Pathfinder international october

How the Bankruptcy System is fading BlackAmericans page 14

Atama plantation is today a source of discontent page 21

Extractive Sector Transparency, Value Maximisation and Nigeria’s Economic Recovery page 17

PATHFINDER International

Lifting up a standard for the Global African Community VOL. 1, NO. 5

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ISSN 2573-6523

Highway Through Hell:

African Migration to Europe l The Paradox of Prosperity l Mali’s Migrant Crackdown l The Deported: My Smuggler, My Savior

October 2017

Prayer for Nigeria at 57 page 22

The Mande Charter

Coming Revolutions in black Africa page 16 SOCFIN’S plantations in Africa: Many places of violence and destruction page 19 Why I don’t speak Yorùbá — Daramola page 5

2 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

FAITH

African Dining and Catering

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 3

NEWS

Dreams of European life spur perilous journey from Ivory Coast

By Olivier Monnier, Bloomberg’s Ana Monteiro

K

adi Bah saw people starving in the Sahara desert and drowning in the Mediterra-nean during her failed six-month odyssey to reach Europe. But as soon as the United Nations plane bringing her back home from Libya to Ivory Coast touched down, she was hatching plans to try again.

“I'll be so proud of myself if I can make it to Europe; I'll tell everybody I managed to leave,” the 23-year-old hairdresser said. “That's why I keep trying.”

At first glance, Bah's determination to emigrate is puzzling. She has a fouryear-old daughter. She had a job. Ivory Coast is a regional economic powerhouse, with an average annual growth of 9 percent. Ivorians don't fit the profile of migrants fleeing war and repression for the West.

Yet Ivory Coast ranks as a top African departure country for people who try to reach Italy by boat, after Nigeria and Guinea, according to the Genevabased International Organization for Migration.

Authorities on the Italian

island of Lampedusa identified about 12,000 arrivals from Ivory Coast last year, up from 7,000 in 2015.

“It seems like a paradox, but in some cities, it's a fashion trend,” said Ally Coulibaly, minister for African integration and Ivorians overseas. “When the son of the neighbor makes it to Italy or France and starts to send money back to the family, the other n e i g h b o r t h i n k s i t ’s something his son can do, too. Going to Europe becomes a community project.”

The irony is that Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest c o c o a p r o d u c e r, h a s traditionally attracted migrants, not provided them: a quarter of the population was born elsewhere, in a n o t h e r We s t A f r i c a n country.

“When we survey those who return, we find that unemployment is not the main reason for people to leave,” said Issiaka Konate, director of the department for Ivorians overseas, which charters planes to bring back Ivorian migrants. “People want a better life, a sense of well-being.”

Ally Coulibaly, Minister for African Integration and Ivorians Overseas Bah set her sights on France, the former colonial ruler, after speaking with customers of the salon in Abidjan, Ivory Coast's main city, where she worked.

Some customers moved abroad on student visas, and they encouraged her via Facebook chats to try to leave the country too, she said.

“They said things are good over there,” said Bah, who started working at the age of 12 because her parents couldn't afford school fees.

“They make me want to go.”

Bah traveled by bus to

Agadez, a town in northern Niger that serves as a transit point for migrants because it's the last stop before the Sahara desert. There, she boarded a pickup truck for the 465-mile (750kilometer) journey to the Libyan border. Along the way, she and her fellow travelers saw a group of migrants who'd been abandoned by their driver.“They were alive but they had nothing to eat or drink,” she said. “We gave them some water and food but we had no extra space in our truck.”

Upon arrival in Tripoli, Bah joined seven other Ivorian women in a house she believed may have been the property of her handler, a 25-year-old man from Mali.

Before leaving Ivory Coast, she had wired 1.2 million CFA francs ($2,078) for the journey to his bank account.

After a few weeks of “doing nothing,” Bah was told to board one of four crowded, inflatable vessels that left Libya's shores in a convoy under cover of darkness. About two hours into the journey, the last boat, with about 200 people on board, began to sink.

“We saw it happening before our eyes,” Bah said.

“They were drowning and we were on our boat watching them die, unable to save them.”

Then Bah's boat developed trouble too and she believed the moment had come when she would die. “I just told myself it was over,” she said.

Libyan fishermen agreed to tow them to shore in exchange for the passengers' belongings, Bah said. In Tripoli that evening, she was arrested and sent to a detention center. It was there that she accepted her government’s offer to return.

“The Ivorian ambassador came to see us. He said we should come back,” she said.

“He was right. In Libya, they don't like black people. But they didn't do anything to me. They only beat the boys, not the girls.”

The government has brought back Ivorian migrants from the Philippines to Gabon and runs a campaign to warn of the dangers of illegal migration.

Bah is among a growing number of women migrants from West Africa since leaving is no longer “a man thing,” said Laurent Guittey, a project manager at the IOM in Abidjan. “Women have started to leave too, because they're seeing that other women have managed to succeed.”

Back in Ivory Coast, Bah avoided her own neighborhood, didn’t use her Facebook account and screened her calls. She didn't want to tell anyone she’d failed in her dream to reach Europe.

A few weeks later, she was gone again.“I'm not going back to Libya,” she said, as she was about to board a bus to Mali. “From Mali, it'll be easier to get a visa for France.” n

Young people in Central, Eastern Europe B protest against corruption R AT I S L AVA , Slovakia — This week, for the third time, thousands of high school and university students swarmed the streets of Bratislava, the capital and largest city of Slovakia (it is still quite small). They were, once again, protesting corruption. They were, once again, calling for the resignation of the interior minister, reputed to have ties to shady businessmen, as well as a top cop and a top prosecutor. They were, once again, bound to be disappointed. Everybody is still in office and going nowhere fast.

Which raises a question: After a season of fervent, heartfelt protests that have pounded the cobblestones from Bratislava to Bucharest, giving a sclerotic system a good shake — what now? How can the resistance find something to stand for?

What happens to anticorruption protesters after the anti-corruption protests wither away?

A few weeks before the latest demonstration, I met with a pair of Slovak protesters in Urban House, a hip, spacious coffee shop and bar in Bratislava’s Old Town, which looks not unlike the main square through which Belle traipsed while singing about how there must be more than this provincial life. David Straka, a high school senior who picked a spot in the back corner of the bar on a raised platform, was one of the

masterminds behind the anticorruption protests, and he had the good sense at that point in the day to order tea (I did, too). His friend, Sam Klacman, was able to show off his Texas-polished English and his intimate knowledge of how to use Urban House tea strainers without making a terrible mess (though he ordered an espresso).

They’re part of the cohort of young, urban, restless activists who have riled up the status quo and antagonized plenty of older Slovaks. Part of the first generation born and raised inside the European Union, Straka, Klacman, and their peers have a different set of expectations about what their government is meant to be. But across Central and Eastern Europe, those expectations are now slamming into reality, sometimes with bitter aftershocks.

The first Slovak protest, back in April, started organically, they said. Straka and his friend Karolina Farska decided they wanted to do something to try to hold their government accountable. They didn’t expect thousands to clamor to join, or for news of the protest to spread on social media. But it did.

And the Slovak government did begin to speak of the importance of fighting corruption. But Interior Minister Robert Kalinak didn’t step down.

And so, in early June, the teens went back to the Slovak streets again.

And Kalinak still didn’t step down, and so they went back out again, this time collecting signatures for a petition for parliament, too.

Some were impressed that teenagers — and they are truly teenagers, clad in skinny jeans, Straka sometimes laughing nervously, Klacman turning from the interview to check

his phone — were the power behind the protests. Others were scornful, especially those with memories of harder times in decades past.

“What they usually say is we are young, we know nothing about life. We’ve never experienced anything,” Klacman said.

“The main argument is not that we are young, but it builds on that — it’s that we are manipulated,” Straka said across the table. He

asked me to guess who is supposed to be doing the manipulating; the answer, as it so often is in this part of the world, is George Soros and the United States (for the record, I guessed correctly).

“And of course, the political opposition,” Klacman added.

Their youthful enthusiasm is endearing. But some also think it dangerous. Peter Kunder, director of Alliance Fair-play, an anti-corruption

NGO in Bratislava, agreed that “it is nice that young people are protesting.” But he worried that they are raising expectations that are only going to be dashed — adding more disillusion to a system already rife with it.

“We don’t see how that frustration can be released.

They are protesting for things that are impossible to achieve. There’s no way out,” he said.

Turn to page 23

4 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

CARTOONS

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 5

point where I'm a bit disturbed about my predicament. I study Latino-Americans and admire their effortless flow of Spanish to English and English to Spanish without hesitation or fear. And the large Ethiopian-American population around me that speak in their native tongues with the same free flow as they do English.

Wi t h o u t t h e f e a r o f sounding awkward, without the fear of being teased by people who were never patient enough to teach you, without the fear of not sounding authentic.

Regardless of what generation, first-generation or second, it seems like their language is still embedded in their immigrant American stories.

Yet, I can't completely

B

N

ow, the occasional trendy pidgin phrases like "Ko le work" and "Naija no dey carry last" has slipped out of my mouth a few times, along with the basics like "Ekaaro" and "Omi" to name a few. But when I need to reply in Yoruba to the JJC (Johnny Just Come-To America) who is wittily trying to test my Yoruba aptitude for baseless comparisons, I freeze up and the words get stuck in my throat. I mean, I can understand what they're saying, for the most part, but to give an eloquent reply like a learned YorubaNigerian is a challenge.

Most JJCs snicker and smile, condescendingly, at my rudimentary ability to properly communicate in the language that literally shapes my identity by the framing of my given birth names.

I don't know what it is!

One may question, how can I generally understand Yoruba when it's spoken to me, but I can't speak.

Another may question how can I loosely read Yoruba, and still can't speak it. Even Yoruba speakers that can't read their own language, don't have the reading skill set I've developed through reading my grandfather's letters to my mom. To be honest, I’ve gotten to the

G iso ue la st D C ara ol um mo ni la st

Why I don’t Speak Yorùbá I have a confession to make. Although I am NigerianAmerican, Yoruba to be exact. I can't speak my own native tongue. fault my parents and their generation for the lack of necessary intentional language training. Because a large number of them who migrated to the States in the 80's came for academic advancement. Part of their academic training was to comfortably assimilate into the American economy, not necessarily just the culture.

Their priority was to become financially stable through their chosen career paths, sacrificing time spent at home in exchange for overtime pay and second jobs. Absentee parents created latchkey kids who adopted identities from their Black American friends, in which Ebonics became easier to understand

and speak instead of our native tongues.

I have a cousin that grew up in Nigeria until she was 10 and spoke Yoruba fluently. When she moved to the States, she assimilated and lost the ability to speak Yoruba, because speaking it at home wasn't emphasized as opposed to English. But when I delved deeper, she confessed that she just hadn't tried to continue to speak her native tongue. It was not needful. And now when she tries, she feels like she is “trying.” Her awareness gave me an epiphany. Our psychological trauma of not feeling authentic continues to prevent us from taking the leap to speak a language that has been embedded in our culture in a way that affords

Yet, I can't completely fault my parents and their generation for the lack of necessary intentional language training. Because a large number of them who migrated to the States in the 80's came for academic advancement. Part of their academic training was to comfortably assimilate into the American economy, not necessarily just the culture.

Their priority was to become financially stable through their chosen career paths, sacrificing time spent at home in exchange for overtime pay and second jobs. Absentee parents created latchkey kids who adopted identities from their Black American friends, in which Ebonics became easier to understand and speak instead of our native tongues.

us the opportunity to master it. Yet we don't. Simply put, we fail to speak because of lack of confidence. In order for us to start speaking the language, we need to accept our identities as cultural hybrids, push past our limitations and accept the responsibility of being immersed in two different dominant cultures competing with one another and complementing each other at the same time.

There are advantages of being bilingual, even if the current economic market doesn't recognize it for Yorubas.

As Nigerian-Americans, it's okay that we aren't there yet. That we aren't confident enough to speak it. Because the same responsibility we incurred as hybrids is shared by those that mock us every time we try; by the parents who didn't enforce our native tongues until we were old enough to know that it should have been, by the aunties and uncles that speak to us in Yoruba and accept an English response as the status quo, and by those who “high key” judge without understanding our cultural perspectives and offering to teach. I’m okay with who I have become, while striving to be better so that my kids, the next generation, can learn not to refuse. n

Federalism in Nigeria 2 ... Is it leadership? Is it followership? Is it availability of resources or factors of development? Or something else?

First, on leadership, I would like to assume that we still have a crop of leaders who are genuinely committed to the development of human and material resources. To be voted into office in a free and fair election in which e l e c t o r a t e s v o te t h e i r interests based on manifestos shared with them and promises made to them, those electorates must be persuaded of the genuine motivation of the candidates.

And perhaps more than the writer of the Book of Proverbs, our people believe in the sanctity of names and the fact that riches and honor are important only to the extent that they are not products of activities capable of spoiling one's good name. Therefore, good leaders try to make their mark and, if they succeed, they have their good names unspoiled. Consciously or unconsciously, Awolowo got it. His name has therefore remained unforgettable.

Of course, I am not a reader of minds and I cannot unequivocally vow for every person that seeks leadership position what their motivations are. It is possible that the people are deceived and manipulated

by sweet-talking political charlatans. It is also possible that the people are too poor and ignorant to know when they are being conned. Such would not be unique to our clime. It happens everywhere including in the most advanced countries.

But I know that the only reason that a genuine human being with a moral conscience would consider making the sacrifice to run for a leadership position is to make a difference in people's life and to make a mark. That was the case with the leaders of the West in its golden era. I would like to assume that our current crop of leaders shares this motive.

And I would also assume that they have the skill sets needed to make a mark.

There could be a difference in the degree to which these skill sets are shared. But that is not unusual and it should not be a liability in the discharge of the responsibilities of leadership. Therefore, between the past and the present, leadership should not be the difference.

To the extent that my assumption is wrong, we have a serious problem.

Conclusion of the Presentation by Segun Gbadegesin, retired professor of Philosophy, Howard University, Washington D.C. USA and former President of Egbe Omo Yoruba in North America, at the Egbe's Convention held August 25-27,2017; Kansas City, Missouri, USA. How about followership?

There is no doubt that there has been a serious erosion of the values that sustained us through the 19th century civil wars and the brutal colonial exploitation. But erosion, serious as it is, is not annihilation. Those values still predominate in the larger Yoruba culture despite the incidences of 419 and it is by appeal to them that we judge actions and behaviors, including those in the economic and political realms.

We still hold dear our obsession with hard work as we detest laziness and parasitism. We still believe that good education is key to a successful life. Therefore, every household makes the effort to give their wards good education even when they must pay through the nose. And what must be a concern to all is that the poorest worker or artisan

now holds firmly the belief in the superiority of private schools over public schools and is not deterred by the exorbitant cost.

I think that it is safe to assume that our people are generally good and they have an abiding faith in those cherished values.

However, they need the encouragement of leaders and the hope that their hard work will be rewarded.

To my mind, however, one important difference between the past and the present is the “us” versus “them” mentality that comes with the artificial division of the region into autonomous states. Surely, not all was well between the sections of the Yoruba nation in the remote and immediate past. I touched on this sordid history in my column some weeks ago. And as we know, the creation of states has inadvertently reopened

some old wounds of tribal animosity to the detriment of the desperately needed cooperation across the southwest.

It was because I believe strongly that we must find a creative way of blurring the sharp and dangerous edges that the artificial boundaries between states have created, and remove the wedges that had effectively blocked the development of the entire region that I and other wellmeaning citizens welcomed the emergence of the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) a bold initiative of the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) a few years ago.

For no matter the divisions, the people of southwest are one and their leaders, no matter what the temptations are, must refrain from putting them asunder.

States are supposedly created for administrative purposes. They must not be used in a way that retards growth or limit the opportunities for the people, and certainly never in a way that tears apart the fabric of the Yoruba nation.

There could be a difference in the degree to which these skill sets are shared. But that is not unusual and it should not be a liability in the discharge of the responsibi-lities of leadership.

In the light of the difference between the past and the present southwest in terms of the transition from one region to six states, what adjustments need to be made to ensure that the people still matter and their social and economic interests are enhanced?

Vo l u n t a r y r e g i o n a l integration must be the policy objective of the leaders of the states and region and party affiliation must not stand in the way of this important ideal. Years ago, I made this point in a keynote address to Egbe Omo Yoruba National Convention that took place in Baltimore, Maryland. It was also part of my submission when I gave the Bola Ige Memorial Lecture a few years ago. DAWN had not been established in those days, and the partisan war over rigged elections was still very much fierce. The challenge was for victims to accept the leadership of those who stole their mandate and work with them for the integration of the region. Happily, that war is over and political enemies of the past now wine and dine together on the same political table. What needs to be overcome now is fiefdom mentality and leadership temptation to resist crossfertilization of ideas and practices across territorial boundaries. n

6 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

AUTONOMIA

Ghost of Franco returns in unexpected form

By George Kerevan

A

woman casts her vote in Barcelona woman I'M sitting on the Ramblas with colleagues and friends. It is the night before the independence referendum.

O-1 in Catalan media shorthand. The evening is warm and humid as only Barcelona can be. But the air is so tense you could cut it with a blunt knife. That may have something to do with the Spanish fascist youth parading with flags amid the bemused foreign tourists.

What these tourists don't appreciate is the history of this town. Sure, they've been to Gaudi's exotic Sagra Familia. Or rather what's left of this masterpiece of architecture now sadly ruined by an ill-advised attempt to finish it in the absence of Gaudi's blueprint (which went to the

grave with him). What we have now is a Walt Disney wedding cake in stone.

No, here on the Ramblas, the British hen parties in pink tutus, the nouveauriche Chinese hunting designer labels, and middleaged Europeans tired after a day's sightseeing are all oblivious to the political symbolism of the chanting, glassy-eyed youths marching down the Ramblas with huge Spanish flags. Young democrats protesting the supposed illegality of the Catalonia referendum, perhaps? No. The red caps are the giveaway. Crimson, blood red. A uniform not seen on the Ramblas these past 40 years – and certainly not on the head of a teenager. For this is the headgear of the Spanish fascist Falange. g h o s t o f F r a n c o h a s new generation of thugs, the decadent evils of Suddenly we are back not returned from the grave and bullies and screaming democracy, Catalan selfjust 40 years but 80. For the in the unexpected form of a sycophants ready to combat d e t e r m i n a t i o n a n d Barcelona as a free capital of a free people.

Earlier in the day I was at the Catalan Government building in St James Square.

They claim, with some justification, that it is the Kurdistan Workers' Party exercising self-rule since the Turkey started buying oldest democratic seat of KRG's oil.

Meanwhile, a (PKK) against the state of Gulf War. After the fall of government in Europe. peace process at home with Turkey, has been running for Hussein, it was abundantly the PKK reinforced the idea Coming out of this Gothic 33 years. clear that Kurds might want Ankara's fury at what's to opt out at some point, and of Turkey as a common confection, I ran into a happening in Iraq stems negotiations for the Iraqi homeland for Turks and couple of hundred chanting, from an existential fear that, constitution were very Kurds, as people across the v o l a t i l e S p a n i s h down the road, such a move tough. When a final deal was region started viewing nationalists. A passerby made the mistake of could encourage its own made with Baghdad in 2005, Turkey as a model. shouting “we will vote” and During that period, one Kurds - roughly a fifth of it was predicated upon Iraq's Turkey's population of more ability to deliver economic senior government official was instantly set on. than 80 million people - for benefits and peace. Today, eloquently explained to me Fortunately the local statehood. But Turkey's Baghdad can do neither, and the strategy: "In the long run, Catalan cops were on hand knee-jerk reaction lacks Kurds no longer feel bound we will either shrink or to effect a rescue.

My observer’s badge expand - and I would rather proper historic context - and to live under its banner. expand with the Kurds." saved me from a similar fate a smart strategy.

