What to do about illegal migration from Africa into Europe? The EU’s repatriation programme seems at first like a great idea. Rather than just watching as desperate people risk their lives in the Med, we persuade them to go back home and help them to remake their lives there. The EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa has coughed up £125 million for the scheme and about 25,000 migrants have already taken part, most heading home to west and central Africa.
The poster boy of the programme is Smart Akawa. Two years ago, Akawa was flown by the EU back to his native Sierra Leone from a detention centre in Libya. With a modest EU grant, he has set up his own street-cleaning business, employing 14 other returnees to give garbage-strewn Freetown a much-needed scrub. ‘I want to see my business grow,’ he beams in the promotional video. ‘But more than anything, I want to create job opportunities for the youth in Sierra Leone.’
The trouble with the scheme is that not every migrant is Smart Akawa, as I found out during a visit to Benin City in southern Nigeria this year. Benin was once a centre for the west African slave trade. Today it’s once again an exporter of human cargo, with 60 per cent of all illegal Nigerian migrants to Europe coming from the area.
The story goes that in the 1980s, a group of local women went as guest workers to Italy, and came back to their hometown rich after becoming prostitutes. Word spread of their success, and so people-smuggling networks were set up that thrive to this day. Just as illegal migration causes social strife in Europe, so too has it done at home. The city now has a huge red-light district with many families knowingly sending their daughters into prostitution abroad.
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