Western governments have discovered that the cheapest form of domestic politics is performed hostility toward African migrants. Fine. Africa should take the hint and keep everything else, too.
There is a particular genre of political theatre that has become, in recent years, the dominant art form of Western liberal democracies. It requires minimal props: a podium, a flag, a suitably stern expression, and a set of immigration statistics that have been massaged until they confess to whatever crime the audience requires. The performance is called anti-immigration policy, but a more honest title would be anti-Black-and-Brown-people policy with plausible deniability. The venue rotates Westminster one week, the Palais de l’Élysée the next, the Oval Office whenever a polling number looks threatening but the script is identical, and the casting is never accidental.
We ought to be clear about what is actually occurring. Successive Western governments are not responding to a crisis of numbers. They are responding to a crisis of optics specifically, the optic of their own electorates seeing too many faces that do not resemble the national mythology. The statistics, when examined without the accompanying fog machine, rarely support the hysteria. Migrants, documented or otherwise, do not drain public services at the rates claimed; they staff them. They do not hollow out wages across the board; they are disproportionately found in the sectors that would collapse overnight if they left. But none of this matters to the performance. The performance has its own logic, its own internal economy, and what it sells is not policy. It sells reassurance to an anxious majority that somebody, somewhere, is keeping the gate.
I. The Choreography of Cruelty
The sophistication of modern Western racism lies precisely in its deniability. No serious politician in London, Paris, or Washington now openly says what several of their voters privately think. What they say instead is controlled borders, managed migration, points-based systems, national cohesion, integration challenges a vocabulary that permits the sentiment without incurring the liability. The target is always framed in administrative language: the irregular, the asylum-seeker, the economic migrant, the person who came through the wrong channel at the wrong time. The fact that these categories contain, almost exclusively, people who are not white is treated as a statistical coincidence so persistent that no one can explain it.
Britain’s Rwanda scheme that extraordinary piece of legislative theatre was perhaps the purest recent distillation of the genre. It was never designed to work. It was designed to be seen. To be discussed. To permit politicians to say, with straight faces, that they were doing something. The scheme consumed more parliamentary time, legal resource, and column inches than the housing crisis, the NHS backlog, and the productivity gap combined. Several planes were announced. None departed. The point was the announcement.
The performance requires a villain. Africa has been performing that role for free, and at some cost to itself for considerably longer than it should have.
In the United States, the southern border has become the longest-running production in American political history. Every administration discovers, roughly six months in, that the border is in crisis. Every administration responds with some combination of wall-building, child-processing, and inflammatory rhetoric. The crisis never resolves because resolution is not the objective. A resolved crisis cannot be campaigned on. The border is not a policy problem that generates politics; it is a political product that requires the appearance of a problem. And so the caravans keep coming in the news cycle, at least and the votes keep flowing.
II. The Invitation Africa Never Sent
Here is the part that should give Africans pause. The people boarding those boats in Lampedusa, those trucks in Calais, those planes to Heathrow they are, in the main, responding to a signal. The signal was not subtle. It was broadcast for the better part of a century: we are the centre of civilisation; we have the wealth; we have the universities; we have the opportunity; and we will receive you conditionally, instrumentally, and on terms we reserve the right to revise at any election.
Africa received this signal. Africa sent its people accordingly. The remittance flows which dwarf Western foreign aid in both volume and developmental utility testify to how seriously the continent took the arrangement. Nigerian doctors staff the British NHS in numbers that would embarrass both governments to enumerate publicly. Ghanaian engineers build the infrastructure of the Gulf states. Congolese nurses held European hospitals together during a pandemic that those hospitals were otherwise not staffed to survive. The arrangement, in short, worked. It worked for everyone. And now one side of it has discovered that it works better politically as a grievance than as a policy.
A note on irony: The same Western governments now running electoral campaigns on the theme of too many African migrants are also, simultaneously, operating programmes to actively recruit African nurses, doctors, engineers and care workers through official visa schemes. The Department for International Development gives with one hand. The Home Office takes a photograph of it giving, then runs an advertisement about taking it back.