All of this is making Whatever happened to all and allowed me a few Turkey's anti-Kurdish Turkey on edge. But who are stance at home and abroad is we to tell our neighbors how that? The biggest casualty in conversations with the self-defeating and makes to chart out their destiny? T u r k e y ' s d e m o c r a t i c demonstrators. One posh Ankara more vulnerable Ankara's possible new backsliding over the past Spanish nationalist – a than ever. It is also based on measures against Iraqi two years has been the smooth-talking lawyer – a problematic vision that Kurds could include closing dismantling of the peace e x p l a i n e d t h a t t h e defines Turkish interests in a the border - and are coupled process with Kurds and referendum was being zero-sum game against with military threats against hence the idea of a Turkish- f o r c e d t h r o u g h b y Kurdish gains. This is a Syrian Kurds and hard-line Kurdish homeland. “immigrants and not real N o w , A n k a r a ' s Catalans”. I took great dangerous proposition. policies toward Kurdish What Turkish leaders need representatives in Turkey, belligerence toward the Iraqi pleasure in interrupting one to do is to reverse their where about a dozen have Kurdish referendum casts elderly Spanish nat who was unwinnable strategy - and been jailed over the past one more stone against that explaining to a passing idea. The only realistic way Dutch tourist (in English) start re-imagining Turkey as year. for Turkey to isolate itself that the pesky Catalans were the multiethnic place that it Turkey needs to become really is. Instead of fighting the patron saint of Kurds from regional turmoil is breaking the law by trying the Kurdish reality in its across Syria and Iraq - and through returning to the to secede from Imperial peace process at home and Spain. I intervened to n e i g h b o r h o o d , Tu r k e y not antagonize them. extending a hand to other explain that, in which case, should see the regional rise Too utopian? Hardly. Until of Kurds as a potential a few years ago, when Kurds across the borders. the good folk of the opportunity to expand Turkey was a democracy Kurds are our buffer from Netherlands had broken the Turkey's hinterland, as well and pursued Kurd-friendly Middle Eastern chaos and a law when they also seized as its economic power and policies, its soft power v e h i c l e f o r r e f o r m s . independence from Spain.

Someone should remind influence.

I went off to lunch in extended throughout the First, history. Turkish Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkish leaders that if they George Orwell Square and officials love to describe the Syria and beyond. In 2013, return to the idea of a ruminated on the fact that Iraqi Kurdish referendum as Erdogan invited Iraqi democratic and pluralist Labor in the UK had stayed an "Israeli project" - even Kurdish leader Masoud Turkey, they would not have stolidly silent on the attempt though Kurdish aspirations Barzani to Turkey’s largest to worry about their borders. by the Spanish state to crush predate the establishment of Kurdish city, Diyarbakir, for A democratic Turkey would Catalonia's right to vote – at Israel by half a century. Yes, a historic rally and declared, expand with Kurds of Iraq least till the paramilitary and Syria.

Iraqi Kurds and Israelis get “We are building a new The alternative, a forever Guardia Civil started along, and Israelis have Turkey,” dedicated to all bloodying heads on spoken in support of the ethnicities and faiths. The fight with Kurds everywhere referendum day. I'm not all the time, will rattle Kurdish referendum - but rapprochement between surprised. In fact, the Labor Turkey in more ways than Kurdish ties to Israel are no Erdogan and Barzani made deeper than bonds with Iraqi Kurdistan Turkey's one and embroil Turkey leadership has a sorry track regional powers such as closest regional ally and deeper into the regional record regarding democracy in Spain. anarchy. Let's not go there.

Turkey or Iran. third-largest export market Back in the thirties, Labor

By Asli Aydintasbas, a There is no doubt that Iraqi after Germany and Britain. at first refused to oppose the Kurds have a unique moral O u r f o r e i g n m i n i s t r y s e n i o r f e l l o w a t t h e Chamberlain Tory governE u ro p e a n C o u n c i l o n case for their aspirations. changed its "Northern Iraq” ment ban on sending Foreign Relations and a They suffered a genocidal designation to “Kurdistan campaign under Saddam Regional Government,” and columnist for Turkish daily weapons and aid to the elected Republican adminiCumhuriyet Hussein and have been

Kurdish referendum is none of Turkey’s business

By Ash Ayand

T

urkish President R e c e p Ta y y i p Erdogan was angry last week with the neighboring Iraqi Kurds for holding a referendum on independence.

“Once we put our sanctions in place, you'll be out in the cold,” he said, addressing Turkey's neighbors to the south. "If we turn off the [crude oil] valve, it's over. If trucks do not take stuff to northern Iraq, they won't find food or clothing. How will then Israel send them anything?

Let them send it then."

This sounded all too similar to the rhetoric that my generation of Turks grew up with: Kurds are treacherous! Israel is trying to create chaos in Turkey and the Middle East! Everyone is trying to carve out Turkey by secretly supporting the Kurds (even though major powers, including the United States, tried hard to dissuade Iraq's Kurdish leaders from holding the referendum). And we are angry!

Kurds were denied a state in the Sykes-Picot agreement that drew the borders of modern Levant a century ago, and they have since been fighting for different levels of recognition in their respective countries - that is, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

In Iran, Kurds established an independent state for a very brief period during the last century. In Iraq, after decades of guerrilla war against Baghdad, Kurds have been running their own affairs since the 1991 Gulf War. In Syria, Kurds have partnered with powerful Western nations to fight the Islamic State in return for administering their own region. And inside Turkey, there have been many Kurdish uprisings - one, the bloody insurgency by the

stration in Madrid, after Franco's coup d'etat. Sadly, Mr. Hitler had a different view on the definition of neutrality. A terrific campaign by the trades unions and local constituency parties eventually forced a vote at the Labor conference mandating a change of policy. This was duly ignored by the leadership.

Any thoughts, Mr. Corbyn?

Meanwhile, back in St James Square, the little fascists had got bored chanting and decided on some vandalism. They began climbing on to buildings and tearing down banners calling for the right to vote. I know pulling down banners is not the same as shooting people or staging a coup. On the other hand, fascism starts in the streets with the violent suppression of dissent. And that is where we are in Spain 2017.

In Madrid on Saturday, the proto-fascists were less reticent. Perhaps it had something to do with their proximity to the Rajoy Popular Party (minority) government. The PP is the direct linear descendant of the old Franco regime. It is the PP that is bending every democratic and legal convention possible to thwart Catalonia’s right to self-determination. Where Prime Minister Rajoy leads, street thugs follow.

So in Madrid, the smiling fascist youth took to the streets with arms outstretched in the Falangist salute – borrowed from their Nazi friends. They sang the Falangist anthem: “Onwards, squadrons, to victory. A new day dawns on Spain. Spain united!”

Words not heard since Franco's day. And you ask why the Catalans want their own democracy? Fie only any elected politician in Scotland, the UK or Europe who refuses to come out publicly for Catalonia's right to recover its own democratic state – crushed by the fascist jackboot in1938.

To be contd. in the next ed.

Magazine Page 7

Vol. 1, No. 5, Oct., 2017

International Lifting up a standard for the Global African Community

Highway Through Hell: African Migration to Europe l The Paradox of Prosperity l Mali’s Migrant Crackdown l The Deported: My Smuggler, My Savior

l Buses idle at the main bus station in Bamako, Mali. Thousands of migrants each year board buses like these bound for Gao, from where they will cross the Sahara to

Algeria

By Ty McCormick, Photography by Nichole Sobecki That a small business in Mali would be hobbled by (Reporting for this series was made possible in part by a inefficiency is hardly surprising. More adults here are grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.) illiterate than can read, and the World Bank ranks the country as one of the most challenging in which to do bdoulaye Traoré stands in the doorway of his business. But the cashew processing plant in Kolondiéba uncle’s house in Bamako. Traoré wasn’t sure he isn’t just any small enterprise. It’s one of Mali’s flagship could afford to attend law school in the capital, but development projects and the blueprint for future his uncle agreed to pay the $2.90 in monthly rent for a multimillion-dollar job creation initiatives aimed at single room Traoré now shares with two other young men.) curbing migration to Europe. It’s a preview of Europe’s KOLONDIÉBA, Mali — It had been 10 days since answer to the migration crisis — or a big part of it anyway.

Abdoulaye Traoré did anything at work. The cashew With tens of millions of migrants and refugees projected processing plant where he and roughly 200 other Malian to arrive in Europe in the coming decades, on top of the laborers made a living by stripping the fleshy husks off million-plus who have claimed asylum in each of the last crescent-shaped nuts had been sitting idle since early February. It had run out of raw cashews.

Each day for the past week, fewer employees had “This is European aid for Europeans,” reported for work. No one had been paid since the beige, said Ousmane Diarra, the president of barn-like facility, perched on the edge of a vast plantation the Malian Association for Deportees, a of spindly cashew trees, had suddenly ceased operating.

No one had been told how long the interruption would last Bamako-based organization that — or if the plant was closing its doors for good. supports Malians who have been Traoré, who at 26 had the wide shoulders and confident bearing of a college athlete, was beginning to wonder if he deported from abroad. Diarra told me should look for another job. He had never intended to work that his organization has repeatedly at the plant forever, but shelling cashews paid better than most jobs in impoverished southern Mali, where almost sought EU funding for an agricultural everyone who lives comfortably has a family member development project. “If I come sending money home from abroad. If not quite a ticket to a partnered with a European, then maybe better future, the job was a chance to save up for one. “I think this is a good job, but now we are just waiting,” he they will finance me. But if I come told me in February. “Me, I am leaving for Ivory Coast on alone as an African, no,” he said.

Monday or Tuesday. I heard there is work.”

A

two years, the European Union is pouring billions of dollars into fighting migration at its source — much of it in impoverished and war-torn countries in Africa. The aim is to transform nations like Mali into more hospitable places.

If it succeeds, Brussels is betting that it can convince some would-be migrants to stay home and African governments to stop others from leaving. ÁngelLosada Fernandez, the EU’s special representative for the Sahel, an arid region south of the Sahara through which hundreds of thousands of Europe-bound migrants transit each year, calls it the “EU strategy of security and development.” The aim is to create “the proper jobs on the ground” so that young men no longer feel compelled to leave, he says, while also helping governments “control all this territory.” Call it paying migrants to stay — or paying their governments to keep them at home.

In just under two years — lighting speed for the European Union — the 28-nation bloc has approved nearly $2 billion in spending on 116 projects aimed at countering the “root causes” of migration in 26 African countries.

That’s on top of tens of billions of dollars more in existing development and security assistance from the EU and from member states, some of which has already been reallocated to better address concerns over migration.

Much of the money has been funneled into ambitious development projects: roughly $114 million for sustainable agriculture and food security in Senegal; $32 million for job creation in migration transit zones in Niger; $12 million for vocational training and youth empowerment in Gambia. All of it is administered through a multibillion-dollar EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, Turn to page 8

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MAGAZINE

Highway Through Hell

Contd. from page 7 launched at a joint African and European summit on migration in 2015.

The idea that development can dry up migration is an appealing one for policymakers desperate for a humane response to the unprecedented surge of refugees and migrants. This year, more than 2,500 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to European shores. The crisis has already prompted an aggressive, securitized response from the EU and member states, including funding for detention centers and equipping security services in key transit countries so that they crack down on illegal migration. Development seems to offer a more palatable method of relieving migratory pressures, one that isn’t glaringly inconsistent with Europe’s professed values on human rights.

But the story of the Malian cashew factory — which was still sitting idle in July, five months after it first ran out of raw materials — highlights the immense challenges that await European policymakers seeking to remake the poorest countries on Earth into attractive places to live. It also exposes a false but largely ignored assumption upon which the EU’s entire plan to use development to fight migration is premised: Better jobs and more income, at least in the short and medium term, don’t typically relieve migratory pressures in desperately poor countries; they increase them, a fact that is well-documented by economists.

Like most of his friends, Traoré had long dreamed of migrating to Europe. Also like them, he lacked the resources to make it there. He wasn’t even sure he could afford to move to Bamako, the Malian capital, where he had been accepted to study for a law degree. “School is free, but you have to pay for housing, transport, books,” he said.

He had been saving money working at the cashew plant.

But now that it was closed, the best option seemed to be to go in search of seasonal labor next door in Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer of cocoa. The notion that someday there might be a well-paying job for him right here in Mali — the kind of job envisioned by EU policymakers — struck him as unlikely. If one suddenly appeared, though, Traoré knew exactly what he would do: “I would save money and go to Europe.”

A landlocked, hourglass-shaped nation bisected by the Sahel, Mali is both a significant source of Europe-bound migrants and a key transit country for migrants from other African nations, including Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Gambia. In 2012, jihadis briefly overran the northern part of the country before being repulsed by an intervening French military. Today, the backbone of the economy in this vast and lawless expanse in the north is smuggling.

Narcotics and weapons, stolen and counterfeit items — billions of dollars’ worth of illicit goods move along ancient caravan routes that crisscross the Sahara each year.

So, too, do tens of thousands of West African migrants, who cross the desert to Algeria in the backs of pickup trucks.

Hundreds of miles away in Mali’s semiarid south, remittances, rather than smuggling, are the main source of income. This is where the majority of Malian migrants hail from. Nearly a quarter of the country’s roughly 18 million nationals are thought to live abroad, elsewhere in Africa and in Europe. Experts estimate that the money they send back accounts for roughly 7 percent of GDP. In parts of the south, Western Union is widely seen as more important than development aid. One finds whole villages here with no working-age men. Musicians sing about the heroes of

the sea and the sky, and elders whisper about jobless teenage boys who haven’t yet bid their goodbyes. A distant tomb, it is often said, is better than poverty at home.

One such place is Kolondiéba, a sleepy farming community surrounded by towering mango trees, two hours from the nearest paved road, where Spain’s development agency, known as AECID, opened the cashew processing plant last year. The lush, oppressively hot region near Mali’s border with Ivory Coast once had a thriving cashew export industry. But decades of government neglect left the sector a shambles. Now instead of drawing their sustenance from the land, residents depend on remittances from abroad.

Rehabilitating the cashew nut sector, development experts at AECID reasoned, could revitalize one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest nations on Earth. “For one U.S. dollar, you can plant one hectare’s worth of trees,” said Francisco Álvaro, an AECID official in Bamako who helped design the project. “You will employ one or two people on that hectare and one or two more on every hectare thereafter. We see potentially 5 million hectares of production in Mali. We are at 100,000 now, so that’s about 2 percent of our potential.” Álvaro, who is short and excitable with salt-and-pepper hair, talks about cashews with the enthusiasm of an agronomist who has spent years immersed in his subject.

The tree is well-suited to the inhospitable climate of the Sahel, he explains, and begins to produce nuts in as few as three years. Once it is mature, it can survive and produce even in a drought, since its roots tunnel as deep as 30 feet in search of ground water. In addition to the nuts, which command ever-higher prices in Europe and the United States, it produces a fruit that can be eaten or turned into juice or wine. Spoiled nuts can be made into soap.

But farmers in Mali have reaped few of the cashew trees’ theoretical benefits. Before Álvaro and his team arrived, most of the fruit was left to rot, and commercial wine- and soap-making were unheard of in places like Kolondiéba.

The cashews were exported raw, meaning that middlemen in India and China profited from the shelling and roasting of the nuts.

So at a cost of roughly $7 million, Álvaro and his colleagues at AECID designed a pilot project that would serve as a model for a much larger cashew sector project funded through the EU Trust Fund. They built 10 small packing and storage facilities and one processing plant in Kolondiéba, where an association of women’s collectives operated manual shelling machines and baked the nuts in an industrial-size kiln. AECID also offered the women business training, including instruction on how to find markets for their produce. Álvaro and his team had run the math: Revenue from the sale of processed cashews should have been enough to pay for the purchase of new raw cashews with a modest profit margin. AECID donated the first 15 tons of unprocessed nuts; after that, the operation was supposed to be selfsustaining. But by early February — before the plant had even processed and sold a single shipment of nuts — the pilot project had stalled.

Employees at the plant had different explanations for what went wrong. Some blamed fluctuations in the price of cashews, which made it difficult to budget for new raw nuts. Others said the problem was the decision to pay workers monthly wages based on the weight of the cashews they processed, a system that resulted in payouts that exceeded the money coming in from sales. The quality of the raw cashews delivered by AECID, a third of which

were rotten by the time they could be processed, apparently also played a role. Whatever the proximate cause, it was clear that the women’s collectives — comprising mostly illiterate women but also a few men, like Traoré, who faced tremendous social pressures to migrate — had been left on their own to manage an industrial-scale operation with millions of dollars in assets.

“We can’t self-fund. This [operation] will stop for sure without more assistance,” Awa Touré, the president of the cooperative that manages the plant, told me. “Right now, we are not doing anything because we have no cashews left to process.”

None of the workers had been in contact with AECID since an on-site trainer from the development agency had departed several months previously. Some planned to hold out until more cashews arrived; others were already planning to leave town. “We will wait and see,” said SangareKonaté, a slender 32-year-old whose colleagues playfully referred to her as la vieille, or “old” one. She has family members all over the world: an aunt in Angola, a brother who migrated to Italy, and another brother in the United States.

Back at the Spanish Embassy in Bamako, Álvaro seemed only vaguely aware of the troubles in Kolondiéba. “I don’t have all the details, but I think they have preferred to share the money. They should have saved it,” he said of the workers there. “The problem here is a cultural one. If you have money, you spend it all — it’s the same everywhere in Africa. People here don’t prepare for the future. There is an incapacity to save.”

When I asked whether the European Commission had requested to see the results of AECID’s pilot project before awarding the development agency roughly $15 million to scale it up, Alvaro said no. “Their first concern was the speed of the execution,” he said. “They didn’t ask anything about the quality of the implementation.”

Carlos Martin Ruiz de Gordejuela, a spokesman for the European Commission, said in an email that the results of a 2015 evaluation of the AECID pilot — carried out before the Kolondiéba plant was operational — had been considered as part of the decision to fund the agency’s new cashew project. He added that “knowledge acquired during the [pilot] project, the experience of the EU and other stakeholders, and the very high number of meetings and exchanges since the start of the [project] identification process” had also been considered. Price fluctuations in the international market for cashews, he allowed, had played a role in the “temporary inactivity” of the Kolondiéba plant.

To secure funding through the EU Trust Fund, development agencies like AECID must submit detailed project proposals that are evaluated in Brussels and by the EU delegation in the country where the project will be implemented. The screening process is rigorous, EU officials say, even though they acknowledge that there is tremendous pressure to get programs off the ground that might help ease the migration crisis.

“I can tell you that if the EU is spending money, even if we have to do it quick, fast, and sensible, we have always a control on what we are doing. It’s money of the taxpayers, so we have an evaluation and control,” said Losada, the EU’s special representative for the Sahel. Still, Losada acknowledged that the need to have an immediate impact has made it impossible to tailor each project to specific community needs. “We cannot do urgency, [act] immediately, and then to go case by case, problem by problem. We have to try to have a big impact, an immediate impact. That’s the philosophy of the Trust Fund,” he said.

The result is that virtually all of the grants have gone to European development agencies like AECID instead of to the Malian government or to Malian organizations. To support entrepreneurs in the south of the country, the EU has turned to France’s development agency. To aid impoverished communities in the north, it has contracted

We are very angry with the EU because they promised to help us. We even declared that we stopped the job,” said Mohamed, a lean, weatherbeaten man in his early 40s who used to run a lucrative migrant ghetto out of his home. “But the promises have not been met.

They have destroyed the life of Agadez.

Turn to page 9

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 9

MAGAZINE Contd. from page 8 the Dutch development agency. In addition to revitalizing the cashew sector, Spain’s development agency has received funding to help reintegrate migrants who have returned to Mali.

“Out of 200 million euros from the Trust Fund, not one penny is being managed by the Malian government or by Malian nongovernmental organizations,” said Boulaye Keita, a technical counselor to the minister for Malians abroad, who was the main government point person for projects financed through the Trust Fund. “Some of these projects are drafted by people in Paris who have never been to the regions we are talking about. They have no idea what is happening there.”

European organizations have in some cases partnered with local organizations, and the EU-funded projects are often coordinated with the Malian government. But the overwhelming dominance of European agencies has contributed to a sense that Malians themselves are not benefiting from these programs.

