On February 7, Kenyan police apprehended 41 undocumented Ethiopian migrants and two human smugglers at a residence in Nairobi. The all-male group, which was reportedly en route to South Africa, will be prosecuted for breaching Kenya’s immigration laws and likely deported to Ethiopia. The migrants should be thankful for their arrest, as it prevented them from embarking on a perilous journey.
Between 2020 and 2022, the bodies of over 100 undocumented Ethiopian migrants were discovered in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia, having died from hunger or suffocation while travelling clandestinely towards South Africa. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has identified an intricate network of smugglers and traffickers as the main facilitators of irregular migration from the Horn of Africa to Southern Africa.
The African Union has identified a multitude of factors that drive migration within the continent, including the need for improved socio-economic conditions through employment, environmental factors, and respite from political instability, conflict and civil strife. Labour migration, especially of low-skilled workers, is the most consistent source of movement within the continent. However, most immigration regimes in Africa lack visa provisions for such workers and economic refugees, so many desperate immigrants seek assistance from human smugglers to reach countries they perceive as having better employment opportunities.
Once they reach their destinations, undocumented migrants are confronted with a new set of threats and dangers. In South Africa, the anti-migrant organisation Operation Dudula is leading campaigns and actions aimed at making the country as hostile as possible for undocumented African migrants. They have been preventing access to healthcare at a clinic in central Johannesburg and attempting to remove undocumented children from government schools in Diepsloot. They have also been targeting migrants who operate small businesses, market stalls and informal convenience shops in townships and urban centres across the country.
Despite prominent African politicians and thinkers calling for no African to be regarded as a foreigner anywhere on the continent, such as Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party, and Kenyan public intellectual PLO Lumumba, the political determination to fulfil the widely shared aspiration for a borderless Africa is still inadequate. In January 2018, the African Union assembly adopted the Protocol to the Treaty establishing the African Economic Community relating to the free movement of people and rights of residence and establishment. However, only 32 out of 55 countries in Africa have signed it to date, and only four – Rwanda, Niger, São Tomé and Principe, and Mali – have ratified it.
The resistance of many African governments to continent-wide free movement, coupled with their impractical, inefficient and at times inhumane attempts to police irregular migration point to a lack of understanding and appreciation of the considerable benefits of migration. Migration – irregular or not – is beneficial not only to migrants and their kin but also to the communities hosting them.
I can personally attest to this fact because my family is a product of irregular migration. In the early 1930s, my grandfather immigrated from Watsomba, a village in Mutasa District in Southern Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe), to apartheid South Africa. He entered South Africa at an illegal crossing point on the Limpopo River and travelled southwards to Germiston, a small city in the East Rand region of Gauteng. After 40 years of working abroad, he eventually returned home. But my grandfather’s return did not mark the end of our family’s relationship with South Africa; his descendants also eventually made their way there. His eldest grandson became an orthopaedic surgeon; his second eldest grandson established several successful businesses; and his great-grandson found work in a government hospital in KwaZulu-Natal.
My family’s story is just one of thousands or possibly millions; famous South Africans like Albert Luthuli, Dorothy Masuka and Jolidee Matongo came from immigrant families; and in 2020, award-winning rapper, businessman and boxer Cassper Nyovest revealed that his grandfather had walked from Malawi to settle in Potchefstroom, North West province. This is about Africa’s catastrophic political inertia; every year across Africa, tens of thousands of honest, hard-working people are forced to leave their home country due to war, political instability, climate change, bad governance or poverty and build themselves a new life in another African country. Due to circumstances outside their control, many of these people are undocumented and face hostility from authorities. This is a massive loss not only for these migrants and their families but also their adopted countries and the wider continent.
For the benefit of Africa and Africans, so-called “illegal” immigrants must be swiftly recognised, documented and protected from exploitation, discrimination and organised xenophobia. Last year, despite investing billions of dollars in high-tech surveillance technology, border infrastructure, and land and sea patrols, the United States and European Union both experienced exponential increases in irregular migration. Africa’s leaders should learn from these failures and accept that in the absence of legal migration pathways accessible to all vulnerable people, including economic migrants, irregular migration cannot be regulated or expunged successfully.
They must avoid politicising irregular migration and instead implement policies that recognise and render useful African predisposition to migrate in both fair and hard times. In 1963, Kwame Nkrumah said “The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart”; sadly it will take time to unite Africa in practice and establish a visa-free continent. In the meantime, the African Union must move to protect lives and take steps to enable unrestrained migration on a provisional basis. With adequate political will, Africa is well positioned to manage migration in a secure, orderly and humane manner; no African should ever have to die in search of a decent life in Africa – it is high time Africa demolishes its colonial borders.