PETER BRUCE | African mass migration will only grow

There was back-slapping and high-fiving all round this week when South Africa managed to see off an attempt by Ghana at the African Union to criticise it after a wave of sometimes violent anti-migrant protests in the country.

The protests led to the forced repatriation of thousands of Africans from South Africa, some, but not all, here illegally. Instead, Pretoria seems to have successfully pressed for a broader AU debate about migration on the continent as a whole.

But a minor diplomatic success makes little impression on the actual problem and as with many things troubling continental Africa, the final outcome of the struggle to avoid being held solely responsible for the recent wave of xenophobia is far from clear.

What is clear is that a huge migration of Africans from their homes is really only just beginning and there’s little likelihood the AU is going to be able to do much about it.

For a start, immigration has been weaponised in global politics. Donald Trump in the US has placed it at the centre of his second term in office. And the sight last Thursday of thousands of Moroccans rushing on to the beaches and through the fences at Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordering Morocco, will have sent chills right through the EU.

Spain has held the enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta since 1497 and 1640 respectively, despite persistent Moroccan claims to them since it became independent in 1956. For its part, Morocco continues to occupy the Western Sahara, despite long-standing claims, supported by South Africa, that it be given its independence.

The immediate, and probably accurate, suspicion is that the rush of migrants onto Spanish (and hence EU) territory was triggered by pressure on Rabat from the US and Israel, angered as they are by Spain’s refusal to allow the US military to use its huge Spanish bases in its war on Iran and, earlier, its fierce criticisms of the unbearable Israeli destruction of Gaza.

The influx this week is not the first either — in May 2021 around 10,000 Moroccans entered the Spanish enclaves during a spat between Madrid and Rabat over the hospitalisation in Spain of a Western Sahara separatist leader.

Forcing people back to failing home countries solves nothing in the long run

The depth of migration of Africans and Middle East refugees into Europe is straining politics and democracies everywhere in the EU as migrants trigger powerful right-wing movements in Germany, France, the UK and elsewhere.

In a sense, the rush of Muslim migrants into Europe may be peaking, some experts say. Turkey, which has been trying to join the EU for years, holds a huge majority of Muslim migrants in giant and largely forgotten camps. But a truly enormous wave of African migrations may be building only now.

For a start, the Sahel region, a swathe of countries just south of the Sahara including Senegal, Nigeria, Mauritania, Chad, Sudan and Niger, is warming faster than the rest of the continent. And while births in Europe are slowing sharply — population decline in Italy, for example, is now regarded as a national emergency — births in Africa are climbing fast. By 2050 one in every 10 children in in the world will be born in Nigeria and there is little sign that African economies are even remotely able to cope with what is coming.

Slowing population growth in Europe might create the economic space for more migrants but the fact is that climate change and galloping concentrations of wealth in Europe are changing human history.

I have just spent a month in France and the heat has been excruciating. Europe, itself under sustained economic pressure as Chinese imports flood its markets, is struggling to sustain the huge welfare programmes built since World War 2. Rising temperatures add an immesurable challenge for policymakers.

The corresponding rise of the right in Europe is eerily similar to what we’ve seen here in South Africa where ultra-nationalist populist politicians, black and white, rail against migration and people respond as we all just seen. And there’s not much place to hide even as centrist leaders argue for things like better border controls and the rule of law.

But border controls are nothing in the face of the pressure to come. Down here we may be in an economic mess but we’re still the most attractive proposition available for desperate fellow Africans. Migrations are why we exist in the first place and whether you’re in South Africa or Spain or France, you can’t simply shoot people trying to escape their troubled homes and you can’t really tell other countries how to manage their affairs either.

Obviously, the faster African economies are able to develop and grow the better for us but it’s going to ask much more than the ponderous development of an African economic union or a debate on migration at the AU. Forcing people back to failing home countries solves nothing in the long run. We need enlightened local and continental leadership and the right friends in the rest of the world.