“This is European aid for Europeans,” said OusmaneDiarra, the president of the Malian Association for Deportees, a Bamako-based organization that supports Malians who have been deported from abroad. Diarra told me that his organization has repeatedly sought EU funding for an agricultural development project. “If I come partnered with a European, then maybe they will finance me. But if I come alone as anAfrican, no,” he said.

European diplomats say they are forced to partner with big development agencies because Malians lack the capacity to implement projects on the scale of those being approved through the EU Trust Fund. They also point to rampant corruption within the Malian government, which ranks in the bottom half of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, as a reason to channel money toward European development agencies.

“Very often [with] local NGOs, to be honest, to have them as a contract partner for a big contract, you run into issues of fiduciary risks of lack of management capacity.

So our taxpayers also want us to be sure that we know where the money is spent and we can justify every bit of it,” JolkeOppewal, the Dutch ambassador in Mali, told me.

“But I think with the [EU Trust Fund] we could do better in the sense of having more Malian engagement.”

Four months after work ceased at the Kolondiéba plant, AECID made its first trip there to assess what had gone wrong. The agency was planning a second visit, “more oriented to make a support plan to improve their operation,” Álvaro told me in an email dated June 3. When a photographer for Foreign Policy returned to the plant in July, the facility was still shuttered; a lone security guard watched over the deserted grounds. Unused equipment, some of it damaged, was stacked against the wall. Traoré had gone to Bamako to study law after an uncle offered to pay the $2.90 in monthly rent for a single room he now shares with two other young men in a slum on the outskirts of the city.

Undaunted, AECID was moving ahead with its new $15 million project, funded through the EU Trust Fund, that aims to build new cashew processing centers across southern Mali and train hundreds of local residents to work at them. Together with Mali’s Ministry of Agriculture, AECID plans to plant thousands of hectares of cashew trees.

Properly managed, it could revitalize a key sector of the economy and have positive, trickle-down effects on as many as 200,000 people. Whether that happens will depend at least in part on AECID’s ability to learn from the failure of its pilot project. Álvaro told me in February that he was already applying some of these lessons to the new project: Salaries won’t be paid out until operating costs are covered, he said, and he is considering hiring Spanish or Chinese businessmen to manage the new plants.

Depending on whom one asks, that will either improve the quality of management or reinforce the notion that foreigners are the main beneficiaries.

Either way, experts are doubtful that this or any other development project aimed at creating jobs can reverse, or even slow, the tide of emigration. “If the success of your policy is dependent on being able to defeat both market forces and human nature, your chances of success aren’t good,” said Kathleen Newland, a senior fellow and cofounder of the Migration Policy Institute.

Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, has studied the interplay between development and migration for years. He has found that development gains, far from keeping young people at home, are associated with increased migration — until a country attains a per capita income of roughly $7,500 (or three times that of Mali). “There’s this idea that development and migration substitute for each other that underlies all of this. That if we can just make a sufficiently successful industrial park in Ethiopia, that people will go work there and migration will end,” Clemens said. “That ignores the many, many ways in which migration and development complement each other.”

Not only does more income mean people can do more expensive things, like payasmuggler thousands of dollars

In April, a slender 21-year-old Nigerian named Yinka was traveling through the desert in the back of a Hilux when suddenly gunshots rang out. Bullets shredded the tires beneath her and punched through the side of the vehicle. One hit her friend in the stomach, and she doubled over. Auntie Biola, as the six other women traveling together from Nigeria’s Oyo state called her, bled to death as Nigerien soldiers looked on. The driver fled the scene, and the migrants were all taken into custody. But first, the soldiers, who Yinka said were wearing uniforms, beat them all and raped the six surviving women. She said they were beaten and raped again when they arrived at the police station in Madama, one of the last settlements before the Libyan frontier. Because the other survivors of this ordeal had all been repatriated to Nigeria by the time I met Yinka in the IOM transit center in Agadez, I was unable to verify her claims.

l An EU military trainer drills with a Malian soldier at the European Union’s military training facility in Mali.

to take them to Europe; it typically means more education and bigger aspirations. That’s why Clemens says on average as countries transition from poor to middleincome, they experience a “dramatic rise” in migration.

Over the very long term, it is true that development would depress migration as a country transitions to developed status. “But Mali is not going to be a developed country in our lifetime or in the lifetime of our children,” he said.

“The reality is that the development of nations is measured in generations.”

Young people are not given to waiting for improvements measured in generations. In the next three decades, Mali’s population will more than double to roughly 45 million.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, according to Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh of the University of California-San Diego, some 800 million working-age people will enter the labor force — more than the current population of Europe.

This massive demographic bulge is itself proof of development success; infant mortality rates have plummeted across the continent while birth rates have dipped only slightly. But it is also proof that more development aid won’t slow migration, at least not for many years.

The EU and member states already spend roughly $24 billion on development and other aid in Africa each year, but the exodus of young men continues. Much of the funding disbursed through the EU Trust Fund is “more of the same, but it’s now more explicitly linked to the goal of reducing migration,” said Bram Frouws, the policy and research coordinator at the Danish Refugee Council’s Global Mixed Migration Secretariat. “Our expectations in terms of reducing migration have to be very modest,” he said, especially if corruption and poor governance remain problems in these countries. Frouws pointed to West Africa, where most countries are “relatively stable and growing economically.” Yet, he added, “more and more WestAfricans seem to be trying to migrate to Europe.”

From his new home in a corner of Bamako where ambition tends to outpace opportunity, Traoré still thinks about traveling to Europe, though it feels farther away than ever. He and his roommates, a chauffeur and an electrician, share a single mattress on the floor of their one-room flat.

Sweaters and trousers hang from pegs on the walls. A coral pink blanket is the only color in the otherwise drab, windowless room. The university is nearly an hour away, across a stagnant stream that doubles as a sewer and along wide, dusty streets crowded with honking scooters and yellow Mercedes-Benz taxis from the 1970s. He can’t always afford the trip, so he misses a lot of classes. If suddenly he found himself with money to spare, though, he knows he wouldn’t waste it on getting to school.

Europe has been helping fight the country’s jihadis for years. Now it’s turning its sights on human smugglers.

GAO, Mali — The migrants arrive by coach. Diadie picks them out from the other travelers by their swollen backpacks and their apprehensive looks. Up until this point, most of their journeys’ have been legal. They come from Gambia and Senegal, Guinea and parts of southern Mali, and, as such, they hold passports that permit them visa-free travel within the 15-country regional bloc of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The moment they make a deal with Diadie, however, they become illicit human cargo on one of the most dangerous smuggling routes on Earth.

Diadie, who asked to be identified by only his first name, organizes transport for dozens of Europe-bound migrants each week. Wearing a black leather jacket and a maroon scarf wrapped around his head so that only his eyes and the bridge of his nose are visible, the 30-year-old coxeur — a middleman, or agent, who links migrants and smugglers — says Arab and Tuareg drivers crossing the Sahara to Algeria tell him how many empty seats they have in their Toyota pickup trucks. “If they say, ‘I have 15 places in my truck,’then I go find 15 migrants to fill the seats.”

Diadie used to work as a tour guide before jihadis overran northern Mali in 2012 and briefly made Gao their capital. He would take visitors to see the Tomb of Askia, a massive pyramidal structure made of mud and timber where Askia Mohamed, the emperor of medieval Songhai, was interred. Askia built the tomb in 1495 upon his return from a religious pilgrimage to Mecca that took him through Egypt and past the pyramids of Giza. “A migrant of his era,” was how GaoussouDiawara, a professor of literature and civilization at the University of Bamako, described the emperor.

A French military intervention dislodged the jihadis from Gao in early 2013, but they continue to carry out regular bombings and assassinations. Neither law and order nor the tourists who once frequented the tomb and other remnants of the Songhai Empire have returned. The only Westerners now in Gao travel in armored vehicles, flitting between blast-proof compounds topped with razor wire.

The Malian state has essentially vacated an area the size of Texas, leaving French counter-terrorism forces and U.N. peacekeepers, who deployed to Mali in 2013, as the only authorities in the northern part of the country. On the nearly 3,000-mile frontier with Niger, Algeria, and Mauritania, all but a handful of official border posts are abandoned. “It is known that the borders are porous,” said Moussoudou Arby, the director of Mali’s border police, Turn to page 10

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MAGAZINE Contd. from page 9 adding that in the north especially, “Everybody knows there is no security.”

Where the legal economy has collapsed, the smuggling business has flourished. Weapons, narcotics, and migrants — tens of thousands of them each year from impoverished West African nations — pass through Gao on their way across the Sahara. The end of the ECOWAS zone is the Algerian frontier, which marks the beginning of illicit human-smuggling routes that run through the desert oasis of Tamanrasset toAlgiers and to the Libyan city of Sebha.

The International Organization for Migration, which monitors migrant flows, only began gathering data on those transiting through Mali in June 2016, but it estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 migrants stopped in Gao on their way to Algeria that year. Thousands more passed through Bamako, the Malian capital, en route to Burkina Faso and Niger, which counted more than 400,000 Algeria- and Libya-bound migrants in 2016. A record 181,000 people crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Italy that year. More than 4,500 died trying.

Europe’s response to the migration crisis has centered on fighting migration at its source, particularly in impoverished and war-torn countries like Mali. In addition to development initiatives aimed at creating jobs, the European Union and member states have rolled out a range of state-building, governance, and security policies designed to keep would-be migrants at home. In neighboring Niger, the EU gave the government hundreds of millions of dollars in direct budget support, as well as vehicles, training, and equipment, as part of a deal to shut down human-smuggling routes. The country passed an anti-trafficking law in 2015 that criminalized the transport of migrants across the Sahara — a law that critics say violates ECOWAS’s freedom of movement protocol — and the army started arresting smugglers and impounding their trucks.

Mali is too unstable and its security services too weak for such an arrangement to work right now. European military trainers, who began work in 2013, are “retraining a Malian army that just lost a war,” said Brig. Gen. Peter Devogelaere, then the commander of the EU training mission in Mali, said in February. “So they were starting from a very low level.”

But in private European officials acknowledge that something like the Niger deal is the ultimate goal in Mali, where ambitious EU-funded police and military training efforts are seen as essential to fight terrorism and, increasingly, migration. Once the northern half of the country is stabilized, the hope is that Malian authorities will begin clamping down on smugglers. In the meantime, France is pushing for the creation of a 5,000-strong West African armed force — launched in July but not yet fully funded — that will fight terrorists as well as traffickers.

Albrecht Conze, a veteran of the U.N. mission in Kosovo who until recently headed the EU police-training mission in Mali, said Europe’s heightened interest in Mali and the broader Sahel region reminded him of the massive international buildup in the Balkans during the wars of the 1990s. “For decades, this part of Africa was left to the French. No one else cared,” he said. But a migrationinspired “pivot to Africa” has turned it into “one of the most extensively covered post-crisis, post-conflict theaters in Africa with an enormous international presence.”

Malian smugglers know that a crackdown is coming.

“We are watching what is happening in Niger with a lot of attention,” Diadie said. Already, his business has changed in important ways because of what’s happening over the border. Fewer migrants are taking the route through Burkina Faso to Niger because they have heard the route is “closed,” he said. Instead, more and more of them choose to travel through Gao directly to Algeria, a shift confirmed by researchers and NGO workers focused on migration.

For now, Gao’s authorities are leaving smugglers alone.

The police make occasional patrols, often alongside U.N. peacekeepers, but their goal is to project normalcy in a town threatened by jihadis, not to deter crime.

LamissaBerthé, the director of prisons in Gao, said no smugglers were behind bars. “Most are common criminals, small fish,” he said of the incarcerated population. Diadie would qualify as a small fish in the smuggling world, but he doesn’t worry about the law. “You can always bribe the police,” he said. “Five hundred CFA [about $0.85] and there is no problem.”

BAMAKO, Mali — It was in Paris, but it wasn't glamorous work.

AmadouCoulibaly spent his nights swabbing a mop over acres of dimly lit office space as France's corporate workforce slept. Each dawn, he bedded down with a dozen other Malian immigrants, who rested in shifts in a barren, one-room flat they shared in Paris's 15th arrondissement.

But Coulibaly slept soundly in the surety of his purpose.

Born to a poor family in Bamako, Mali's congested riverside capital, he dropped out of university in order to support his aging parents. He watched as his wealthier, politically connected classmates graduated into plush government posts. They drove cars and worked in air-

Europe is expelling thousands of Africans. To one Malian deportee, that looks like a recipe for revolution.

Amadou Coulibaly outside his office at the Malian Association for Deportees in Bamako, Mali. Photo-graph by Sebastien Rieussec conditioned offices while he scratched out a living hawking kola nuts by the side of the road. By the time he had children of his own, all paths to prosperity seemed to have closed but one: the one that led abroad.

Almost a quarter of Mali's roughly 18 million nationals are thought to live outside the country, mainly in Europe and other African countries. An estimated 120,000 live in France, sending back remittances that exceed France's development aid to its former colonial possession, according to a favored talking point among Malian officials.

In France, Coulibaly earned about $600 a month, sending half of it home to his wife and children. It put food on the table and paid for school fees. “I didn't want my children to have to stop their education like I did. That's the reason I left,” said Coulibaly, whose unwrinkled complexion belies his 59 years. His children now have desks in air-conditioned offices of their own. One daughter is an accountant, and one is a doctor; he has three younger children still in school.

Coulibaly counts himself lucky to have made it to France but resents the manner in which he left it. One day in 2007, he was on his way to the train station when a police officer asked for his papers. Having applied and been rejected for a resident card, he was whisked away to detention. Thirtytwo days later, he was put on a flight to Bamako, one of 5,947 Malians whose expulsion from Europe between 2002 and 2013 offered a preview of the coming immigration crackdown.

As Europe grapples with a refugee crisis that saw the number of asylum-seekers jump 122 percent in 2015 to 1.3 million (the previous high was 700,000 in 1992, the year after the Soviet Union collapsed), it has sought to accelerate the deportation of failed asylum-seekers and migrants who arrive without proper documentation.

The European Commission, the EU's executive body, has recommended using “all leverage and incentives” at the EU's disposal to “ensure that third countries fulfil their international obligation to take back their own nationals residing irregularly in Europe.” Less than 40 percent of failed asylum-seekers were actually deported in 2013, the commission noted in its 2015 “European Agenda on Migration.”

As part of a broader makeover of its immigration policies, which includes spending nearly $2 billion on development and stabilization programs in Africa aimed at countering the “root causes” of migration, the EU is leaning hard on countries to take their citizens back. In 2016, the bloc deported more than 175,000 people, according to the EU border agency Frontex. But in places like Mali, where only a tiny percentage of young people can expect to find work in the formal sector, and where migration is often seen as a rite of passage, the pushback has been fierce.(B0X “You will have revolution and destruction if you start sending people back,” said Coulibaly, who is now living in Bamako with his family.

That is nearly what the Malian government got in December, when it signed a joint communiqué pledging to work with the EU to expedite the return of migrants living there illegally. Protests rocked the capital, and the government was forced to deny that it had ever agreed to help European countries identify and deport Malian nationals. (BarémaBocoum, a special assistant to Mali's minister of foreign affairs, declined to comment on the status of that agreement, citing “controversy” and the “sensitivity” of the subject.)

“The fact that the government has denied the EU deal shows how important migration is to the economy,” said Sabane Touré, an analyst at the Bamako-based Coalition for African Debt and Development Alternatives. “If you take the money from migration out of the economy, it will be nothing.”

European officials maintain that Mali is already obligated under international law to take back migrants and failed asylum-seekers. The December communiqué was just aimed at speeding up the process, they say. The Malian government has been reluctant to help European governments identify its nationals — a requirement for their legal return — and often dragged its feet on issuing them travel documents. And when European countries have tried to work around this problem by issuing their own travel documents, diplomatic spates have ensued. In January, the Malian government returned two African migrants deported from France, claiming that it could not verify they were Malians.

Advocates of so-called “take-back” agreements have argued that they could be sweetened with promises of expanded channels for legal migration. But European governments have shown little willingness to take in additional African workers at a time when populist and nativist sentiments are already on the rise. And there is no guarantee that giving African governments a set number of European work visas to distribute will be enough to offset the overwhelming public opposition to deportation agreements.

In Mali, migration is as much a cultural issue as an Turn to page 11

Eighteen months ago, Mohamed was moving more than 300 migrants a week through his ghetto for a profit of about $10,000 to $13,000. But then the crackdown happened, and he was forced to take his business underground.

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 11

MAGAZINE Contd. from page 10 economic one. The country has a proud tradition of venturing abroad that dates back to the Middle Ages, when caravan traders carrying gold and salt turned cities like Gao and Timbuktu into storied commercial hubs. Those same caravan routes are now used by smugglers; remittances are the new gold. Venturing abroad in many Malian communities, particularly in the south, is seen as an honor verging on an obligation.

Even the criminal syndicates, some of them with links to al Qaeda, that ferry migrants north are viewed as a necessary evil. “The passeur who helped me, was he a bad guy?” said Coulibaly, using the preferred term for smuggler in Mali. “I was able to send my children to school because of him. My daughter went to medical school.”

Coulibaly is now the vice president of an association that supports Malian migrants who have been expelled from Europe. He helps recent deportees get back on their feet and advocates for migrants' rights. He also lobbies the Malian government not to cooperate with European governments seeking to expel migrant workers like him. In his view, no amount of legal migration or development aid from Europe could ever make up for the remittances that come in from Malians abroad, many of whom migrated through informal channels.

(B0X) “One migrant can support more than 20 people at home,” he said. “They are the ones paying for homes, for schools, for hospitals. Aid from Europe can't pay for all this. Without migration, there will be no development.”

The human-smuggling route across the Sahara may have been the deadliest on Earth. Then the EU paid Niger's army to shut it down — and made it even more treacherous.

Photography by Nichole Sobecki AGADEZ, Niger — Ali leaned into the accelerator and squinted into the darkness. It was 3 a.m. on the southern edge of the Sahara, still another three days' drive through dizzying heat and shifting sand dunes to get to the border with Libya. He was doing 60 miles per hour with the headlights off, maneuvering the black Toyota Hilux around steep ravines and past rocky outcroppings by starlight in order to avoid detection. In the back, 25 Europe-bound migrants, all of them from Nigeria, clung to each other and to a handful of wooden poles that were wedged into the open bed of the truck.

A solemn 33-year-old with stained teeth and heavy bags under his eyes, Ali had made the perilous trip to Libya more than 100 times before — but never by this route. A few months prior, after Niger's government struck a deal with the European Union to shut down one of the world's most heavily trafficked human-smuggling routes, the army had begun intercepting convoys of migrants. The soldiers arrested the drivers and impounded their trucks.

Sometimes, Ali and other drivers said, they opened fire on vehicles that tried to flee, aiming for tires but hitting people as well. So the drivers stopped using the main road across the desert, a well-worn national route that runs more than 600 miles to the Libyan border, and forged their own paths across the vast and uninhabited Sahara.

Each time he crested a dune, Ali imagined the army lying in wait. He had long dreaded desert bandits, notorious for carjacking travelers along the old national route and then leaving them to die of thirst or exposure. Now he imagined new ways to suffer at the hands of a military that had once profited from human smuggling by levying an unofficial tax on each vehicle but which had recently begun to hunt drivers like Ali with the same urgency that it pursued al Qaeda militants.

The migration crisis has presented Niger with a similar opportunity to line its coffers, and it has happily adopted Europe’s view of human smugglers as a threat to regional stability.

Ali had made the perilous trip to Libya more than 100 times. But after Niger's government struck a deal with the European Union to crack down on human smuggling, he began taking longer and more dangerous routes across the desert. A few months later, he crashed into a gully at night, upending the vehicle and killing two of the 25 Nigerian migrants on board.

A former coxeur, Garba, left, was arrested last year as he loaded 49 migrants into trucks. He spent more than nine months in prison. Omar, right, used to drive migrants from Agadez to Libya at least twice a month but says fewer migrants are coming now and it takes longer and longer to fill a car with enough people to warrant making the increasingly dangerous journey.

