Malicious tongues are still wagging. They say that the fact that the Valletta summit has brought so many parts of the country to a standstill is testimony to the government’s incompetence. Lies, all lies – peddled by those who can’t see beyond their noses.
Make no mistake. The traffic, rearranging our lives for the sake of VIPs, the suspension of whole areas of government services, the postponement of cultural events, the disruption of business without consultation… it was all a brilliant feat of multicultural education.
For just a few days, we had an amiable, low-voltage experience of what it’s like to be an African from a migrant-sending country. Now we can go back to being the best in Europe, albeit culturally and spiritually richer, thanks to three lessons we can apply to our understanding of Africa.
To the bleeding-heart liberals, who blame our summit experience on the colonial legacy (why else would we quietly accept the impositions?), we can reply, with poise and dignity, that there are some problems that we are capable of creating all by ourselves.
To the racists, who say we should never have been granted independence because we can’t govern ourselves or secure the country, we can confidently reply that we have a record of doing better. It’s not our genes, it’s our geniuses.
And maybe, to ourselves, we can now acknowledge that the line between political and economic refugees is sometimes very blurred. You can vow to leave a country because it’s impossible to work in; but sometimes the conditions are what they are because of the political disorder.
These insights on their own won’t rid us of our Eurocentric blinkers. For that, we need to acknowledge other points.
Concerned as we are about the flow of migrants from Africa to Europe, what we’ve seen so far is only a fraction of the number of refugees in Africa. Other African countries host over a quarter of the world’s refugees.
Those who come our way have revived former trading and slave routes to avoid bigger crowds, worse camps and the lawless, dangerous arid zone of the Sahel, an area larger than Europe and spanning several states.
Next, to think that we can get by with keeping Africa out of Europe’s life is to live in a fantasy world. The real world is one where, soon, one in four human beings will be African.
If Africa takes off economically – and that’s not farfetched; in several countries economic growth is taking place and a middle class is developing – then the flow of Europe-bound migrants would slow dramatically. But Europe would still need to engage with a resource-rich continent, just as the US and China increasingly are.
It is true that Europe remains the major aid donor to Africa. However, while that’s useful, it’s also a problem
On the other hand, if Africa fails, we can expect not thousands but millions to trek towards us. No fortress Europe will stop them.
Some might say Africa is bound to fail, despite some current success stories like Botswana. Climate change and its accompanying water wars will destabilise the region permanently. But it’s not the weather that’s causing the conflicts and human flight. It’s the breakdown in effective governance of water rights. History has no record of water wars.
So, no matter what, Africa needs to be engaged. The late Swedish novelist and dramatist, Henning Mankell (who used to spend half the year in Mozambique) once observed that, in the 21 century, the African novel will shape Western imagination the way that the Latin American novel shaped it in the second half of the twentieth.
He was right. Because to tell Africanstories will be to tell stories about the whole world. It’s not just China that’s investing heavily in Africa. It’s the US, Brazil, India, the Arab Gulf… the big powers as well as emerging economies.
Not Europe, however, which is seeing its private sector disinvest commercially and financially. It’s a process that began in the 1990s, as European capital shifted to Asia. Another massive withdrawal took place during the financial crisis, with China taking advantage of the consequent fall in share prices to invest even more heavily in Africa.
The Valletta Summit is taking place against this background: Europe wants to engage Africa in governance of the migration problem, while its enterprises economically disengage from the continent and ordinary Europeans want to psychologically disengage from its people. That’s not a formula that inspires success.
And that’s apart from the fact that Europe has found it, so far, impossible to manage fewer than 200,000 migrants in crisis conditions. Despite all the commitments undertaken, less than 10 per cent of the migrants stranded in Greece have been transferred to mainland Europe. It’s difficult to lecture Africa on good governance from that podium. It is true that Europe remains the major aid donor to Africa.
However, while that’s useful, it’s also a problem. According to two Africa experts, Jean-Michel Severino (a former VP of the World Bank) and Olivier Ray (a policy analyst for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Europe continues to discuss Africa in terms of ‘development goals’, stuck in a retrograde vision of the continent, and sometimes having, in policy terms, its left hand undo what its right hand tied up. A view focused less on charity and more on common geostrategic interests, they say, would be better for both sides.
None of this is to rubbish real progress that has been made. An approach focussed on concrete detail – like the trade agreement for the diamond market to certify ethically traded diamonds as against diamonds sold by warlords – can make a real political difference.
To address and anticipate the causes of migration, we don’t need to make new discoveries. The dangers and institutional weaknesses are known: the ‘renting out’ of resource-scarce parts of a country to thugs, while the dictator milks the resource-rich areas; the impatience with democratic transitions, so that people elect a new ruler without the checks and balances; the perils of peace agreements signed too soon because the international community wants to move on; underinvestment in initiatives like the continental early warning system…
The problem with the declaration that crowns the Valletta Summit is not the well-meaning words, which identify the core issues. It’s the sustained, coherent action that we won’t get until African migration to Europe becomes even more dramatic.