EU plan leaves ex-smugglers empty-handed
Former traffickers susceptible to recruitment
Andre Chani said he once earned thousands of dollars a month driving migrants from Niger’s desert trading hub of Agadez to Libya.
But in 2016, he said, police in Niger impounded his two white pickup trucks as part of an effort to stem the flow of Africans onto European shores.
Chani, 44, applied for 2.5 million CFA francs (about R78,000) in aid from an EU-funded programme to start trucking agricultural produce to neighbouring Algeria.
He never heard back, so briefly turned to drug smuggling to support his family. Now he scraped by growing onions, he said.
Chani is one of many wouldbe entrepreneurs in this ancient city, long a launch point for northbound travellers, to seek support from the EU fund, established in 2015 to address root causes of illegal migration to Europe.
A spike in migration in the last decade has proved deadly to thousands and created a refugee crisis in countries like Italy and Spain.
Yet the EU money has been slow to arrive — only half the €4.7bn (R96.2bn) from the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) approved over the last five years has been distributed, according to statistics on the fund’s website.
“It is frustrating that the help is so late,” Mohamed Agali, head of migration at local governing body the Regional Council of Agadez said.
“The EU wants to stop migration, but to do that you need to help the people recover. Without that, they will have to try something else.”
An EU official said the rollout in Agadez was “in line with the timings for EU processes”.
The official, who declined to be named, said it had taken Agadez authorities longer than expected to list potential beneficiaries, evaluate their proposals and purchase goods.
Under EU rules, local officials buy merchandise and equipment for EUTF beneficiaries. They are not allowed to receive cash.
Some phases of the EUTF programme were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, the official said, but that did not affect many residents who had applied long before the outbreak.
Thousands of migrants have died since 2010, often during crossings of the desert in open trucks or the Mediterranean Sea in overloaded, rickety boats.
In 2016, about 300,000 migrants passed through Niger to Libya. That dropped to about 50,000 in 2019, due largely to Niger’s EU-backed clampdown.
The Agadez programme was set up in 2017 to jump-start small businesses for former smugglers.
It was one of more than 200 such projects launched in 26 African countries and one of 12 in Niger. EUTF projects have created more than 66,000 jobs in Africa, the fund’s website says.
Since its start, about 42% of the more than 2,300 business plans submitted in Agadez have been approved. Of those applicants with approved business plans, less than half have received the assistance.
Twenty former smugglers from Agadez said they submitted applications in 2017.
They said they either received no assistance or not enough to replace lost livelihoods.
The EU official said it was “unrealistic” to match the kind of compensation ex-smugglers used to earn trafficking migrants. “Let us not forget that 10 million Nigeriens live on less than €2 (about R40) a day,” the official said.
Agadez leaders said the growing ranks of unemployed in the city could make residents susceptible to recruitment by groups with links to al Qaeda and IS.
Critics of the EU programme say the fund was hastily put together, with slow decisionmaking and poor oversight.
The EU said in an e-mail that an evaluation of the EUTF by the EU Court of Auditors had found no irregularities.