Ali's mind was running wild with terrifying possibilities of what he might encounter in the dark when he felt the ground fall away and the vehicle pitch to the side. For a moment, he was airborne. Then the truck hit the ground with crushing force, careening to a halt on its side at the bottom of a gully he had missed in the darkness. He heard the groans before he wriggled himself free from the wreckage. Then he saw the trail of people thrown from the truck at odd intervals behind him. Two of them lay prostrate under a 50-gallon fuel tank. Their bodies were still.

Shaken but unhurt, Ali pulled out his Thuraya satellite phone and called a friend in Agadez, the age-old caravan city in Niger that has become inextricably linked with the modern migrant trade. He gave the friend his coordinates so that a search party could find them and then fished a trowel out of the truck. As the injured migrants looked on, he buried the two dead Nigerians in a shallow grave in the sand. “I don't remember their names,” Ali said. “There are too many who come and go. I can't keep them in my head.”

Until a little more than a year ago, Agadez was the epicenter of massive waves of migration from Africa that began in 2011, when the fall of Libya's dictatorship opened a clear path through weak and failing states to Europe's southern border. In 2016, a record 181,000 people arrived on Italy's Mediterranean coast. Most of them were subSaharan Africans fleeing poverty, war, and oppression.

More than half of them likely traveled through Agadez on their way.

Comprising a dense warren of mud-brick compounds that bear the same shade of cocoa brown as the surrounding Sahara, Agadez has been a place of exchange for more than 600 years. Like Timbuktu in neighboring Mali, it was a center of Islamic learning in the Middle Ages and an important transit point for caravan traders. But whereas the cargo of old was gold, salt, and slaves, now it is weapons, narcotics, and migrants. The trade touches almost everyone in the city, whether they are directly involved or living off the service industries that have developed around it. Grocers, hoteliers, the police — all of them are to some extent dependent on this illicit flow of people and goods. Before the crackdown began, the Nigerien army openly escorted the smugglers' convoys into the desert in exchange for a share of the profits. Sometimes hundreds of Toyota Hiluxes loaded down with young men made the crossing in a single day.

In its heyday as a smugglers' paradise, from 2013 to 2016, Agadez was crawling with profiteers who had money to burn. They would flock to the bars and nightclubs, Tuaregs and Toubous in flowing traditional jalabias mixing with Nigeriens of other ethnicities in hightops and skinny jeans, dancing and draining $4 cans of Heineken until the call to prayer echoed through the city at dawn. But when I visited in May, the city no longer felt like a freewheeling frontier boomtown. Market stalls sat empty in the 110-degree heat while drivers lounged all day in their yellow three-wheeled taxis without scoring a fare.

The nightclub at the Hotel de la Paix, a garish modern fortress rumored to have been financed by Muammar alQaddafi, still opened each night around midnight, the purr of a diesel generator audible over the rollicking pulse of Tuareg music. But every time I went in, the place was mostly empty.

The collapse of Agadez's economy was just one of the unintended consequences of Europe's bid to halt the flood of unwanted migrants and refugees toward its shores. In 2015, as the European Union was struggling to cope with what would amount to a record 1.3 million asylum-seekers that year — a 122 percent increase from 2014 — EU

l The city of Agadez, located at the gateway to the Sahara in northern Niger, has been a place of exchange

since the Middle Ages. Now it is at the heart of the human-smuggling trade.

Turn to page 12

12 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

MAGAZINE Contd. from page 11 officials held a series of emergency talks with African leaders. In November of that year, they announced a $1.9 billion EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa designed to combat the root causes of migration, including poverty and conflict. The EU also struck bilateral agreements with several African countries that migrants depart from and travel through on their way to Europe, aiming to strengthen border controls and disrupt smuggling networks. It designated Niger a priority country as part of a partnership framework agreement it made with the government in 2016, paving the way for a pledge of $633 million in exchange for stopping the flow of migrants through its borders.

In addition to funding development projects designed to wean the economy off trafficking, the EU, along with some of its member states, delivered training and equipment to Niger's security forces to help them clamp down on smugglers. Soon the same army that once escorted smugglers to Libya was putting them behind bars to be sentenced under a new anti-trafficking law passed with the encouragement of European governments.

From behind a broad wooden desk stacked with files, YahayaGodi, then the secretary-general for the governorate of Agadez, explained his government's abrupt change of heart. “We must fight against migration and human trafficking because it has many consequences,” he told me. “For instance, there is insecurity. It may also be connected to terrorism or the traffic in weapons.”

Surrounded on all sides by conflict and instability — the country shares borders with Nigeria, Mali, and Libya, all of which harbor significant terrorist threats — Niger has positioned itself as a key counterterrorism partner for Western nations, including the United States and France, both of which have military bases in the country. As a result, it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance from those nations. The migration crisis has presented Niger with a similar opportunity to line its coffers, and it has happily adopted Europe's view of human smugglers as a threat to regional stability.

“It’s very impressive how they fight for security,” said Ambassador Raul Mateus Paula, the head of the EU delegation in Niger, when I went to see him in Niamey, the capital. “This is very, very important because they are in the middle of problems: Libya, Mali, and Nigeria. So they have to increase dramatically their security expenditures.

That’s one of the reasons why the European Union is making a huge effort of budget support.”

Paula seemed pleased with the government’s efforts to halt migration so far. He pointed to the dramatic drop in migrants recorded transiting through Niger en route to Libya and Algeria, key jumping-off points to Europe, as evidence that the partnership is working. Between February and May 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has received funding from the EU to open transit centers where migrants are encouraged to return home, recorded 116,347 “outgoing” migrants in Niger. During the same period this year, it recorded less than a quarter of that number. In press releases, the EU has touted the number of smugglers arrested and trucks impounded by authorities. “I think that they made very, very important reforms,” Paula said. “And I think we have to keep working with them, support them, to fight terrorism [and] traffickers.”

The actual impact of Europe’s intervention in Niger is less clear. Since the crackdown began, smugglers have mostly stopped passing through established outposts and way stations, including those where IOM monitors the flow of migrants. This raises the possibility that the organization is underestimating the number of migrants still passing through Niger, perhaps by a significant margin. That possibility seems even more likely in light of the data on migrants who actually make it across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. As of Sept. 5, IOM reported that nearly 100,000 migrants had arrived in Italy this year from North Africa, more than half of them originally from West Africa, meaning that it’s likely they passed through Niger on their way. An estimated 400,000 additional migrants are currently stranded in Libya, caged in squalid detention facilities and prevented from making the dangerous sea voyage by militias in the pay of European nations.

What is clear is that Niger’s EU-funded crackdown has heightened the risks for smugglers, as well as for migrants.

One of those who paid a price for defying the authorities was GarbaHamani, a coxeur, or connection man, who was arrested last year as he loaded 49 migrants into trucks.

They were eventually released and taken to the IOM transit center, but Hamani spent nine months and 20 days behind bars. He said the jail in Agadez was filled with people connected to the migrant trade — smugglers, drivers, and coxeurs like him. But the smuggling business hasn’t stopped; it’s just been driven deeper underground. “You cannot stop this thing. If the government stops people here, they will just go another way,” he said.

The new routes are both longer and more dangerous, according to nearly a dozen drivers I interviewed in Agadez. Some pass through mountainous regions outside

l Men and women dance late into the night at a club in Agadez playing live Hausa music. Niger's EU-funded

crackdown on migration has hit the economy of Agadez hard, slowing the city's famously fast-paced nightlife down considerably.

l Sheriff Sonko sits inside the migrant ghetto in Agadez where he has been stranded for the last eight months.

He left Gambia without telling his parents so they couldn't try to talk him out of making the dangerous journey to Europe, but he ran out of money in Niger and is waiting for a family member to send more so that he can continue on to Libya.

the city before crossing vast stretches of desert. Some hug the border with Chad. One area where many of the new routes converge is in a desolate region some 20 miles outside of Dao Timmi, an old military installation in the far north of the country. Here, the trucks slow to a crawl and pass single file through a minefield that dates back to an uprising by ethnic Toubous in the 1990s. Used for years by weapons and drug smugglers because authorities stayed away, the route is now commonly taken by migrants.

“They made it a crime, so now it follows the criminal routes,” Hamani said.

Ali, who like most of the smugglers I spoke with asked to be identified by only his first name, started taking the road through the minefield soon after the crackdown started last year, a few months before his deadly nighttime crash. So did Laminou, a muscle-bound 25-year-old with short dreadlocks. Laminou deals in cars, specifically stolen cars from Libya that he smuggles in without papers. One day, he came upon a nightmarish scene: the obliterated remains of a pickup truck surrounded by the dead bodies of multiple migrants. “We couldn’t tell them apart. It’s one man’s leg, one man’s arm — all black,” he said. He and another driver did their best to bury the remains. Then they prayed together and set off again in their trucks.

No one knows how many migrants have died in the desert. Trucks get lost, break down, or are attacked by bandits all the time. Often, nobody finds out until another driver happens upon the human remains. “We know that many people are dying in the Mediterranean. But many are dying in the desert as well, and we have not many statistics,” Paula said.

In addition to being more dangerous, the new routes are also more expensive. Where it once cost around $300 to travel to the next staging post in Libya from Agadez, it now

costs more than double that amount. As a result, many more migrants are finding themselves stuck in the squalid compounds known as “ghettos” that smugglers have set up in secret locations throughout the city. This was the predicament Sheriff Sonko had been facing for the past nine months. A baby-faced 21-year-old, he left Gambia without telling his parents so they couldn’t try to talk him out of making the journey. But he hadn’t counted on the price of crossing the Sahara to skyrocket overnight. “If my parents don’t pay, I won’t leave here,” he told me.

Increasingly raided by the authorities, who arrest the smugglers and turn the migrants over to IOM, the ghettos are getting smaller, and they are constantly being moved so they won’t be discovered. Gaining access to the one where Sonko was living took days of negotiation because the smugglers feared I would be followed or would otherwise inadvertently reveal its location. The day I visited the halffinished compound in a largely abandoned neighborhood on the farthest margins of the city, just four other migrants besides Sonko were there — two from Cameroon and two from Guinea. A group of 29 West Africans had departed for Libya the night before. The structure itself was crumbling and covered with a thick dusting of sand. The dirt floors were bare except for a few empty water bottles, plastic bags, and a broken sandal — the detritus of an unknown number of previous inhabitants. On the walls, migrants had scribbled phone numbers, presumably of family members, drivers, and coxeurs. In one corner, someone had left a message in block letters: “The road of success never smooth.”

New routes pose new risks for those who attempt to ply them. But just as dangerous is the climate of fear that has settled over the Sahara in the wake of the crackdown. Ali Turn to page 13

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 13

MAGAZINE Contd. from page 12 blames himself for the deaths of the two migrants killed in the crash. But he also feels resentment toward the EU for having forced him to drive with his headlights off. “When they arrest you, that’s not a law coming from here,” Ali said. “That’s a law coming from Europe.”

When faced with the choice between ensuring their own freedom and saving their human cargo, many drivers choose freedom. Sometimes that means leaving migrants behind in the middle of the desert and speeding off to avoid a military patrol. According to AzaouaMahaman, an IOM official based in Agadez, more and more migrants are being abandoned in this way. Since the beginning of the year, he said in May, IOM had worked with Nigerien authorities to facilitate nearly a dozen rescue operations.

“The main reason we see abandoned migrants is because of the patrols,” he told me. “[The smugglers] are afraid of going to prison, so they drop the migrants and flee.”

This is hardly an irrational response. Unverified reports that the military has opened fire on migrant vehicles have circulated widely. Three different drivers told me that they knew of such incidents, though none had been present when they occurred.

One migrant was there when soldiers lit up a vehicle carrying two dozen passengers: In April, a slender 21-year-old Nigerian named Yinka was traveling through the desert in the back of a Hilux when suddenly gunshots rang out. Bullets shredded the tires beneath her and punched through the side of the vehicle. One hit her friend in the stomach, and she doubled over. Auntie Biola, as the six other women traveling together from Nigeria’s Oyo state called her, bled to death as Nigerien soldiers looked on. The driver fled the scene, and the migrants were all taken into custody. But first, the soldiers, who Yinka said were wearing uniforms, beat them all and raped the six surviving women. She said they were beaten and raped again when they arrived at the police station in Madama, one of the last settlements before the Libyan frontier. Because the other survivors of this ordeal had all been repatriated to Nigeria by the time I met Yinka in the IOM transit center in Agadez, I was unable to verify her claims.

But her account was consistent with testimony from other migrants at the center and with reports by rights groups on abuses, including rapes, committed by the Nigerien military as recently as 2007. Niger’s military and its ministries of defense and interior did not respond to written requests for comment; Paula, the EU ambassador, told me that he was not aware of any reports of abuse. “The traffickers,” he said, “are the real criminals.”

Most Nigeriens would disagree. Smugglers — known as passeurs, or “ferrymen” — are widely regarded as providing a vital service. (Migrants who send home remittances are seen as heroes in this part of the world.)

Still, passeurs are often involved in other forms of criminal activity — weapons and drugs, for instance — and now many of them are out of work. The crackdown hasn’t stopped the flow of migrants, but it has diverted much of the human traffic away from Agadez and pushed most of the profits toward smugglers with the highest appetite for risk. For those who are still making the trip, the EU has laid out a feast. For everyone else, it’s famine.

“Today, [illegal migration] generates more money than before,” RhissaFeltou, the mayor of Agadez, told me. But the profits go to “small mafia groups” instead of to a broad cross-section of society as they did before. The new policy, while necessary in his view, means that Agadez will suffer because its residents have historically been dependent on smuggling.

The EU has pledged to fund job trainings and other development projects to help former smugglers transition to new careers. But the crackdown commenced more than a year ago, and former drivers, coxeurs, and ghetto owners all said in May that they had yet to receive any assistance.

(The EU said the programs were on track and that the job trainings would begin soon.)

“We are very angry with the EU because they promised to help us. We even declared that we stopped the job,” said Mohamed, a lean, weather-beaten man in his early 40s who used to run a lucrative migrant ghetto out of his home. “But the promises have not been met. They have destroyed the life ofAgadez.”

Eighteen months ago, Mohamed was moving more than 300 migrants a week through his ghetto, for a weekly profit of around $10,000 to $13,000. Business was so good that he decided to knock his house down and build a bigger one so that he could fit more migrants in his courtyard. But before the new house was finished, the crackdown was underway, and he was forced to take his business underground.

Today, he lives with his wife and children in a single room in the courtyard of his younger brother’s house in Agadez’s old town, not far from the ancient mosque whose conical minaret towers over the rest of the low-slung city.

Mohamed comes from noble Tuareg lineage, and his older brother was once a famous musician in Agadez. (Posters of the brother in traditional Tuareg dress hung from the walls of the compound, alongside a framed photograph of

Moussa was a driver for migrants traveling to Libya. After Nigerien authorities began cracking down on smugglers, he applied to an EU-funded program designed to help former smugglers transition to new careers but says he has yet to receive any financial support.

Nine months ago, Kader was driving a truck full of migrants to Libya when he came across a military checkpoint. He fled into the desert to avoid arrest, leaving the migrants and his vehicle.

Qaddafi in aviators and a flowing headdress.) But the family appeared to have fallen on hard times; goats pranced through the living space, and pigeons clucked from inside a coop made of mud and straw.

“The way I live now and the way I lived one year ago is very different,” Mohamed said, leading me out of the compound and across a narrow alleyway between crumbling mud walls to a larger, half-finished complex made of rectangular brown bricks. A stray dog roused itself from a sandy depression to snarl at us and then slunk off into a corner. This was once his home, he explained, and where he had made a small fortune housing migrants before they were smuggled to Libya.

He told me that he would wait to see if anything comes of the promised job training programs, but he doubts that kind of legitimate work would ever pay as much as he earned running a migrant ghetto. Many of the smugglers he knows have already gotten back into the game, including his third brother, who was arrested in a sting operation by authorities in May. “Some people will try and get caught.

Others will take the dangerous routes and die,” Mohamed said. “This migration business, anyone who has experienced it can never leave it.”

My Smuggler, My Savior: They’re migrants’ only chance of making it safely across the Sahara. They’re also outlaws engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Niger’s military.

It was already among the most dangerous commutes on Earth. To make the 600-mile journey from Agadez, an ancient Nigerien caravan city that has grown into Africa’s most notorious human-smuggling hub, across the Sahara to Libya was to risk death at the hands of bandits, terrorists, and the elements. Unknown thousands of migrants — and the smugglers who shuttle them — have perished of thirst or exposure in the desert after their trucks broke down or got lost. Then in 2015 the journey became even more perilous. “The army started hunting us,” says Adji, who at 32 had been ferrying migrants to Libya for nearly 15 years. “They are even shooting at our trucks.”

The EU-funded crackdown on Niger’s smuggling industry didn’t stop the flow of Libya-bound migrants.

But it did force drivers like Adji to take new and more dangerous routes across the Sahara. “The distance is now twice what it was before and so are the risks,” says Adji, whose truck was hijacked by bandits as he traveled along a new route in 2016. He barely survived, walking for miles in the desert before stumbling across another migrant caravan. For the sake of his wife and children, Adji says he has left the trade, but those who are still willing to make the trip can expect profits even bigger than before. The cost of crossing to Libya has skyrocketed, he says, and for the right price there will always be someone willing to go. n

14 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

MAGAZINE

How the Bankruptcy System is failing Black Americans

By Paul Kiel with Hannah Fresques (ProPublica) This story was co-published with The Atlantic.

O

VASHA MILLER PUSHED THROUGH the revolving doors of the black glass tower on Jefferson Avenue last December and felt a rush of déjà vu. The building, conspicuous in Memphis’ modest skyline along the Mississippi River, looms over its neighbors. Then she remembered: Years ago, as a teenager, she’d accompanied her mother inside.

Now she was 32, herself the mother of a teenager , and she was entering the same door, taking the same elevator.

Like her mother before her, Miller was filing for bankruptcy.

She’d cried when she made the decision, but with three boys and one uneven paycheck, every month was a narrow escape. A debt collector had recently won a court judgment against her and, along with that, the ability to seize a chunk of her pay. Soon, she would be forced to decide between groceries or electricity.

Bankruptcy, she figured, despite its stink of shame and failure, would stop all that. She could begin anew: older, wiser, and with a job at a catering company that paid $10.50 an hour, a good bump from her last one. She could keep dreaming of a life where she had money left over at the end of each month, a chance of one day owning a home.

What Miller didn’t know when she swallowed her pride and called a local bankruptcy attorney is that she would probably end up right back where she started, with the same debts, in the same crisis. For the black debtors who, for generations, have made Memphis the bankruptcy capital of the U.S., the system delivers neither forgiveness nor renewal.

Up on the sixth floor of that tower where I met Miller last February, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Tennessee appeared to be a well-functioning machine. Debtors, nearly all black like her, crowded the wedge-shaped waiting area as lawyers, paralegals and court staff, almost all white, milled about in front.

Hundreds of cases are filed here every week, and those who oversee and administer the process all proudly note the court’s marvelous efficiency. Millions of dollars flow smoothly to creditors, to the court, to bankruptcy attorneys.

But the machine hides a harsh reality. When ProPublica

Black people struggling with debts are far less likely than their white peers to gain lasting relief from bankruptcy, according to a ProPublica analysis.

Primarily to blame is a style of bankruptcy practiced by lawyers in the South.

analyzed consumer bankruptcy filings nationwide, the district stood out, both for the stunning number of cases in which debtors were unable to get relief, and for the reasons why. In Memphis, an entrenched legal culture has made bankruptcy a boon for attorneys while miring clients like Miller in a cycle of futility.

Under federal bankruptcy law, people overwhelmed by debt have a choice: They can either file under Chapter 7, which wipes out debts and, since most filers lack significant assets, allows them to keep what little they have. Or they can choose Chapter 13, which usually requires five years of payments to creditors before any debts are eliminated, but blocks foreclosures and car repossessions as long as debtors can keep up. In most of the country, Chapter 7 is the overwhelming choice. Only in the South, in a band of states stretching from North Carolina to Texas, is Chapter 13 predominant.

The responsibility of knowing which path to pick falls to those seeking relief. In Memphis, about three-quarters of filings are under Chapter 13. That’s how Miller filed. She thought the two chapters were “the same,” she told me.

