Although the UN forum on migration provided Africa with a rare opportunity to present its case for the movement of labour around the world, it was marred by infighting and a weak stance. Onyekachi Wambu.
TThe UN International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) he just concluded, which took places in mid-May, exposed many contradictions and hypocrisies surrounding globalization and the movement of people. It also exposed at a global level the weaknesses and divisions of Africa.
The UN approved the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in 2018. In 2018, the IMRF was also approved by member states. This inter-governmental platform will be used to discuss and share progress on the compact, and to ensure that it is still aligned with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Although the process is intergovernmental, input to the draft IMRF Progress Declaration documents was provided by a variety of stakeholders including migrant organisations, businesses, and civil society groups.
The IMF delegates were ostensibly there to consolidate and even extend the main goals of the compact – ie., safe, orderly and regular migration – while reducing the negative impact of irregular migration. Other objectives were to improve the contributions of skilled and unskilled migrants to development in their country of origin, heritage, or transit.
They hoped too to guarantee the following guiding principles: “people-centred, international cooperation, national sovereignty, rule of law and due process, sustainable development, human rights, a gender-responsive, child-sensitive, whole-of-government approach and whole-of-society approach”.
This is a complicated and complex task that involves managing 281m international migrants, who are critical players in the global economy. Each migrant, according to the World Bank, impacts on average 4.5 people (over a billion people) in their country of heritage – a key part being the $751bn they send in remittances. These figures don’t include the millions of diasporas that result from historic migrations.
It is easy to ignore the elephant in your room
But if all you have are hammers, all issues, especially at the highest levels, will appear as nails. So inter-governmental processes don’t adequately account for the elephant in the room – which is that the biggest migration flows, movements from villages to cities, are internal, within countries, and therefore outside their jurisdiction.
Failure is inevitable when you try to address interstate migration without addressing the core triggers or a strategy to provide livelihoods and an economic that would anchor rural communities.
It would also allow for a meaningful discussion on the role of globalization in moving people from rural areas and the current global trading system. Scaling Fences, a UNDP report on African irregular migrants to Europe revealed that their main motivation was to see the positive impact that earning euros and British pounds would have on their home lives.
Globalization has seen the gradual deregulation of economies and currency systems, which has allowed for greater freedom of movement of capital, goods, and services.
Despite Africa currently enjoying a comparative advantage in labour costs, unlike other factors of production, labour cannot move freely at all, and young Africans currently ‘export’ themselves across the Sahara and Mediterranean in a totally dysfunctional manner.
African labour has had great difficulty integrating itself into the global economic system. 400 years ago, our ancestors had to be captured and sold into slavery in exchange for their labor. Today they pay $5,000 and take enormous risks to enter European labour markets.
These big issues regarding the historic global terms and trade were not raised by the African governments, whose voices were muted in the IMRF. Perhaps it had to do with the difficulties they encountered, coming to an inter-governmental conference on migration at the UN, where their delegations were unable to secure American visas – some were offered interviews in November 2022, for a conference taking place in May 2022!
It was perhaps also difficult to keep some of the progressive language in the Global Compact 2018 against growing hostility towards migrants.
When African governments should have been uniting to combat these major issues, Ethiopians and Egyptians decided to fight a side battle over the waters. The amendment was put to a vote, which the Ethiopians lost.
This was shameful as it was the only vote that was held. The Progress Declaration was approved by consensus despite the fact that several Western countries immediately disassociated themselves from the document and opted out of its provisions.
Source: New African Magazine
