees with the policies of the World Bank. But this time I must support its decision to halt assistance to the Chadian government for reneging on a commitment to make the country’s new found oil wealth work for future generations. The government is supposed to keep a percentage of this money in trust for when oil runs out in 20 years’ time.
But President Idriss Deby and members of his inner circle appear to be laws unto themselves. They have disregarded World Bank advice, and are now misusing the money. What a shame.