Initially, they are. Upon filing, debtors are shielded from garnishments and debt collectors. But whereas under Chapter 7 those protections are generally made permanent after a few months, under Chapter 13 they last only as long as payments are made. Most Chapter 13 filers in Memphis don’t last a year, let alone five.

As efficiently as cases are opened, they are closed — usually because debtors fail to keep up with payments, according to a ProPublica analysis of court data. In 2015, over 9,000 cases in the district were dismissed — more cases than were filed in 22 other states that year. Less than a third of Chapter 13 cases in the district result in a discharge of debts. And when their cases are dismissed, debtors are often in worse straits, because as they struggled to make payments, the interest on their unpaid debts continued to mount. Once the refuge of bankruptcy is gone, the debt floods back larger than ever. They’ve borne the costs of bankruptcy — attorney and filing fees, a seven-year flag on their credit reports — without receiving its primary benefit. A system that is supposed to eliminate debt instead serves to magnify it.

Driving this tremendous churn of filings is a handful of bankruptcy attorneys with what sounds like an easy pitch: immediate relief, for free. In Memphis, it typically costs around $1,000 to hire an attorney to file a Chapter 7, but most attorneys will file a Chapter 13 for no money down.

Ultimately, the fees for Chapter 13 filings are higher — upwards of $3,000 — but the payments are stretched over time. For many people, this is the only option they can afford: debt relief on credit. For attorneys, they gain clients — and a regular flow of fees — they might not otherwise get, even if few of their clients get lasting relief.

For black filers in Memphis, relief is particularly rare.

They are more likely than their white peers to file under Chapter 13 and less likely to complete a Chapter 13 plan.

Because failure is so frequent in Memphis, many people file again and again. In 2015, about half of the black debtors who filed under Chapter 13 in the district had done so at least once before in the previous five years. Some had filed as many as 20 times over their lifetimes. Here, bankruptcy is often not the one-time rescue it was envisioned to be, but rather a way for the poor to hold on to basic necessities like electricity for a couple months.

“The way we have it set up, our culture, has a lot of unintended consequences,” said Judge Jennie Latta, one of five bankruptcy judges in the Western District of Tennessee. Since 1997, when she took the bench, the racial disparities in Memphis have been evident, she said. “It was troubling to me then, and it’s still troubling to me.”

When I asked judges, trustees, who administer the cases, and debtor attorneys what could be done to reduce racial disparities and improve outcomes, I was mostly met with resignation. I heard a lot about the poverty in Memphis and a legal culture with deeply rooted traditions. But ProPublica’s analysis identified bankruptcy attorneys in Memphis who had much more success in getting their black clients out of debt. These attorneys had a different approach, preferring Chapter 7 to Chapter 13, and, crucially, allowing more flexibility in what clients paid upfront in fees.

Scrutiny of Memphis is important, because the racial differences we found there are present across the country.

Turn to page 15

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 15

MAGAZINE

How the Bankruptcy System is failing Black Americans

Contd. from page 14 Nationally, the odds of black debtors choosing Chapter 13 instead of Chapter 7 were more than twice as high as for white debtors with a similar financial profile. And once they chose Chapter 13, we found, the odds of their cases ending in dismissal — with no relief from their debts — were about 50 percent higher.

Meanwhile, the $0-down style of bankruptcy practiced in Memphis, long common across the South, is quietly growing in popularity elsewhere. Chicago in particular has seen an explosion of Chapter 13 filings in recent years. A recent study found that the “no money down” model is becoming more prevalent, prompting concerns that it is snaring increasing numbers of unsuspecting debtors and ultimately keeping them in debt.

ABOUT 10 MILES south of the black glass tower lies the community of Whitehaven. Famous as the site of Graceland, Elvis Presley’s mansion, its streets are lined with miles of humbler homes, mostly one- or twobedroom bungalows. The houses reflect the range of financial security among Whitehaven’s almost exclusively black residents: Some lawns are immaculately kept in front of neat, pretty facades, while others run riot with weeds next to broken-down cars.

This is where Novasha Miller was born and raised. She went to Hillcrest High on Graceland Drive and still lives in the area. Here, bankruptcy has a startling ubiquity. Count the bankruptcies filed from 2011 through 2015 by residents of Whitehaven, and there is almost one for every three households. Miller’s spiral downward began in late 2014, when she and her sons moved into a $545-per-month apartment in Highland Meadows, a complex pitched on its website as nestled in a “serene woodland setting.” Inside, roads wander around shaded clusters of two-story structures, some with boarded-up doors and windows.

Miller soon realized she’d made a mistake by signing the lease. Roaches emerged every time she cooked, she said.

Underneath the kitchen sink, mold was spreading that seemed to aggravate her 10-year-old son’s asthma. The stove broke; then bedbugs arrived, leaving telltale marks up and down her and her boys’arms.

Despite her calls and complaints, she said, management didn’t fix the mold issue and told her she’d have to pay for an exterminator herself. Finally, she decided to move. She wrote a letter saying she was breaking her lease and explaining why.

“My kids’ health is more important than anything, and I just had to leave,” she told me. (The company that manages Highland Meadows did not respond to requests for comment.)

A couple of months after she moved, Absolute Recovery Services, a collection agency, sent her a letter saying she owed $5,531 — a total that seemed inflated to Miller. If she didn’t pay up immediately, the agency wrote, it might sue.

It followed through the next month, tacking on a $1,844 attorney fee, for a total bill of $7,375.

Derek Whitlock, the attorney who represented Absolute Recovery Services in its suit against Miller, provided ProPublica with an accounting of Miller’s debt. Only $1,635 was due to back rent; the rest stemmed from eight different types of fees — all of which, Whitlock said, Miller had “contractually agreed to.” Miller’s lease had also stated that residents were “responsible for keeping the premises free from infestation of pest, etc.,” he said.

With no attorney to represent her, Miller went to court.

Delayed by a search for parking, she missed her case, and Absolute Recovery won a judgment against her. A court employee told her the agency could soon move to garnish

her paycheck, she said.

Under Tennessee law, debt collectors can seize up to a quarter of debtors’ take-home pay, and in Shelby County, which contains Memphis, they sought to do so in over 21,000 cases in 2015, according to a ProPublica analysis of court records. Such garnishments are far more common in black neighborhoods.

“I cried, stressing at work,” said Miller. “I couldn’t work, trying to figure out what to do.”

At the time, Miller earned $9 an hour working for a catering company where her hours were often cut without warning. Although she’d never had an extended stretch of unemployment, the last several years had been a struggle.

She still carried $19,000 in student loans from a cosmetology program, and a $1,100 loan from a car title lender, TitleMax, which she’d used to cover one month’s shortfall. TitleMax routinely lends at annual interest rates above 150 percent in Tennessee, and every month Miller had to come up with about $100 in interest to keep the company from seizing her 2003 Pontiac Grand Prix. If Absolute Recovery garnished her wages, Miller stood to lose her apartment, her electricity or the car she drove to work.

The pressure, she said, pushed her into bankruptcy court.

“It’s hard out here,” she said. “I hate that I had to go through it just to keep people from garnishing my check.”

She Googled “bankruptcy attorney” and landed on the website of Arthur Ray, who has been practicing in Memphis since the 1970s. His website was topped with “$0” in large type. “Most of our Chapter 13 bankruptcies are filed for $0 attorney’s fee up front.” She called and made an appointment.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I headed to Memphis to meet people like Miller and find out why attorneys there kept funneling their black clients into Chapter 13 plans when so few could complete them. I came armed with what amounted to a score sheet for each attorney, showing how their black and white clients had fared. ProPublica had taken every case filed in the district over 15 years, paired it with census information and put it on a map. In a starkly segregated city like Memphis, we could deduce the race of their clients with confidence based on where they lived.

I caught up with Ray by phone. Like most of the higher volume lawyers in the district, Ray is white while most of his clients are black. About nine out of every 10 of his cases is a Chapter 13. And he was twice as likely to file under Chapter 7 for a white client as he was for a black client.

None of this troubles Ray in the least. If Chapter 13 has an evangelist, it’s Ray, who trumpets its attributes unapologetically. In his eyes, debtors need Chapter 13 to train them to get their financial houses in order and instill discipline on their unruly spending.

“A Chapter 13 shows people how to live without buying things for that 60-month plan,” he said. “With a Chapter 7, wham bam it’s over, and they’re back to the same old thing, the bad habits that got them in trouble to begin with.”

When debtors squander Chapter 7’s power to erase debt, he argued, they are stuck — barred from filing again for eight years. Better to keep that option in reserve for something truly catastrophic, he said.

Ray conceded that most of his clients do not successfully complete their Chapter 13 plans, but he argued that wasn’t so bad. “It may be a long time before the creditors come after them,” he said. And when the phone calls and the legal notices do come back, “then they can file again.”

Even though residents of the mostly black areas in the Western District of Tennessee file for bankruptcy in much higher numbers than residents of white areas, they are less

likely to actually see any debt discharged, or wiped out.

With Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 filings combined, there were almost 8,000 more filings by debtors from mostly black census tracts from 2008-2010, but debtors from mostly white tracts received almost 3,000 more discharges.

I told Ray that Novasha Miller hadn’t understood the difference between the two chapters. Ray was not troubled by this either. As required by law, he said, he provides clients with documents explaining the difference, but any client who asks about Chapter 7 will get an argument from him. “They need to learn how to live not buying things on credit,” he said.

Few attorneys are likely to express this paternalistic view as bluntly as Ray, but the idea that bankruptcy courts should rehabilitate debtors instead of simply freeing them of their debts dates back to the 1930s, when, buoyed by creditors’ lobbying efforts, Chapter 13 first became law.

It’s a form of bankruptcy that sprang from the South: Started as an experiment by the bankruptcy court in Birmingham, Alabama, it was added to the federal bankruptcy code through a bill authored by a Memphis congressman. To this day, many see Chapter 13 as the more honorable form of bankruptcy because it includes some attempt to repay debts.

But when I asked some of Ray’s colleagues why so many of their clients filed under Chapter 13, honor was rarely mentioned. Instead, they said it was about holding on.

“Chapter 13 is generally a ‘keep your stuff’ chapter,” is how Bert Benham, a Memphis bankruptcy attorney, put it.

Most people who end up filing in the district don’t own much. In 2015, 69 percent of those who filed under Chapter 13 didn’t own a home, and the median, or typical, income was less than $23,000 per year.

For many people, the most important thing is keeping their car, a necessity in Memphis, which has little public transportation. Used car lots abound, offering subprime credit. When borrowers fall behind and lenders threaten repossession, Chapter 7 won’t stop that from happening.

But Chapter 13 allows secured debts to be repaid over the course of the plan. In theory, loan payments on a car or mortgage can be reduced to an affordable level, providing time to catch up without fear of repossession or foreclosure.

Lured by this promise, desperate Chapter 13 filers can spend years caught in a loop. One Whitehaven resident told me how, in order to hold on to her car, she’d filed under Chapter 13 four times since 2011. The first time, she lost her job a year and a half after filing, and her case was dismissed after she fell behind. She immediately filed again to keep the car for job interviews, using unemployment benefits to make the payments until she couldn’t. She then filed a third time. Finally in 2014, after her third dismissal, she got a new part-time job paying $11 an hour and filed again.

She still has two years of payments to go and will have spent most of her 30’s trying to hold on to her car. “If I’d known,” she said, “I just would have let my car go.”

Bernise Fulwiley, 60, filed for Chapter 13 in 2014 to avoid foreclosure on her home, a brick bungalow with a large maple in the yard on a corner in Whitehaven. The following year, she lost her warehouse job when she required foot surgery and couldn’t keep up her payments.

She got another warehouse job, earning $9.50 an hour, and filed again. She has kept up the payments for two years, and is determined to make it for three more. “‘God, go before me. Open this door! Help me, Lord!’

That’s been my prayer,” she said. “I ain’t gonna never give up.”

For decades, the most prolific bankruptcy firm in Memphis has been Jimmy McElroy’s, known for its longrunning TV commercials featuring the now-deceased Ruby Wilson, a legendary blues and gospel singer dubbed the Queen of Beale Street. At the end of 30-second spots, she exclaimed, “Miss Ruby sings the blues, and you don’t have to!”

McElroy, a mild-mannered white man in his 70s with a genteel lilt to his speech, told me that “the ultimate success” for a Chapter 13 filing is “to pay it out, get a discharge, get out of debt. And then learn to live within your means.” From 2011 through 2015, McElroy’s firm filed over 8,000 Chapter 13 cases and fewer than 900 Chapter 7 cases. About 80 percent of his clients come from predominantly black neighborhoods.

But “ultimate success” is rare at his firm. Only about one in five of the Chapter 13 cases filed by his black clients reached discharge, a rate typical for the district. When I asked why, McElroy, whose office is in the same tower as the bankruptcy court, said clients generally “get the temporary relief they needed,” but then things just happen: “They lose their job. They get sick. They get a divorce.”

Sometimes Chapter 7 does seem like a better choice, he said, but the client can’t afford to pay the attorney fee, which, at his firm, is about $1,000. n To be contd. in the next edition.

16 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

BOOK REVIEW

The Mande Charter T he Mande Charter or Mande Oath was a charter created circa 1232 A.C.E. during the formation of the Mali empire. Sundiata Keita, the great founding father and first emperor of Mali and a team of advisors authored the beautifully worded text that spells out the rights of human beings and abolishes slavery and the slave trade in the empire. An oath that was undisclosed for centuries as part of the 'secret history' of Mali, the Mande Charter was a clandestine document taught only to griot (historian) initiates.

One of these initiates, Wa Kamissoko, a master griot from Krina, decided it was time to reveal some of the secret history to the public since modernity was rapidly eroding the traditional systems of knowledge. Malian historian Youssouf Tata Cissé, who was fascinated by Wa Kamissoko's dignity, dedication, and amazing scope of knowledge spent years studying and documenting his discourses.

His most important discourse was the revelation of the Mande Charter abolishing slavery forever in the Mali Empire, an oath that was broken twenty years after Sundiata’s death.

The Mande Charter 1. The hunters declare: All human life is one life It is true that one life may appear to exist Before another life, But one life is not more “ancient” or more Respectable than another life In the same way no living being is superior to another living being.

2. The hunters declare: All life being one life, All harm caused to a living being requires reparation Hunger will no longer kill a person in Manden, Consequently, If by chance famine raged against us, No one can take things freely [steal] from his War will never again destroy some village neighbor, To take away slaves, No one must cause harm to his fellow man, From now on no one can force a bit in the mouth No one should kill his fellow man.

Of another human being to sell into slavery, 3. The hunters declare: A person will no longer beat, let alone, put to death That everyone must watch over his fellow man, another That everyone should venerate their ancestors, Because he is son of a slave.

That everyone should educate their children, 6.

The hunters declare: That everyone maintain and provide for the needs of their The essence of slavery is extinguished this day family. “from one end to the other” of Manden, 4. The hunters declare: Raiding is banished and reckoned with this day in That each guard the country of their fathers Manden, Through country or homeland The torments born of these horrors have ended this day in He must also understand and especially men Manden.

That every nation, every land where men disappeared What tribulation, what torment!

From the face of the earth Especially when the oppressed have no other recourse Became immediately nostalgic.

What decadence that slavery!

5. The hunters declare: The slave is not shown any consideration in this world.

Hunger is not a good thing, 7.

The people of the past say: Slavery is no longer a good thing, “Man in that he is an individual There is no greater calamity than slavery in the present Made of bone and flesh of marrows and nerves, world.

Nourishes himself with food and drink; As long as we are in possession of the bow and quiver, But his soul, his mind lives on three things:

Excerpt from“Kuma Malinke Historiography: Sundiata Keita to Almamy Samori Toure”

To see what it wishes to see, To say what it wishes to say, And do what it wishes to do; If even one of these things is missing from the soul, It suffers and will surely waste away.”

Consequently, the hunters declare: From now on each person arranges his own affairs Everyone is free to do what he wants In respect of the prohibitions Such is the oath of the Manden For the benefit of the ears of the entire world.

Nubia Kai, Ph.D (Translator) See also Abolition of Slavery in West Africa; Mali Empire; Manden Oath Bibliography Cissé, Youssouf Tata and Wa Kamissoko. La grande geste du Mali. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1988.

Cissé, Youssouf Tata and Wa Kamissoko. Soundjata, la gloire du Mali. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1992.

Kai, Nubia. KumaMalinke Historiography: Sundiata Keita toAlmamy Samori Toure.

Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Press, 2014.

Kamissoko, Wa. L'empire du Mali. Trans. Youssouf Tata Cissé. Paris: Foundation, SCOA, 1975. n

Coming Revolutions in Black Africa T he Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan are setting the stage for Africa's “coming revolutions” based on the character of their internal conflicts. As shown in this book,these are after-effects of the architecture of the African post-colonial States, which were deemed artificial during the first wave of anti-colonial agitations, the artificiality now being manifested in these instances, where the post-colonial state is held together mainly by force of arms. Interestingly, these also rely on pitting one people against the other, the post-colonial State itself being anchored on a colonial preference for any favored Nationality in the colony thus setting the stage for perpetual crisis which has now become the order of the day inAfrica.The foundation of these conflicts lies in arbitrary colonial boundaries and arbitrary agglomerations of peoples, conflicts that have been aggravated in each country by the poor management of diversity since independence, conflicts that are contributing in great measure to poor pace of development in Black Africa, to poverty, and to massive human suffering.

Drawing from specific examples of Ghana, Uganda, the Congo, Ethiopia, the authorholds that thefoundation of these conflicts lies in arbitrary colonial boundaries and arbitrary agglomerations of peoples, conflicts that have been aggravated in each country by the poor management of diversity since independence, conflicts that are contributing in great measure to poor pace of development in Black Africa, to poverty, and to massive human suffering. Therefore, the best solution to these perennial conflicts in sub-Saharan African countries is a rational Federalism through a sensible FederalAutonomy structure.

This advocacy differs in degrees from the Pan-African advocacy of the previous era, in which many African youths excitedly participated. Pan-Africanism earlier sought freedom and independence, and eventually led to independent

countries and the concretization of the continental brotherhood now known as the “African Union”.

Yet, the internal formulation, structure and management of these countries make any form of unity impossible in almost all the countries, and are panaceas for conflict and

underdevelopment, and that only a system of careful respect for the various Nationalities in each country, a sensible Federal structure based on such respect, serious deference to the reality of national diversity, and higher qualities of statesmanship among the rulers of each country, will positively change the direction of Black Africa's modern history – will, indeed, generate positive change and progress, and prevent the kinds of painful (and possibly destructive) change that further and heightened conflicts and human suffering would generate.

The author, Professor S. Adebanji Akintoye is an eminent African scholar, academic from Nigeria, a leading African historian with famous works on the history of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria in West Africa. After a B.A Honors degree at London University and a Ph.D. in African History at the University of Ibadan, he started his university teaching career in African History at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he became a professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies. In the United States, he has taught African History at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, and Eastern University, St. David's, Pennsylvania.

His published works include: A History of the Yoruba People (2010), Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland 1840-93, (1971); Emergent States of Africa: Topics in 20th Century African History, (1976), Ten Years of the University of Ife (1973), and An Outline of Yoruba History (2016). He has contributed chapters to several books, as well as several articles to leading scholarly journals. For years, he has written weekly columns for two of Nigeria's national newspapers.

Now in his eighties, he still plays active roles as an elder statesman and intellectual leader in the promotion of rational Federalism for the countries of his Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a strong pillar among those who propose respect for the Nationalities inside each Black African country. (available on Amazon) n

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 17

FOR THE RECORD

Extractive Sector Transparency, Value Maximisation and Nigeria’s Economic Recovery

P

ermit me to start commending the family of late Alhaji Dauda Adegbenro and the Governing Board of the Dauda Adegbenro Foundation for keeping alive the memories and legacies of the late frontline politician. I also want to commend you for taking an approach that promotes human capacity development and reasserts the place of ideas in national development. Beyond those familiar with the life and times of the late politician and the roles he played in the build-up to independence and at a critical period in post-independent Nigeria, the work of the foundation offers a great opportunity, not only for the younger generation to know about him and others in his generation and about their sacrifices and contributions, but also for all — the young, the not-so-young, the old and the not-so-old — to continue that critical conversation about, and the search for the good society. I must also thank you for inviting my very humble self to be part of this on-going and important conversation about national well-being. I cannot thank you enough.

