Migration to Europe: A risky affair

ONE of the major problems facing African leaders and their counterparts in Europe, is the rate African youths migrate to Europe through the Mediterranean, as thousands of them have lost their lives while trying to cross the sea to Italy through Libya. These immigrants come from more then 20 countries to Libya after crossing the Sahara desert and some mountains following known smuggling routes.
  The International Organization for Migration (IOM)  has tracked the migrant flows through North Africa for years. There are reasons why people leave their countries for other countries and one of them is to find better living standards while some leave in order to escape repression or military service due to internal conflicts  in some African countries. For example, Eritreans have been prominent among the travellers, as they escape authoritarian government, poverty and indefinite military service.
  Somalia is another major source of migrants that head to Libya for passage to Europe. Somalis leave their country due to extreme poverty, prolonged insecurity, sexual violence and other human rights violations, lack of access to basic needs such as food, medical services, healthcare and livelihoods.
  West Africans are also involved as migrants from Senegal, Mali, Guinea and Gambia are also finding their ways to North Africa in order to find opportunity of crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The populations in West African sub-region are swelling but farmland and economic security shrinking.
  Surprisingly, Nigeria is among the countries from where migrants arrive Italy from Libya. According to a research  officer of the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), Tara Brian, over 9000 migrants  from the country arrived Italy through the Mediterranean Sea in 2014. She said that out of the number, 557 were minors while 78 percent were male and that Nigeria was also the fifth top country of origin of arrivals to Europe.
  The IOM official also revealed that there were no fewer then 3,000 Nigerian arrivals to Italy from January to end of April, 2015.
  A migration expert, Prof Adepoju Aderanti, in a presentation noted that Nigerians abroad constituted the population of about seven African countries, adding that it is not surprising due to the population of the country. He stated that the remittances of Nigerians abroad  were about 25 billion dollars annually adding that it overtook direct foreign  investment and was second to oil revenue.
  The world is a global  village and as such nobody  is restricted to live in any part he finds himself. People are bound to move to different parts of the world to live and better their economic conditions. The point is that most people who migrate to Europe from Africa follow the illegal means of being smuggled into the continent where some of them face very hard conditions and end up in jails for one offence of the other, especially drug related offences as they try to make it very fast in their host countries. Recently, four Nigerians were executed in Indonesia for their involvement in drugs and many more are in different prisons around the world for similar  offences.
  Following the austerity measure  in Nigeria, due to drop in the price of crude oil in international market, Nigerians and other African countries are facing serious hard times and most of the youth  feel that the best way to  solve the problem is by leaving the continent for Europe to either find jobs or look for businesses.
  The fact that people want to leave their countries for foreign countries prove that all is not well in most African countries, including Nigeria. When Naira was a strong currency in late 1970s to early 1980s, many foreigners came to Nigeria to pick one job  or the other.
  In our universities, foreigners were engaged in teaching and they came with their family members which  made it possible for some  of their children to graduate from Nigerian universities. Even in some secondary schools, there were teachers from India and other countries that lived and worked in Nigeria.
  The situation changed when Naira started losing its value and little by little all these foreigners in Nigeria started leaving the country for either their home countries  or other places that presented better economic opportunities.
  Today, there exist several universities in Nigeria and many students graduate yearly without finding any employment  in the country. Some even stay more than five years searching for employment without success. It is among these category of people that you find  many trying to enter Europe, America, Australia and other parts  of the world to find something doing. Some of these graduates end up being taxi drivers, working in fast food joints and even being dish washers  in hotels but the point is that  with what they are paid in those strong currencies they remit money home for some development projects like building of houses and assisting  other relations at home.
  This brings to mind the condition of Nigerian workers, both those in government employment and others in  the private sector. The present economic down-turn and the exchange rate of Naira to the US Dollars have made prices of essential commodities to go high making it difficult for an average worker to survive with  the current minimum wage of N18,000 for the least paid workers. Some workers find it difficult to maintain themselves with the current wage while some might be lured into finding ways of joining others that are leaving the country  for other developed countries.
  To control the situation, both the federal and state governments should consider increasing the minimum wage paid to workers in Nigeria to make it less attractive for people to consider leaving the country for other countries. It is equally  necessary for the federal government to enforce the payment of the minimum wage in all parts of the country since it is known that some states are currently not paying the N18,000 while some category of workers are yet to benefit from the wage increase.
  There should be an arrangement where school leavers who are yet to get employment are given some allowances that will enable them take care of their basic needs in life. In developed countries like the United States, there exist social security where people are taken care of when they are unemployed or when they lose their jobs. These allowances always enable them to eat and live decently making it difficult for any American citizen to think of leaving his country and moving to any part of the world  for better economic condition.
  Nigerian  leaders and their counterparts  in other parts  of Africa should therefore think of ways to generate employment for the unemployed, pay living wages to those who are working and create a favourable condition for the youth to enable them remain  in their countries and not risk their lives by looking for illegal means to enter Europe. Apart from the brain drain effect in African countries, the negative implication is that Africans are seen as a continent where the leaders are not thinking  of the welfare of the people.
  African Union should emulate their EU counterparts by joining forces in the patrol of the Mediterranean Sea to ensure that these migrants are rescued and rehabilitated and to discourage other Africans that want to migrate illegally to Europe.

By Nnamdi Chukwujindu