African Migration Remains an Unresolved Problem,

         In its current Global Trends report, published this June, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that by the end of last year, the number of people displaced by persecution, war, violence and human rights abuses had reached 89.3 million, representing a rise of 8% over 2020 – more than double the number from a decade ago. Whether you refer to them as forced migrants or refugees, that means one in every 78 persons on Earth is displaced, and with the results of the Ukraine war since May, that number has risen to more than 100 million, with the related impact of the war threatening an even high number.

As troubling as that is, there is another report that demonstrates that forced migration is even worse for Africa. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) annually publishes a list of the ten most neglected displacement crises in the world. Their stated purpose is to focus on the plight of people whose suffering rarely makes international headlines, who receive no or inadequate assistance and who never become the center of attention for international diplomacy efforts. In their list for 2021, for the first time ever, all ten such crises are in Africa. That list is: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burkina Faso, Cameroon, South Sudan, Chad, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria, Burundi, and Ethiopia. In some of them, there is ongoing conflict, in others there is sporadic violence in various areas that spurs displacement, there is religious and ethnic persecution, and in others, the government provokes the conflict that forces people to abandon their homes and farms.

Unfortunately, there is too much regularity in the countries listed. For example, DRC has topped the NRC list twice before (2020 and 2017). It ranked second on the list in 2019, 2018 and 2016. This is despite the total funding to the DRC humanitarian response plan was $876 million in 2021. Still, last year 19.6 million people needed humanitarian assistance in the country. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, by the end of last year, 5.5 million people were internally displaced in DRC and a further one million Congolese were refugees outside the country.

When I was a Congressional staff member, we did hearings and a fair amount of investigation on the impact of forced migration in the DRC. Militants not only raped women at the rate of 49 an hour in eastern DRC, but they too often do so publicly to break down traditional leadership. If the village chief’s wife and daughters cannot be protected by him and are specifically humiliated and violated in public, then how will villagers continue to respect and follow him. The fact that this abomination is done at gunpoint and would happen even if the chief resisted doesn’t matter. He is shamed and so are the women in his family. In fact, all the women so treated – whether they become pregnant by an enemy soldier or not – are no longer considered respected or marriage material. However, women are the cement in the building blocks of community. Without marriageable females, no village, town or city could thrive. Many of the people visited by such violence choose to flee, but even if they wanted to return, shame would prevent them from resuming normal lives. Longstanding and persistent ethnic animosities also mitigate against community reintegration. I’ve asked government officials, civil society representatives and church leaders about this phenomenon, and none of them had a solution in mind.

As of June 30^th, of this year, UNHCR estimated that there were 2,336,092 South Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers in neighboring countries: 927,823 or 39.7% in Uganda; 805,989 or 34.5% in Sudan; 403,240 or 17.3% in Ethiopia; 142,113 or 6.1% in Kenya, and 56,303 or 2.4% in the DRC. It is estimated that developing countries host 85% of forced migrants so it isn’t unexpected that South Sudanese would seek shelter in neighboring countries. However, as I saw in Congressional delegation visits to the intake station and one of the refugee camps in Uganda several years ago, their presence tends to be a potentially destabilizing factor in Uganda as it has been for the often-fragile ethnic balances in other host countries. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a longtime ally of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army/Movement, considers his hospitality for South Sudanese refugees his brotherly duty, but what will happen long-term to those South Sudanese who choose to stay and create majority communities in Uganda? Long-term migrant communities often engender hostility among indigenous communities, largely because refugees receive international assistance for food, health and education, which are usually in short supply for local resident. In Kenya, the presence of a large number of Somali refugees has long been a source of discontent. In South Africa, with so many people around the continent fleeing to its southernmost country, violent outbreaks have erupted as South Africans have objected to the sometimes-higher skilled refugees taking over jobs, such as the Zimbabwean refugees who have dominated the South Africa financial sector or refugee store owners in townships that take business away from established local businesses.

While Eritrea didn’t make the NRC’s top ten list of displacement crises, the so-called “North Korea of Africa” was at one time considered the fastest emptying country in the world. The Isaias regime has driven thousands of Eritreans to flee the country to escape mandatory and indefinite military service and the repressive practices that have denied them freedom. The Congressional Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission reported on April 18, 2018, hearing that by the time of that hearing, as much as 10 percent of Eritrea's population had fled the country since 2000. During that hearing, Rep. Randy Hultgren, then-Co-Chair of the Lantos Commission, stated that "Many of these asylum seekers are exploited by smugglers and human traffickers, or find themselves in Libyan slave markets, enduring detention, torture, and forced labor. Many others died crossing the Mediterranean Sea for European destinations. After gaining their freedom, some expressed that they would rather endure the experience of slavery over again than be sent back to their native country to end up on open-ended imprisonment terms. The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has made conditions even more untenable for the tens of thousands of Eritreans who sought refuge in that country.