I have been asked to speak about “Transparency in the Extractive Sector: Driving Wealth Creation and Sustainable Revenue as Solution to Economic Recession”. Since we are technically out of recession, I feel it would be more useful to talk about how we can use our natural endowments to drive economic recovery in Nigeria and to also talk about other things we need to do to ensure that the attendant growth from the primary advantage granted by resource endowment is deepened, sustained, and shared. I will pursue two theses in this intervention: one, our natural resource endowments can translate to real and sustained prosperity only if we maximise the opportunities they offer and only if we manage the revenues derived from them in a prudent, transparent and accountable manner. In our almost 60 years of independence, we have not done that. Two, and somewhat contradictorily, we need to look beyond natural resources for our development. The wealth of nations, it is now established, is not under the ground but over it.

Nigeria and the Paradox of Plenty In terms of natural resource endowments, our country could as well be the biblical Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, just that the milk and the honey have not been appropriately harnessed to nourish and benefit the mass of our people. Nigeria is richly endowed with oil and gas, still highly prized sources of domestic and industrial energy across the globe. With 37.1 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Nigeria has the 11th largest oil reserves in the world and is the world's eighth largest exporter of crude oil.

The first level of paradox is well known: Nigeria exports crude oil and imports refined petroleum products to meet most of its local needs. The total installed capacity of our four refineries is 445,000 barrels per day, with actual utilisation sometimes below 20%. A quick comparison with Singapore can help with perspective. Singapore has a population of 5.6 million people (compared to ours of 186 million), produces a little over 20,000 barrels of crude oil per day (compared to ours of average of 2 million barrels per day), is the 78th producer of oil in the world (compared to ours at 8th) but has an oil refining capacity of 1.54 million barrels per day (compared to ours that could be lower than 100,000 barrels per day).

Nigeria is sometimes described as a gas country that has some deposits of oil. With proven gas reserves of 180.1 trillion cubic feet, we have the 9th largest gas reserves in the world. Though gas utilisation is improving, a very significant proportion of our associated gas is flared, with due implication not just on the people and the environment but on prosperity in terms of lost electricity and income.

According to figures from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), though gas flaring was slashed by 26% within ten years, sum of $850m and 3,500 megawatts of electricity were lost to gas flaring in 2015 alone. Despite being a major oil and gas producing country for 60 years, it is clear that we have not fully optimised and maximised the

A Paper delivered by Waziri Adio, the Executive Secretary of NEITI, on 27th September, 2017 at the 3rd Annual Lecture of the Dauda Adegbenro Foundation, held at the Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.

l Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari

opportunities in the oil and gas value chain.

The picture is grimmer in the solid minerals sector, where Nigeria is blessed with large deposits of 44 different minerals spread across the country. According to data from the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, Nigeria has, among others, 639 million metric tonnes proven reserves of coal but production is only at 0.04 million metric tonnes, has 3 billion metric tonnes proven reserves of iron ore but production is only 0.07 million metric tonnes, has 5 million metric tonnes proven reserves of lead/zinc but production is at 0.6 million metric tonnes, has one million metric ounces proven reserves of gold but production is 0.04 million ounces, and has 568 million metric tonnes proven reserves of limestone but production only at 11 million metric tonnes.

Thus, despite the abundance of solid minerals in the country, production has been low and the sector has contributed minimally to national development output. Solid mineral sector, according to the NBS, only accounted for 0.12% of GDP and 1.45% of total non-oil exports in 2015. Remember for a moment that Nigeria used to be a major mining country, that some of our cities developed around solid minerals (JOs, the Tin City, Enugu, the Coal City), and that the solid minerals sector used to be a major employer of labour and used to contribute about 5% to our GDP in the '60s.

Partly because of low optimisation and largely because of governance issues, natural resource endowment has not translated to prosperity for the mass of Nigerians. Nigeria has one of the lowest development indicators in the world.

The 2016 UNDP Human Development Report, which measures human development in terms of educational attainment, life expectancy and per capita income, ranked Nigeria 152 out of 188 countries, behind South Africa, Kenya, Gabon and Ghana, and not among the top 20 in Africa. In a related vein, data from NBS show that the period between 1980 and 2010 witnessed a steady increase in poverty rate in Nigeria. While 27.2% of Nigerians were considered poor in 1980, this increased to 46.3% 1985 then 69% in 2010. In raw figures, the number of Nigerians adjudged to be poor increased from 17.1 million in 1980 to

Table 1: Comparison of Human Development Indices

Source: Human Development Report, 2016

112.47 million in 2010, an increase of 558%. The massive inflow of rents from the oil sector has not made a positive dent on human welfare in Nigeria. This illustrates not just the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty but has turned Nigeria into the most cited example of the phenomenon of resource curse.

Resource Curse:AParadox Foretold Ordinarily, natural resources should be synonymous with blessings. So the idea of resources and curses occurring together in the same sentence and in reality is not only an oxymoron but the very definition of paradox. But it is real.

The story of many resource-intensive countries, including ours, has amply and sadly demonstrated this. Beyond anecdotal evidence or the conflation of coincidence with causality, it has been proven empirically by Jeffrey Sachs and others that resource-rich countries mostly perform worse economically than those not similarly endowed.

True, there are a few resource-rich countries that have escaped resource curse. But these countries — such as Norway, Canada, Malaysia, UAE and Botswana — are the exception rather than norm. The exceptions have however also shown that resources do not come studded with curses.

It is the risks and choices that resource-endowment predispose the ruling elites and the larger societies of resource-intensive countries to that turn natural resources from potential enablers of prosperity to uncanny facilitators of poverty. Resource-intensive countries are usually prone dependence, delusions and distortion, three afflictions which translate to high levels of corruption, incessant conflicts and a dysfunctional ethos of politics and society and ultimately to poor economic outcomes.

The first of such afflictions manifests in the form of what is called the Dutch Disease. Deriving its name from the paradoxical outcome of the discovery of large gas reserves by the Netherlands in 1959, this concept describes what could happen when a country experiences sudden and massive inflow of foreign exchange because of the high price of its natural resources in the international market. This is likely to result in raising the value of the country's currency but with the net and negative effect of making its other exports expensive and therefore non-competitive and imports relatively cheaper. This in turn creates what is called the crowding out effect, when the export of natural resources crowds out other sectors of the economy such as agriculture and manufacturing and which are in turn crowded out by cheap imports. The country ultimately becomes a monocultural economy, depending on the valuable natural resource for its export, for most of its foreign exchange and for government revenues. In addition, the country becomes dependent on imports to meet most of its household and industrial needs. Does this sound like a country we all know?

This double-dependence would not be a problem as long as the price of the primary product stays high. But it is also a known fact that commodity prices fluctuate and despite the existence of cartels such as OPEC that try to constrain supply to keep prices high, resource-dependent countries are price takers and prone to be boom-and-bust cycles.

Resource-dependent countries are thus usually advised to save during boom times as insurance against bust times.

Another common prescription is for resource-dependent countries to deliberately diversify their export and revenue base. But they hardly save for the rainy day and they hardly, beyond lip services, diversify their revenue and export base.

This is because the elite and even the citizens of resourcerich countries, flushed with sudden and massive wealth, become deluded. They think the good times will last forever.

They take the easy road. They make choices that are not sustainable. They mistake natural wealth for real wealth. But while benefits of booms are usually narrowly confined, the burdens of busts are usually widely dispersed, leading to the kind of economic meltdown that Nigeria is slowly emerging from.

The other affliction of resource-dependence is that it distorts not just the structure of the economy but also that of politics and the society. The economy shifts from a tax and productive economy to an extractive one. This changes the dynamics between the citizens and those in authority, leading to what some have called the unholy pact: “we will not bother you about taxes, and you will not bother us about what we do resource rents.” Transparency and accountability thus go out of the window; corruption not only increases but also becomes the norm. This also changes the organising philosophy of politics from one driven by service to one animated by extraction of benefits for selves and clients. Public office becomes unduly attractive and the intense competition for access fuels conflicts. When revenue uncertainties co-join with low national productivity, high import-dependence, predatory politics, pervasive

Turn to page 18

18 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

FOR THE RECORD Contd. from page 17 corruption, and constant conflicts, the vicious cycle of resource curse is complete. But it has also been established that resource curse is not destiny. It is not inevitable.

NEITI: Shining Light in Dark Places, Promoting Prudent Revenue Management Based on the conviction and the evidence that the onset of resource curse can be averted and its onslaught can be reversed, several propositions surfaced in the academia, civil society and within governments about how to ensure that natural resources aid, and not impede, human development. One of such prescriptions is the Extractive Industries Transparency/Initiative (EITI), launched in 2002 by the then UK Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa. EITI revolves around the idea that regular disclosure of reconciled payments and revenues from the extractive sector will limit the incidence of sharp practices and mismanagement and trigger debate about optimal use of extractive revenues and resources.

Nigeria, under President Olusegun Obasanjo, voluntarily signed up to the EITI in 2003 and started implementation in 2004 with the constitution of the first National Stakeholders Working Group of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), led by Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili. In 2006, NEITI published the first major audit of the oil and gas sector covering the period 1999 to 2004, beaming an intense searchlight on a sector that was renowned for its opacity. In 2007, the NEITI Act was passed by the National Assembly, making Nigeria the first of the now 51 EITI-implementing countries to institutionalise the initiative with a law. The tradition of beaming light in dark places has continued unabated: NEITI has conducted seven cycles of oil and gas audit reports, five cycles of solid minerals audit report and one FiscalAllocation and Statutory Disbursement Audit. NEITI has pushed the reports in the public domain, partnering with the media and civil society to trigger debate about the audit findings and working with relevant government agencies to remedy the gaps discovered in the operations of the extractive sector. In the last 18 months, NEITI has also introduced three new policy products to stimulate further debates and trigger necessary policy actions on prudent, optimal and accountable utilisation of Nigeria's extractive resources. These are the NEITI Policy Brief, the NEITI Quarterly Review and the NEITI Occasional Paper Series.

Through NEITI's reports and interventions, Nigerians now know more about the operations of the sector that, despite low commodity prices, still remains the backbone of their economy. Citizens, civic groups and the media are now better armed with information that they can use to ask probing questions and make informed contributions to governance. Over time, various governments have used information from NEITI's reports to cover almost $3 billion that would have ended up unpaid. NEITI's recommendations are driving the on-going reforms in our oil and gas and mining sectors. Nigeria sets the pace among EITI implementing countries, which now include the UK, US and Germany. In 2013, Nigeria was voted as the best EITI implementing country in the world. Different countries, notably Ethiopia and Malawi, have come to Nigeria to understudy how EITI is implemented in Nigeria.

Despite the well-acknowledged progress that our country is making in EITI implementation, Nigeria is yet to escape resource curse. EITI has not failed us. We, especially at moments of high oil prices, failed ourselves. Our country will benefit more from faithfully implementing the recommendations of the NEITI audit reports, which are done at considerable public expense. On-going reforms of the extractive sector deserve special commendation and should be sustained. Yet, much more needs to be done to ensure prudent, accountable and optimal use of our extractive resources. I will mention just a few of the issues that have become recurring decimals in NEITI's audit reports to show the outstanding remedial actions we need to take.

One, we need to know exactly how many barrels of crude oil we produce, not just how many barrels that we export.

NEITI's first audit report (covering the period 1999 to 2004), claimed that Nigeria did not know or could not independently and scientifically state its oil production beyond the say-so of the operators. The situation remains the same, eleven years after that report was released, 59 years after we exported our first vessel of oil and 60 years after we discovered oil in commercial quantity in Oloibiri, in present Bayelsa State, NEITI had recommended the need for multiphased, cultivated meters at the week-heads, the flow stations and the export terminals. Beyond mere fixation on transparency, knowing what we produce has implications for government revenues, citizens' welfare and national security. Other countries have invested not only in metering infrastructure, but also in digital command centres where they can monitor the status of their oil assets in real time. We should not continue to trifle with a sector that still accounts for bulk of government revenues.

Related to this is the issue of crude losses due to outright theft and deferred productions on account of vandalism and sabotage. The Federation share of crude oil losses was valued at $14.2 billion between 2009 and 2013. Lost domestic crude recorded as lost was valued at $1.5 billion within the same period. In 2014 alone, six companies

reported crude oil losses valued at $4.1 billion and domestic crude loss was put at $100 million. These are losses at almost industrial scale. Imagine the revenue, welfare and security implications of these losses. Also, there have been losses to uneconomic and sometimes unseemly practices such as Product for Oil Swap, Offshore Processing, Agreements and the infamous Strategic Alliance Agreements (SAAs). The country lost $518m and $198.7m to SWAP and OPA in 2013 and 2014 respectively. (This administration has discontinued SWAP and OPA). There are also losses due to failure to act. A major case in point is the failure to review the 1993 Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs) as demanded by Section 16 of the Deep Offshore and Inland Basin Production Sharing Contract Act which states that the terms of the contracts should be reviewed in ways that are economically more beneficial to the country when oil prices cross $20 in real term and 15 years after the 1995 agreements came into effect and five years subsequently. The Honourable Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, recently put the value of the loss incurred on account of the non-review of the PSCs at $60 billion. NEITI has not independently validated this figure. But imagine the implication of $60 billion in terms of revenues for the three tiers of government and the potential impact on citizens' welfare. Also flagged consistently is the low contribution of the solid minerals sector, regulatory uncertainties, and lack of clear fiscal and legal terms in the extractive sector. For example, we have been trying to pass the Petroleum Industry Bill for almost ten years, carrying on as if the world will always wait for us. And then there is the not-so-small matter of revenues withheld or owed by NNPC and its subsidiaries, especially the NPDC. In March this year, NEITI published a policy brief where it put the value of unremitted funds at $21.8 billion and N316 billion. With the way we have managed our extractive sector and our failure to make corrective actions, we should not be surprised that enormous resource endowments have not translated to sustained growth and sustainable human development in Nigeria.

NEITI, on its part, will continue to shine the light. But this will not amount to much if others do not do their parts.

Moving from Recession to Sustained Recovery The extractive sector is roundly implicated in our march into and out of recession. Exposed to the oil and gas sector, at some point, for as much as 95% of exports and 85% of government revenues, our economy was not insulated enough from the well-known volatility of commodity prices and other negative consequences of resource dependence.

So, when oil prices started falling in September 2014, it was clearly inevitable that our economy would be negatively impacted. That sense of inevitability is underpinned by the following: the price of commodity that is our main source of government revenue and foreign exchange, within a short space, fell by about 75%; we did not use the period of boom to diversify our revenue and export base but rather we expanded public expenditure with the boom; our production plummeted due to militant activities; we did not build up foreign reserves to accommodate fall in foreign earnings from $3.2 billion monthly to as low as $400 million at a point against an import bill which had ballooned by 519% from N148.3 billion in 2005 to N917.6 billion in 2015; we imported most of our final and intermediate goods, including refined petroleum products (which accounted for 40% of forex demands).

National productivity figures shared plunging from late 2014, showing how our economic fortune is unhealthily yoked to movement in oil prices. GDP growth rate went from 5.94% in Q4, 2014 to 3.96% in Q1, 2015, to 2.35% in Q2, 2015 slightly up to 2.84% in Q3, 2015 then back down to 2.11% in Q4, 2015 sliding further to -0.67% in Q1, 2016 then to -1.49% in Q2, 2016 when we technically entered recession. After five consecutive quarters of negative growth, national productivity returned to positive territory in Q2, 2017 with 0.55% rate. One of the major reasons we exited recession was because of positive growth in the oil and gas sector based on increased oil production and higher oil prices. Oil contribution in GDP in Q2, 2017 was 1.64% from -11.63% of the corresponding quarter of last year and 15.40% of the first quarter of 2017. In a way, we can say that the oil sector took us into recession and took us out of it. No doubt, the exit from recession should be celebrated. But as many have said, the growth is still fragile, not widespread or deep enough. We need to be alive to the danger of a double-

dip and prevent that from happening. Most importantly, we need to delink our economic fortunes from the fate of oil prices.

I will conclude by saying that for the extractive sector to drive sustainable growth and development in Nigeria, we need to focus on five areas. The first is that we need to fully optimise the opportunities that resource endowments offer and go beyond the easy and lazy approach. For now, we are still scratching the surface. Value optimisation would mean going beyond just exporting crude oil and refining petroleum products for domestic consumption and export, harnessing gas instead of flaring it, and becoming major players in the petroleum chemicals arena. The real value is in value-addition, otherwise we remain price takers and marginal players. It would mean changing the solid minerals sector from an abandoned and artisanal-dominated sector to a major contributor to GDP, to exports, to industrial development and to jobs. Clear and predictable legal and regulatory frameworks, reasonable incentives, and aggressive marketing would be needed. The 7 Big Wins, the Solid Minerals Roadmap, the investment outreaches by the respective ministries and renewed efforts to pass the Petroleum Industry Bill are steps in the right direction, and should be seen to the logical conclusion.

While value addition and optimisation would ensure we make more money, they cannot guarantee that the money would not end in private pockets. We therefore need more openness, not less. We need not just revenue transparency but also ownership transparency, contract transparency, expenditure transparency and assets transparency. We need to strengthen NEITI and other agencies and institutions that shine light in dark places and we need to encourage and empower our citizens to ask informed questions. The third arena of work is we need to save against commodity price volatility and natural resource depletion. NEITI's study into Nigeria's oil saving funds shows that we don't have a robust natural resource savings mechanism. The total amount in our three oil savings fund is $3.9 billion, enough to fund only 16% of the 2017 federal budget. Meanwhile, the value of the sovereign wealth fund of Norway, a country of 5.2 million people, hit the $1 trillion mark last week. Without enough savings, we will always be vulnerable.And time is not on our side: our oil will run out in 38 years; the world is rapidly moving beyond oil, as countries embrace electric vehicles and even the oil majors are moving to gas. Yes, there are other uses of oil beyond gasoline and we are more of a gas than an oil country. But the glorious days of oil and even other natural resources seem numbered. We might be lucky to experience another boom before the bottom falls off. Now is the time to optimise, to manage transparently and prudently, and save for the rainy days and the future, whether prices are high or low.

However, we need to come to terms with the reality that a natural resource-led development approach leads to a mirage. From 1981 to 2015, Nigeria earned a total of $715 billion from oil. It is a lot of money, but not an awful lot when you take our population size and developmental needs into consideration. And for perspective, the market value of Apple is $751 billion. That is just one company. So the fourth arena of work is to aggressively restructure our economy and psyche. Malaysia is a good example to follow. Dependence on tin and crude oil gave way to an economy with robust value-adding agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors. We also need to move from a sharing and extractive mind-set to a productive and value adding mind-set. There is a growing clamour for political restructuring in the country.

But beyond tinkering with the form of our federalism, we need to also restructure the substance and spirit of our politics, and more importantly, we need to restructure our economy and our value-system. We need audacious and not necessarily pain-free economic and governance reforms.

And last but not the least, we need to invest in the welfare and the productive capacities of our people. We need sustained investment in health, in education, and in critical modern infrastructure that will make our economy more competitive and expand the creative, productive and competitive capacities of our people and by extension, of our country.

That is how we can derive optimal benefit from endowment in natural resources, not as wealth in themselves, but as resources for necessary investments in the competitive capacities of our most prized assets: our people. n

Table 2: Trends in Poverty Incidence in Nigeria

Source: NBS

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 19

SPECIAL REPORT (1)

Members of SYNAPARCAM protesting against SOCFIN's failure to respect its agreements and the impacts of SOCFIN's plantations, Cameroon, 21 September 2017 (WRM).

SOCFIN’s plantations in Africa: Many Places of Violence and Destruction

O

komu Oil Palm Company PLC is a Nigerian industrial oil palm and rubber plantation company. Okomu was founded in 1976 as a state company, but SOCFIN acquired part of the company in 1990 and now owns 63 per cent of the shares. In 1998, at least four villages were forcefully destroyed and the inhabitants evicted, with their houses, properties and farmland taken over by the company. The four villages are Owieke with 25 houses, Agbede with 31 houses, Lemon with 15 houses and Ijawgbini with 7 houses. A state investigation accused villagers of being illegal occupiers even though the same report recognized that they were already on those lands before the area was made a Forest Reserve in 1912. Besides, a forest ordinance of 1935 also affirmed the existence of these villages before that year.

In 2010, another village, Makilolo, was to be evicted, but the people resisted Okomu’s plans. In response, the village was locked-in by the company's security forces, cutting off any access with the outside world as an arm-twisting strategy. The company aimed to, first, gain support from the other villages to the eviction of Makilolo for more than three months (from November 17, 2010 to February 25, 2011) and, secondly, attempt to force Makilolo headship to sign an agreement with the company stating that the village is an illegal occupier on the company's property. At the end, the company managed to get an agreement signed, but only with a small group of people and not Makilolo Community members.

The agreement states that "Okomu Oil Palm Company is the legal owner of all land currently being used or occupied by occupants of Makilolo (…) and all occupants of Makilolo agreed that they are not the legal owners of the land and have no title or hold on the land (…)

Notwithstanding the fact that Okomu Oil Palm Company is the legal owner, and holds all rights and title, according to Nigerian Law, it shall permit the occupants of Makilolo to remain and to carry out their daily tasks on the land defined herein". However, the company only left 50 acres [around 20 hectares] as a “donation” for the community and, on top of this, imposed restrictions over its use, such as limiting the right to plant food crops. Furthermore, the river on which the village depended for its water supply

In 2016, the multinational agro-industrial SOCFIN Group - controlled by the Belgian Fabri family (50.2 per cent of the shares) and the French Bolloré group (39 per cent of the shares) -, announced its so-called “responsible management” policy. This policy refers to strict environmental standards, respect for human rights, transparency, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification, good management, among many others. But these are hollow words when they do not represent transparent, responsible and respectful practices towards the communities living in and around the plantation areas, which experience daily the real behavior of the company.

This article looks at what is happening on the ground in some of the countries where SOCFIN promotes its rubber and oil palm plantations. It reveals the large gap between its so-called “responsible management” policy and the reality of violence and destruction around those plantations, which, with the complicity of national governments, attempt to suppress people’s resistance. became contaminated with agrotoxins used in oil palm plantations.

In 2015, the Edo State Government, under former Governor Adams Oshiomhole, ordered the revocation of those land deals involving the company because of their shadiness. The decision was published in the Edo State Gazzette on November 5, 2015. The revocation order covers about 13,750 hectares spread through Okomu forest Reserves to Owan Forest Reserve, covering Ovia North East, Uhunmwode and Owan Local GovernmentAreas.

But until now, Okomu has disregarded the Edo State Government's Revocation Order. Instead, the company has militarized the communities’ areas and, under military shield, embarked on a continuous bulldozing of the forest for the expansion of their oil palm plantations. As a result, over 20 thousand peasant and forest-dependent communities have been displaced. Okomu village, Agbede, Ik camp, Makilolo, Lemo, Oweike, Avbiosi, Sobe, Uhiere, Owan, Ugbebezi, Oke-Ora, Ekpan, Oke, Atorumu, Ogbetu, Umokpe, Orhua, Ozalla, Sabo,

Odiguetue, Agudezi, Uhunmora, Uzeba and Odighi are some of the communities directly impacted.

On June, 21, 2017, in spite of several attempts at intimidation by security forces, oil palm impacted communities, peasants, women and civil society groups such as ERA/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, organized a massive protest against the complicity of the present Edo State Governor Obaseki with Okomu’s activities.

Sierra Leone In Sierra Leone, SOCFIN arrived in 2011, promising jobs and scholarships to the people of Malen Chiefdom in Pujehun District, Southern Province. But instead, they imposed payments on landowners and took land on which the local people depend. As crop compensation for the oil palm plantations (palm trees and land) that the communities lost, SOCFIN paid the amount of 200 US dollars per acre [around half a hectare] for a period of 50 years. SOCFIN also pays an Annual Lease Rent of 5 US Turn to page 20

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SPECIAL REPORT SOCFIN’s plantations in Africa: Many Places of Violence and Destruction

Contd. from page 19 dollars per acre, 50 per cent of which goes to the land owners and the rest is paid to local authorities and the central government. These amounts are ridiculous, considering that families could earn over 200 US dollars per acre per year by working on their land. The few community members that could get jobs in the company are paid very little.

SOCFIN wanted to relocate some communities, but people resisted. In 2011, the Malen Land Owners and Users Organization (MALOA) was created, after 40 landowners were arrested by the local police during a protest against SOCFIN activities. Since then, members of MALOA have suffered constant intimidation, including arrests. At least five criminal cases have been filed against MALOA leaders and members, including six MALOA leaders in 2013 and eleven members in 2015. In all cases, the MALOA members were detained for several days, and sometimes for weeks, without trial. On 4th February 2016, the six MALOA leaders were sentenced and given a fine of around 35 thousand US dollars. The draconian fine was paid through an international fundraising drive. In July 2017, the eleven MALOA members were fined 27 US dollars each.

In 2015, MALOA registered about two thousand people from the area as members, but the registration process came to a halt when seven MALOA members, including members in charge of process, were arrested in September 2015 for “writing down names of people” without the knowledge of local authorities. In March 2017, the Chief of Staff in the President’s Office contacted MALOA declaring that he had a mandate from the President to open a dialogue between SOCFIN and the communities, but some of the mediators and contact people he proposed are on record for criticizing MALOA and other organizations opposing SOCFIN, which was unacceptable for MALOA. Since then, the Chief of Staff has held two meetings with representatives of MALOA but the political will needed to advance the dialogue seems to be absent, so the dialogue is yet to take off.

Women members of MALOA complain that the working conditions in SOCFIN’s plantations are bad, especially for them. One worker, a mother, declared that she has to leave her home at 04:30 in the morning to go to work, while her children are left malnourished. She complains that before SOCFIN came in, she could feed her children with the food she produced on her field, and with that income she could pay the school fees. Now, the money she earns from working on SOCFIN’s plantations is too little to pay the school fees. Besides, her very absence from home and thus the lack of attention for her children has created other problems. Women also suffer from violence, abuses and arrests. A pregnant woman was arrested on the allegation of “stealing” oil palm fruits from the company.

MALOA members have organized sit-ins and demand a review of the concession agreement as well as an independent investigation of their claims. They also demand the implementation of the recommendations contained in the report on the Environmental Protection Agency-sanctioned investigation of the contamination of the Malen River by chemicals used by SOCFIN. They also want the return of some farmland and proper compensation for their lands and crops, as that would mean a small improvement of their current situation. However, they know that without their lands, the situation will never be the same and therefore they will continue the struggle until they get their lands back.

Liberia In Liberia, SOCFIN has been operating since 1983.

Through its two subsidiaries, Liberian Agricultural Company (LAC) and Salala Rubber Corporation (SRC), it has managed to gain access to almost 130 thousand hectares through land concessions, of which more than 18 thousand hectares are for rubber tree plantations.

Communities in and around the plantations suffer extreme poverty. In May 2006, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) published a report that described the dire human rights situation on the plantations: child workers under the age of 14, widespread use of subcontracting, the use of carcinogenic products, the quashing of trade unions, arbitrary dismissals, connections with private militias, and the eviction of peasants obstructing the expansion of the plantation area.

The testimony of a woman from a community affected by one of Salala's rubber plantations shows the dire situation they are facing: “I grew up in a town that was given by my forefathers. We used to have free movement in our communities. We had plentiful land, which was used for agriculture activities, forests for hunting and collecting medicinal plants and rivers for fishing. One sunny day in 2010, while we were in our town, we saw a group of men with cutlasses, axes, and other working tools, walking towards us. When they arrived, we asked them why they were here. They answered that the land we are occupying was bought by the Salala rubber company long time ago from the government. That statement was totally strange to our ears because this land is where we were born, grew up and had our kids; how then can it be from the company.

They then told us that the clearing of our town was going to happen the next day because the company was ready to start its operations.

The night after their visit, they came while we were sleeping with the police and yellow machines. The yellow machines started breaking down the trees (rubber, coffee, cocoa, plantain, orange, etc.) surrounding the town and destroying our water sources. It was the sound of the machines that woke up the members of the town. People started crying and left without any of their belongings.

Each went his or her own separate way to find a new place where to start a new life, so the community is no longer together and we are landless. We had children as little as one month old and we had to walk two to three hours to reach the closest town. During our long journey we had nothing to eat or water to drink. We went through so much pain with our legs and feet swollen. We arrived to the nearby town having no clue where we could sleep for the night. For many months, we slept on the floor of an old abandoned kitchen. Other towns around the company operations also had similar experiences or even worse.

The SOCFIN Company destroyed all our farms we labored for, destroyed my parents grave site, destroyed our fruit trees, our cultural sites and sacred sites, our traditional schools for girls and boys. The company also destroyed our healing site for sneak bites and damaged the women sacred site for giving birth.

We have now become beggars because of the damage they created in our lives. We rent a small piece of land for planting crops for survival from landowners in our new town. The chemicals used in the rubber plantations have also infected the river used by the members of the new town. Our water source is swamp. We open holes in the morning and water comes out. The water from the swamp hole is not clean but we have to use it for drinking and other water related activities. We do not want to die from the chemical polluted water.

We, the women, our old enough children and men have no jobs. Children have to stay home and do not go to school due to the lack of a school in the community. There are no health facilities, so we have had many deaths for common sicknesses, not to mention the death of pregnant women and their unborn babies. I have a family of five including my blind father. I am now involved in general labor jobs which involves brushing, weeding, scratching, planting rice, etc. I work form one farm to another doing any job assigned to me and receive one dollar for working all day, which is used to provide food for my five member family. I have nothing else to do that could help improve my standard of living”.

(The identity of this woman is kept anonymous for security reasons) Cameroon In Cameroon, the government created SOCAPALM in 1968, a national oil palm company that was privatized in 2000 and sold to the SOCFIN Group. In 2005, the state secured communities 20 thousand hectares of land, however, failed to inform communities about SOCFIN purchase agreement. Only in 2008, community members discovered that in spite of the privatization, community rights were secured in the contract between SOCFIN and the state of Cameroon. Nonetheless, the company continues to promote and expand oil palm plantations on land that belongs to the communities, paying no rent or compensation for it.

In 2010, community people living inside SOCFIN’s plantation areas formed “The National Association of Peasant and River Populations of Cameroon” (SYNAPARCAM), an organization that brings together members from six different plantations and aims to defend their rights. Only in 2014, the government recognized their organization.

SYNAPARCAM, together with organizations in other countries like MALOA in Sierra Leone and others, created an alliance of people affected by SOCFIN. In 2013, they organized actions in 4 countries to protest against SOCFIN and to claim their rights as communities. This resulted in a meeting in France in October 2014 with Vincent Bolloré, the French owner of SOCFIN. But Bolloré did not take his responsibility for the problems and violations SOCFIN is causing. Instead, he suggested that people should solve the issues with the national branches of his company in each country, like SOCAPALM in Cameroon. Not surprisingly, however, the dialogue is not advancing significantly.

Several NGOs filed a complaint against SOCFIN at the level of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2010, accusing the company of negatively affecting traditional livelihoods of people and plantation workers. For example, based on an analysis of water samples, the complaint alleged water contamination by agrotoxins. The OECD held the allegations admissible, and an action plan was elaborated. But the company has not made real efforts to implement it and, according to SYNAPARCAM, many problems and impacts continue.

Thus, the struggle of the communities surrounded by SOCAPALM plantations continues with protests, road blockades, dissemination of information nationally and internationally, among other tactics. In the short term SYNAPARCAM demands access for the communities to a vital space of 250 hectares of land around villages.

Final Comments While SOCFIN formulates responsibility policies and plans, the practices on the ground, such as those described here, are completely opposed. People face the crude reality of destruction of community lands, livelihoods and culture and severe violence in many of the company’s plantation areas on a daily basis. On the ground, that seems to be the prevailing policy. More evidence of how so-called “responsibility” policies and plans amount to little more than empty discourse. These will also remain empty discourses as long as impunity prevails. This is further facilitated if they are based on voluntary commitments, like RSPO certification, and other non-binding policies and guidelines.

But affected communities have not given up. On the contrary, they keep resisting against all injustices, and increasingly they do so in an articulated way. They deserve all our support and radical solidarity! n

We, the women, our old enough children and men have no jobs. Children have to stay home and do not go to school due to the lack of a school in the community.

There are no health facilities, so we have had many deaths for common sicknesses, not to mention the death of pregnant women and their unborn babies.

PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017 | 21

SPECIAL REPORT (2)

ATAMA Plantation is today a source of discontent for local communities and the entire nation

I

n 2013, Wah Seong Berhad, a Malaysian company with no prior experience on palm oil, announced its decision to invest US 744 million dollars over a tenyear period to establish an industrial complex and an oil palm plantation covering an area of 180 thousand hectares in the departments of Sangha and Cuvette, some 800 kilometers north of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo. ATAMA Plantations, a subsidiary of the Malaysian company, obtained from the Ministry of land affairs and public domain of Congo the authorization to occupy 470 thousand hectares to develop oil palm plantations. The 180 thousand hectares located in Sangha are part of this concession.

The processing plant was supposed to create close to 20 thousand jobs and produce 720 thousand tons of palm oil once it reached full production. According to the company, it would be “the largest refinery in the Congo river watershed”. In 2013, the company claimed that it would plant 2 thousand hectares of oil palm by the end of 2014. At the time, ATAMA had announced that production would start in 2017. However, to this day, very few oil palm trees have been planted and it seems very unlikely that palm oil production will reach anything close to the initial 170 thousand tons announced in 2013.

Nonetheless, ATAMA is harvesting a lot of wood with high commercial value. In fact, timber extraction is proceeding far more rapidly than the plantation of oil palm trees. In 2016, the company also announced that “since last year, we […] also have reduced our participation to 49% and are prepared to abandon this venture”. In February 2017, the Congolese government suspended the company’s fraudulent logging activities.

WRM talked with Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo, Natural Resources and Forest Community program officer at the Congolese Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH, Observatoire congolais des droits de l’homme), about what she saw during her visit to the Sangha region.

WRM: You recently visited the Sangha region where ATAMA Plantations was awarded a 180 thousandhectare concession to plant oil palm trees. What are the main findings of your field mission?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: In our latest mission conducted in March 2017, we were able to make several observations, in particular: l A fleet of vehicles almost entirely made up of forestry equipment; l A sawmill located in the middle of the forest that is running at full capacity and processing only wood with the highest-value; l Timber from selective cutting in an unauthorized area; An oil palm plantation that is still in its incipient stage; l Incinerated wood waste, with no possibility of ecogeneration; l Badly paid workers without any form of social security; l Exploited communities that are intimidated and repressed so they don’t assert their rights; l Awood lot filled with high-value commercial timber; l Noncompliance with the project’s specifications.

WRM: What is the current situation at the oil palm plantation and processing plant? What happened to the jobs they promised to create with the palm oil refinery?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: As I said earlier, the plantation is still in its nascent phase. The plants in the nursery were not moved in time to start production.

ATAMA Plantations is acting like a real forestry and agriculture company.

The promise of job creation has become a lure to attract the government and win its trust. All of the companies that establish themselves in our country always use this reason to convince the government, whose economic diversification policy is designed to create jobs. Like every other company, ATAMA Plantations had promised to create 20 thousand jobs. But the reality is that these jobs have never been created. Today there are only 80 employees at the site, five of which are permanent. The jobs created are not permanent jobs that can provide employees decent and acceptable living conditions. These jobs do not provide any form of social security. The workers are exposed.ATAMAPlantations was supposed to be a major economic development factor in the area and provide added value to the national economy. Today, we see the opposite happening. Local community members are not holding jobs nor are they benefiting from the impacts of ATAMA Plantations’ operations. These communities, in particular that of Yengo-Mambili, rose up to demand several benefits from the company. The uprising was rapidly repressed. ATAMA Plantations is today a source of discontent for local communities and the entire nation.

The construction of the palm oil processing plant is far from complete because ATAMA Plantations is focusing

l Photo: OCDH

only on harvesting wood instead of developing oil palm plantations. They haven’t even taken the time to separate the oil palm plants in the tree nursery that have started producing. They still haven’t finished clearing the 5 thousand hectares granted to them in 2013, but are making selective cuts of profitable timber species in the second block without authorization from the forest administration. It is already obvious that the goal for 2017 of completing the processing unit will not be met. The government needs to take measures to condemn this kind of company that comes here to enrich itself at the expense of local communities and indigenous populations. The decision taken last February to halt the fraudulent selective cutting does not apply to all of the company’s operations, but rather only the fraudulent logging.

WRM: Why is the company extracting logs far faster than it is planting palm trees?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: ATAMAPlantations is listed as an agricultural company in the Trade and Credit Register (RCM, for its French acronym). But in practice, it is carrying out an activity that should be exclusive to a forestry company with the selective cutting of high value commercial species. When you arrive at the ATAMA plantation, you notice something right away: this agricultural company has a fleet of vehicles that is primarily made up of wood transportation equipment. The company built a sawmill in the middle of the forest located about 18 kilometres from national road n° 2. The photographs show this. I wonder whether this is all a smokescreen. Could they be a logging operation disguised as an agricultural company?

WRM: Is it possible to estimate the loss that the treasury of Congo would incur if ATAMA terminated its concession contract now that it has extracted much of the existing high-value timber, but has not invested much in the oil palm plantation and oil production?

How much would a forestry company have officially paid to extract that same volume of wood?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: An economist would do a better job of answering this question by performing a study. But to give you an idea, I think that we have to take into account forestry taxation. The timber produced by a forestry company generates more added value for the national economy because forestry companies pay corporate taxes, license fees, a stumpage tax, an area tax, an export tax, a surtax (on all exported unprocessed timber beyond 15 percent of the total produced timber). But if an agribusiness clears a forest area, it only pays the stumpage tax, corporate taxes and other taxes specific to the agricultural sector. In addition, forestry companies are required to process locally 85 percent of the timber production and create local and national jobs. Forestry companies must comply with social requirements in the interest of local communities and indigenous peoples by complying with project specifications that includes an implementation calendar. This provides communities with local development opportunities. In addition, a local development fund is created from a contribution of 200 CFA Francs [around US 0.36 dollars] per cubic meter of harvested wood to support economic activities carried out by communities. These funds exist in the organized forestry concessions and communities develop economic activities to create wealth and thus contribute to national development.

WRM: The Ministry for sustainable development, forestry economy and the environment recently ordered a halt to the forest clearing. What reasons did it give for this? Did this measure stop timber extraction?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: The halt ordered in February 2017 applies to the fraudulent selective cutting operations in the second block of 5 thousand hectares, for which no authorization had been given, nor any stomping tax paid. According to the intent of this decision, ATAMA Plantations will continue its tree-felling activities in the 5 thousand-hectare area for which it has received an authorization and where there are still 3,500 hectares to be harvested. It will also continue to mill the timber harvested from this area, because the authorization states that the timber from that 5 thousand-hectare area is the property of ATAMA Plantations. Sanctions should be imposed on ATAMA Plantations for having carried out an activity exclusive to forestry companies in an area without authorization.

WRM: The project’s real intentions have long been dubious. Could the suspension of timber harvesting be a first step before the full cancellation of the agreement, since the parent company declared in 2016 that it was considering abandoning the oil palm plantation project even before production started?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: The government has to take strong measures to terminate the agreement tying it to ATAMA Plantations because it is a one-sided contract in which the government is not gaining much and the company is making huge profits. These days, there is ever more talk of the social responsibility of companies, which involves compliance with social commitments, legality and the protection of the environment. ATAMA Plantations has nothing to lose by walking away. It has already recovered its investment by selling wood produced at a lower cost than that of forestry companies. This is a case of undeclared unfair competition.