 

Earlier this year, the Eritrean Research Institute for Policy and Strategy wrote to Philippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about the case of Eritrean Afar refugees at Barahle district of Zone 2 (Kiblatti Rasu), at the Regional Afar State in Ethiopia. “We are deeply concerned about the safety and wellbeing of the about 15,000 refugees hosted at a refugee camp at Barahle town. As the result of the ongoing war in Ethiopia, the town and surrounding areas have become a war zone, and we are deeply concerned of the plight of the refugees there. Due to limitations of getting up-to-date information, the situation there could be much worse than the last information we received.”

 

The international community has been swift to create refugee camps to cater to the growing cadre of Africa refugees. Of the world’s top ten refugee camps, eight are in Africa: Kakuma, Hagadera, Dagahaley and Ifo in Kenya; Yida in South Sudan; Katumba and Mishamo in Tanzania, and Pugnido in Ethiopia. As mentioned earlier, conflict in Ethiopia has made the plight of refugees more precarious despite ongoing international community efforts to address their needs. Actually, the international community has maintained refugee camps along with the associated assistance, in some cases for decades, such as with the Sahrawi refugee camps in the Tindouf area of Algeria that have existed since the mid-1970s. Given the disagreements and varied agendas within the donor communities, it has been exceedingly difficult to come to consensus on how to resolve the crises that have led to such elevated levels of forced migration. So, conflicts roll on, creating even more refugees, and new conflicts continue to add to the overall total of displaced people.

Adding to the reasons for displacement is climate change. Africa is one place on the planet where climate change is starkly visible. The Sahara Desert wasn’t always as it is now, and once contained significant vegetation and animal life, but desertification is now a quantifiable phenomenon. The ice packs at the top of mountains such as Kilimanjaro clearly reveal a noticeable shrinking. Increased stress on water systems and farmland puts livelihoods in significant danger, causing people to flee their homes and farms for more productive, or just more survivable, areas. According to various UN agency statistics, worldwide 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services, more than 11 million of these people live in Madagascar alone; every 15 seconds a child dies from a preventable water borne disease such as diarrhea, cholera and typhoid, and worldwide 80% of water scarce households appoint women and girls to fetch water, and they spend 200 million hours per day fetching water for their households. UNHCR estimates that since 2008, an annual average of 21.5 million persons have been forcibly displaced by weather-related occurrences, and according to the think tank the Institute for Economics and Peace, more than one billion people are at risk of being displaced by 2050 due to environmental or other reasons.

Such an elevated level of displacement on the continent will wreak havoc on development and economic advancement planning in Africa. How can anyone properly estimate not only infrastructure needs, for example, but also available human resources? The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of Africans to the so-called New World to build North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, but it deprived Africa of productive people and stimulated antagonisms that continue to this day. Most of the people taken captive in Africa were women in their childbearing years and young men who normally would have been starting families. The European slavers usually left behind persons who were elderly, disabled, or otherwise dependent – those who were least able to contribute to the economic health of their societies. The descendants of those who were taken away as slaves have been of great benefit to their current societies. So have many Africans who remained on the continent, but consider what could have been if Africa had been allowed to develop without many of its potentially most productive people taken away.

So, as solutions to Africa’s conflicts and natural disasters are being developed. Such solutions should keep in mind the need for sustainability and manageability by Africans. The time must be past for Africa’s problems to be addressed mainly by donor nations and institutions. Those who want to help must create mechanisms for Africa’s salvation that will be managed by Africans. That will mean donor training for African governments and technicians where necessary and funding for projects that Africans believe meet their needs so they will take over projects after the donor money is exhausted. It also will mean that African governments, private sectors and think tanks must willingly take on the burden of implementing plans to effectively address their challenges. African leaders in government and society must think beyond their own interests and those of their ethnic groups to the overall interests of their countries.

Aid can be a means of outside control or a source of graft, but neither is sustainable nor will lead to a resolution beneficial to Africa’s people. African leaders have developed visionary plans for the continent’s future, aimed at union for all its people. As visionary as this may seem, it is possible if all concerned function as though we all have to ability to recognize what is necessary for our mutual survival and act accordingly.