WRM: What do the region’s inhabitants think of the oil palm project? What are the effects of deforestation on their lifestyle?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: The expansion of oil palm monocultures always creates huge problems for neighboring communities including the reduction of areas for rural activities, fishing, hunting (removal of wildlife species) and the gathering of non-timber forest products (NTFP), since the forest cover is completely destroyed. It will therefore be hard for communities to find caterpillar trees (Uapaca guineensis), honey and even medicinal plants. Right now, this problem is not acute because the plantations are only starting. But when they will fully extend themselves, nearby communities might have food security problems. It should be noted that in the exchanges we had with the peasant fisher organization, they informed us that some water sources and rivers are polluted by oils coming from insecticides and herbicides used in the plantations’plant treatment processes.

WRM: Do you have any other comments you would like to share?

Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo: ATAMA Plantations has not complied with any of its commitments. The communities have complained about this and declared that the company does not talk to them because of language barriers. There is a misunderstanding because the interpreter is the interface between these communities and the company and the communities say that they are misunderstood. The forest has an essential function for these communities. To replace it with large-scale oil palm plantations has a major impact on the way of life of these communities.

We thank Nina Cynthia Kiyindou Yombo, of the OCDH, for granting us this interview. n

22 | PATHFINDER International, Oct., 2017

FAITH

Prayer for Nigeria at 57 Delivered by Pastor Goke Afolayan at the Gospel Faith Mission International Church(GOFAMINT), Brentwood, MD on October 1, 2017

P

ost-slave trade abolition, some nations of the world switched to colonization of other peoples. This they achieved methodically beginning with trading with the people, extending to taking them as protectorates.

Tactically they amalgamated these protectorates into nations architected to their political and economic gains for generations to come. Nigeria is one of those "nations" put together by the British as their colony. It is made of diverse "natural nations" in their tongues, languages and culture amalgamated into a "British-made nation" and remains so until this day.

In 1960, Nigeria was granted independence.

Independence for self-determination and self-governance.

Today, 57 years after that independence, the diverse "natural nations" constituting the "British-made nation" still struggles to keep and maintain the colonialarchitectured unity. The peoples do everything, including praying, to deny and resist natural inclinations for the “natural nations” as created by God. Today, more than a century after Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Nigeria still does not have stable electricity. Telephone system, roads, highways, airways, sea ways, - all are non-functional. Nigeria is endowed with natural resources that are either untapped or tapped with high level of corruption in management. Nigerian universities train doctors but the leaders have no confidence in them to provide care. The leaders travel outside the country for medical care. The universities graduate engineers but engineering projects are outsourced to the Europeans, the Chinese or other nations.

Despite all the universities with self-acclamations of greatness, Nigeria cannot boast of any self-produced technology. The people don't have confidence in the government instituted education system. Private institutions are proliferated all over the place. Individual citizens bore holes to provide water for themselves.

Individuals generate their own electricity with generators.

The country cannot boast itself in any infrastructure provided for the people. Government workers are denied their wages for many months in sequence, yet the leaders leave in affluence.

It is often said that "home is where the heart is."

Nigerians in diaspora don't look forward to going home.

Nigerians at home are seeking ways to exit at all cost.

Nigerians jubilate and give testimonies when granted visas to Europe or the Americas. Others die in the thousands in the North Africa deserts and the Mediterranean Sea, trying to cross illegally to Europe. Home, unfortunately, is the least in places where their hearts are. Slavery, prostitution, and human trafficking are now prevalent in many parts of the world with Africans, especially Nigerians as victims.

In the quest for survival, money, employment, and improved lifestyle, human kidnapping, rituals, armed robberies are becoming more and more prevalent.

The church of Christ seems oblivious to these issues. It appears the most we do is to pray and be silent. That's all.

Our solution to the state of education in the country is to build our own schools and universities. Ownership of an educational institution accords the denomination a status upon which to pride or compete. The graduates of these church denomination-owned institutions join the unemployed upon graduation. There is no active involvement of the church in shaping the social infrastructure or making demand on the country for economic change. Our solution is to build our own denominational communities which is gradually gaining trend across denominations. These are just two examples of the channels of alternative solutions modeled by the church in Nigeria.

Consider that in any congregation in Nigeria, if a minister would ask people who have no jobs or who have jobs but have not been paid wages for several months to stand up, one would not be surprised at the number.

Financial income determines to a large extent the economic state of any people. I have not heard many ministers of influence and affluence, if any, in Nigeria admonish or speak to the government about these issues.

Nigeria ministers minister to the people but never challenge or rebuke the leaders oppressing them. Rather, access to authorities and “Aso Rock” is considered status to pride upon.

Numerous passages in the scriptures tell of the roles of prophets addressing social and moral inappropriateness in the society. An example can be found in 1Kings Chapter 21, where we read about the evil act of King Ahab, and Elijah rising to the occasion to address the issue. In the New Testament we read about John the Baptist condemning the unlawful act of Herod in taking his brother's wife.

l Pastor Goke Afolayan

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and his contemporaries addressed the social issues of their day loudly and persistently both from their pulpits and by peaceful protests on behalf of the people. Shall we also mention Bishop Desmond Tutu who also did not play oblivion to the social issues in his country but addressed it directly from his pulpits and loudly and persistently until some change happened.

When will Nigeria’s ministers, many with influence, be touched enough by the suffering of the people to rebuke these leaders and make demands on behalf of the people?

Stories have it that some leaders in government, and in authority sometimes attend church events and are prayed for.

One would wonder if the Bible-referenced people of Israel were to be Nigerians, they would never have left Egypt. The Moses' of the people and their elders would only have prayed but never made any demand on Pharaoh to set the people free. Would some elders have rather lavished themselves in the pleasures and opulence of Egypt, perhaps?

Voices are rising from Nigeria peoples in their natural nations, tongues, and tribes towards resolutions, referendum, and secession in some cases, but the Church in Nigeria remains unconcerned and quiet.

Polarizations and agitations are escalating in many quarters; local groups are making their voices heard.

There are concerns that echoes of impending war are looming (of which we earnestly pray not to happen). No individual who experienced the civil war would wish for another war again. The Church, however, remains silent. In many cases, we take reactive rather than proactive positions to many issues that even affect us.

The influence of many of our ministers is exercised more on “enlarging our coasts” than it is on shaping the structure of the “colonial-amalgamated” nation.

LET US PRAY l Pray for divine intervention for the peoples Nigeria to wake up and seek restoration in all facets. l Pray for restoration of our God-given “natural nations” l Pray for peace upon the “lands” l Pray against the looming violence including secession by violence/war Pray for healing in the church and that the church will take her rightful place in the country. l Pray for GOFAMINT to be active in wisdom as a ministry of God, not just to the peoples, but also to the leaders in authority. l Pray for true independence for the peoples of Nigeria. l Pray for deliverance of the people from the oppressors in leadership. n

Identity and the Quest for Restructuring in Nigeria “..of the sons of Issachar who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” 1 Chronicles 12:32 (1) Christians for Yoruba Nation(CYN) is a platform for concerned Christians in general and Yoruba Christians in particular, to reestablish the God-given Yoruba Nation and her Diaspora within the context of the on-going attempts at Restructuring of the Nigerian Nation-State; more-so given the fact of Yoruba influence in the anti-colonial quest and her subsequent developmental strides before the Unitarization of Nigeria in 1966. This engagement is driven by the realization that our continuous existence as a God-created Nationality cannot be dependent on colonial imposition which truncated our potential development hence this responsibility, as reflected in Nehemiah 1: 8-10.

In pursuing this, CYN is not advocating a “Christian” Yoruba Nation, for we recognize that the Yoruba Nation is a multi-religious society hence all of her citizens and residents shall have the freedom of worship, more-so when the Yoruba Society has a tradition and Global reputation of religious tolerance within itself.

(2) The Yoruba Nationality, just as other Nationalities in the Nigerian Nation-State, is caught up in the Crisis of Identitythat has characterized the operations of that Nation-State since the military seized power in 1966 and imposed its ownIdentity on the rest of the country. Our God-given Identity is our Nationality and any form of political, economic and social formulation that will mediate the interrelationships within the Nationality and between Nationalities expressed as a Nation-State must involve the direct participation of the Nationalities making up such a Nation State, more-so when there are different existential realities between the Nationalities which the apparatus of the Nation-State seek to mediate.

(3) The post-1966 Nigerian Nation-State exist in contradiction to the right and consequently the ability of the Nationalities to maintain their God-assigned Identity. It attempts a homogenized “Nigerian” community devoid of the Nationality via the military-activated Unitarized Nation-State, where everyone is dependent on the Center; itself being under Hausa-Fulani Hegemony whose vision drives the homogenization pursuit thereby nullifying the God-given Identity of the Nationalities as Nations in

themselves. There are so many examples of this reality.

(4) The Nigerian Nation-State is completely dependent on international economic forces responsible for our colonization without any philosophy of engagement that will address disparities between the Nation-State and its international sponsors and within the Nation-State itself thus living out the reality expected by colonialism while negating the existential expectations of the Nationality.

(5) This Nation-State is parasitic on the God-given natural resources of the geo-political space. This in turn leads to the non-utilization of these resources to develop any meaningful human resource or capacity. This causes massive exodus of human capital glamorized by the military Nation-State as remitters of foreign exchange back into the country with no impact on productivity since the Nation-State, as a creation of colonialism, was and is not wired for such productivity. Nigeria's economic history is replete with examples of these.

(6) As a response to the homogenization, the “Nigerian” seeks refuge in his or her Nationality, Religious inclination or allegiance to Western (and Eastern) Worldviews as the basis for his/her Worldview since there is no such thing as a “Nigerian” World view; for, the only way the “Nigerian” Worldview can come about is through homogenization and assimilation of one Nationality by another.

Consequently, such homogenized “Nigerian” Worldview will become an anti-African Worldview since the “African” Worldview is dependent on the African Nationalities.

(7) The fact that the Nigerian Nation-State had been engaged in this process in different military and civilian versions with nothing but further underdevelopment to show for it must mean it cannot be an option for solution.

This is why the ruling Party has begun moves to address this issue, not only because it was a major point in its Manifesto, but also as a response to varying degrees of agitations all over the country.

(8) What is being promoted as the solution, variously defined as “devolution”, “restructuring” which are nothing more than distribution of powers and functions between governments, fail to address the fundamental question, to wit: Is a Government the creation of a Constitution OR is a Constitution the creation of the Government?

To be continued in the next edition.

PATHFINDER International, Octt. 2017 | 23

Young people in Central, Eastern Europe Contd. from page 3 protest against corruption People who do not work day after day fighting corruption do not necessarily realize how terribly slowly things actually change.

That, Kunder worried, could push more people to abandon their faith in democracy and turn to extremist politics, as is happening all over Europe.

“The students still believe that what they are asking for is going to happen,” Kunder said.“The government will not do that.”

Indeed, the government hasn’t gotten rid of Kalinak, an ally of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

And, lip service aside, the official fight against corruption has been half-hearted.

We re S t r a k a a n d Klacman and their peers disappointed they didn’t get what they wanted? And now what will they do?

“At first, I felt

discouraged, because I expected more, you know? As a young person,” Straka said, laughing at himself.

NGOs, at least, tell him they are now in a better position to negotiate new laws, even if the real rub with corruption is enforcement of existing laws. (Slovakia already has relatively robust anti-corruption legislation.) “So there are some smaller things, which are good. But the main things haven’t actually happened.” “ We c a n n o t b e satisfied with these things, and we have to keep going,” Klacman said.

They just don’t know exactly how. They hope to get 100,000 signatures for their petition to force a discussion in parliament (they had 72,000 when we met, though some didn’t fill out their addresses correctly). They weren’t sure if this third protest

would turn out to be their last protest, or who would take over their work, or even if it was the sort of torch that even could be passed on.

What about running for office themselves?

Klacman said he would only want to get involved at politics at the local level, not in the national jungle.

“Not ‘up there,’ but helping the community.”

Straka doesn’t think he wants to get into politics.

But it’s too early for him, or any of his cohort, to decide such a thing just yet.

“We’re still too young,” he said.

Emily Tamkin reported from Romania and Slovakia on a transatlantic media fellowship with the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

Photo credit: Vladimir Simicek/AFP/Getty Images RWANDA She tried to run against Rwandan President Paul K a g a m e . N o w s h e ’s looking at 20 years in prison. n

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Pastor Tunde Bakare, Generals I Gowon and Obasanjo n Lagos, Nigeria, Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly used his Independence daysermon to praise European “civilizing mission” by glorifying colonialism as the source of conflict resolution among what he referred to as the warring communities in the Niger area.

When our existentialism is denied by a “man of God”, the problem is not of God but the denier. Pastor Tunde Bakare, probablya Yoruba (there are some denying their Yorubanness) denied Yoruba and her history when he stated thusly “before the creation of the Nigerian state, there was no Yoruba nation, there was no Igbo nation, there was no Hausa nation, neither was there an Ijaw nation. We must not be misled by nostalgia for a spurious harmonious past or the myth of homogenous ethnic groups that is far removed from reality.

The area around the Niger was marked with unrest, continuous intergroup conflict, subjugation, enslavement and oppression of the weaker by the stronger until Nigeria provided the possibility for peaceful coexistence. For this, we must appreciate the Nigerian state, we must celebrate our Nigerian-ness and we must gravitate towards strengthening our nationhood rather than cursing our blessing.”

Limiting this to the Yoruba experience, he deliberately overlook the Nigerian State itself being the result of British“subjugation, enslavement and oppression of the weaker by the stronger” and Pax Britannica not being an act of demonstrating peaceful coexistence. Must we then accept the falsehood of Nigerian Statehood only because a Pastor says so? The major cause of the Yoruba Civil War was the “war to end all wars” begun as an attempt to quell the perennial conflicts arising from the Fulani invasion. This “war to end all wars” ultimately pitted the Unitarists against the Federalists in Yorubaland. There would not have been such an internal conflict if there was no sense of Yoruba Nationhood.

It is written that those who serve God must do so in Spirit and in Truth. Pastor Tunde Bakare need not engage in peddling historical falsehoods in order to promote the Nigerian State of his dreams.

In Washington D.C, USA,yet another annual prayer ritual took place.This was virtually the brainchild of former Nigerian Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, who, as aLieutenant-Colonel, became the country's Head of State as a result of the July 1966 northern countercoup to the January 1966 coup whose lopsidedness in the senseless murders of northern and western political leaders provided the immediate cause for the July counter-coup and eventually the Nigerian civil war. Although he had a Christian background, his coming to power reflected Nigeria's power politics at the time, where he represented the geo-political North.

His first pronouncement, after being announced as the new head of State, was “the basis for Nigeria's Unity no longer exist” hence the declaration of Independence by the North before the decision was overturned a few days later by the same North, acting on the advice of the colonial power now being eulogized by Pastor Tunde Bakare as the purveyor of peaceful coexistence.

After the war, the General became a

Editor’s Note In the heat of the battle for the soul of the Peoples of Nigeria, our humanity is being ignored, which would be why the colonial power glorified by Pastor Tunde Bakare ensured a false census just so it will have its way. The product of this lie, the Nigerian State, is what Pastor Tunde Bakare, Generals Gowon and Obasanjo and all promoters of “peace, unity, non-negotiability of Nigeria” want us to fully embrace. The question for “Nigerians” is therefore not one of “praying” (mostly amiss) but in recognition of our humanity which translates into each of our Nations being recognized as a Nation for, and in itself. victim of another coup in July 1975 after which he proceeded on a voluntary exile to the UK and upon his return, collaborated with other Christians to establish “Nigeria Prays” which started life under various military administrations in Nigeria, whose military governors often encouraged and patronized its activities.

It is anchored on “One Nigeria” where that oneness is defined by homogeneity and uniformity, although the country is multi-lingual and multi-cultural and all efforts at ensuring the homogeneity and uniformity became the main causes for the crisis that led up to military intervention and subsequently General Gowon's ascension to power. His own political (and military) history therefore cannot be divorced from this new passion of praying for Nigeria's oneness.

The anchor Scripture for the Washington DC prayer session is2 Chronicles 7:14, which says “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land”.The word “wicked” defines exactly what Nigeria is, today; from false census figures to a Constitution brought about by the northerndominated military tailored to centralization of power.

General Olusegun Obasanjo was Nigeria's military Head of State between 1976 and 1979; the civilian President between 1999 and 2007. He declared himself to be a born-again Christian.Because of agitations for restructuring of Nigeria from nearly all the Peoples of Nigeria, General Obasanjo threw his hat into the ring, stating clearly that he is not in support of Restructuring of Nigeria except in what he called “restructuring of the mind”.

General Obasanjo led the military regime which validated the unitarization of Nigeria begun by General Gowon.

His regime reinforced the centralization of Nigeria's financial resources, leading to the states having to go cap in hand for monthly allocations to sustain their administrations; placed all of Nigeria's mineral resources under the control of the central government, itself under Northern military and political control, the end result of which is the despoliation of the Niger Delta area, placed all academic institutions of higher learning established by the various post-Independence Regional Administrations under centralized control, determined one centralized agricultural development paradigm for Nigeria and more importantly, legitimized Nigeria's unitarization though subterfuge by interfering in the production and ratification of the 1979 Constitution by military fiat and collaborated in the imposition of the fraudulent military-created Constitution of 1999, which in reality was no different from that of 1979 which he superintended.

Yet, for a Born Again Christian, to argue for a restructuring of the mind must mean the person himself has restructured his own mind to such an extent that he would boldly proclaim, as Apostle Paul did, that “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”(2 Corinthians 5:17); for, as the Apostle's life and times showed, his Damascus experience defined not only the “restructuring “ of his mind, but also of his defining characteristics and what he was able to go through and overcome in the process of putting all of these into practice. It was a “turn around” from persecution of the Way to its promotion.

Africa's militaries were and still are the premier agency for continued colonial domination, having been created by colonial enterprises for the decimation of the various peoples of Africa, often pitting one People against the other in the recruitment and organization of such military, where, for Nigeria, the military was dominated by northerners with a mandate to secure Nigeria for the north.

This was the context under which Yakubu Gowon, a minority and Christian from northern Nigeria, became the military head of State; and for Olusegun Obasanjo, he retained his leadership because he accepted this Northern diktat as recounted

by General Oluleye, the then Finance Minister, who was unceremoniously dismissed by General Obasanjo through a radio announcement upon General Oluleye's complaint about “northern domination” of Obasanjo’s paraphernalia of office. These two Generals therefore contributed, in a significant and direct manner, to the wickedness the Nigeria State has become.

If a “Damascus” experience proposition wereto come into play, that must inform on their position and advocacy as to how Nigeria became what it is and what remedies are available for a transformation to occur. In which case, the entire edifice on which “Nigeria Prays” rest would be different from what it presently is; and General Obasanjo's “restructuring” of the mind would accept the reality that Nigeria's “Golden Era” was in the premilitary Regional federation that existed which was neutralized mainly by their own actions or acquiescence.

There was a mindset that produced the developments of that era just as there was a mindset that produced its negation such that asking for a “restructuring of the mind” or “praying for Nigeria” at this point without addressing this aspect is denying the Scripture both Generals now claim to promote and believe in.

When both Generals and the Pastor introduce false paradigms anchored on what they have contributed to making out of Nigeria, discerning Christians must reexamine their own understanding of the Spirit in these matters and begin to determine their allegiance, whether it is to “men” or God. The first platform for the search would be what really constitute their own Nations: the Nigerian PostColonial state as already determined by these two Christian Generals with some Pastors towing along by glorifying colonialism or their natural God-created Nations which may or may not have to work out a Re-Formation of a new architecture of State that will encourage their mutual co-existence.

In the heat of the battle for the soul of the Peoples of Nigeria, our humanity is being ignored, which would be why the colonial power glorified by Pastor Tunde Bakare ensured a false census just so it will have its way. The product of this lie, the Nigerian State, is what Pastor Tunde Bakare, Generals Gowon and Obasanjo and all promoters of “peace, unity, nonnegotiability of Nigeria” want us to fully embrace. The question for “Nigerians” is therefore not one of “praying” (mostly amiss) but in recognition of our humanity which translates into each of our Nations being recognized as a Nation for, and in itself. n

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