III. The Correct Response Is Not Distress
If the West has decided democratically, through the ballot box, with full knowledge of what it is choosing that it does not want Africans, then Africa should receive this decision with equanimity and act on it comprehensively. Not with anger, not with pleading, not with the undignified spectacle of African heads of government flying to European capitals to negotiate the terms of their people’s humiliation. With equanimity. And with resolve.
The Africans currently in Europe and North America should, where possible, come home. Not because Europe deserves to lose them although it does but because Africa cannot afford to continue subsidising Western prosperity with its most educated, most energetic, most ambitious people. The brain drain is not an unfortunate side effect of global mobility. It is a structural transfer of human capital from poor countries to rich ones, conducted under the ideological cover of individual freedom of movement. It is, in its economic effects, indistinguishable from the earlier transfers of material capital, except that it leaves no obvious scar on the landscape.
Africa has been exporting its gold, its oil, its cobalt, its coltan, and its children all at below-market rates. At some point, a continent must decide that this is a poor commercial arrangement.
IV. On the Subject of Raw Materials
Which brings us to the more interesting question. If Africa is to take Western hostility at face value and decline to participate in an arrangement that has become structurally exploitative, then the recalibration cannot stop at the airport. It must extend to the port. To the mine. To the oilfield.
Africa sits on approximately thirty percent of the world’s mineral reserves. It holds sixty percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land. It contains the cobalt without which there is no electric vehicle revolution, the coltan without which there is no smartphone, the lithium without which European green energy policy is a pamphlet rather than a programme. These resources currently leave the continent in largely unprocessed form, at prices set by commodity markets headquartered in London and Chicago, refined and manufactured into finished goods by industries based in Europe, North America, and increasingly China, and then sold back to African consumers at the full retail margin. This arrangement has a name in economic history. It is not a flattering name.
The argument for ending non-discriminatory raw material exports is not protectionism in the pejorative sense. It is the belated recognition that a country or a continent that exports raw materials and imports finished goods is not participating in global trade. It is participating in global extraction. The difference matters enormously. Trade creates mutual dependency. Extraction creates dependency in only one direction, and the dependent party is always the one doing the extracting, whether or not it currently understands this.
If European and American industries require African gold, copper, oil, or agricultural products, they are welcome to them at prices that reflect processing capacity retained in Africa, at terms that require technology transfer, at volumes that do not deplete the resource base for subsequent generations. If those terms are unacceptable, the alternative is instructive: let them mine the North Sea for cobalt. Let them plant lithium in the Cotswolds. Let them discover how many electric vehicles they can build from the mineral endowment of Wisconsin.
V. The Tourism Economy and Its Discontents
The same logic extends, rather pleasingly, to tourism. Africa has been a destination of choice for a certain category of Western visitor: the person who wants to experience wilderness, poverty, and cultural difference in closely managed, photographable doses, while contributing to an industry whose profits flow primarily to foreign-owned hotel chains, foreign-based tour operators, and foreign shareholders. The safari economy is, in its structure, the plantation economy with better lighting and a gift shop.
European and American tourists bring foreign exchange. They also bring a set of assumptions about African wildlife, African people, African primitiveness that have not conspicuously improved since the nineteenth century. The game reserve is, in the tourist imagination, a place where time stopped; the locals are part of the décor. If Western governments are determined to perform civilisational distance from Africa, their citizens can extend the courtesy of staying home. Africa can develop its own internal tourism economy which, with a combined middle class now exceeding three hundred million people, is not the fantasy it once was. Africans have beaches. Africans have history. Africans have cuisine, music, architecture, and landscapes of extraordinary variety. The African traveller does not need to consume them at a discount.
The safari economy is the plantation economy with better lighting and a gift shop. Africa can redecorate on its own terms.
VI. On Equality as the Only Acceptable Basis for Engagement
None of this is to say that Africa should retreat into autarky, or that disengagement is a virtue in itself. It is not. Globalisation, properly structured, creates genuine mutual benefit. The problem is that the current structure is not proper. It was built during a period when one side of the negotiation held all the guns, set all the terms, wrote all the contracts, and reserved the right to alter them unilaterally. That period is not as distant as some would prefer to believe; its institutional arrangements are largely still in place, wearing suits rather than uniforms.
What Africa should insist upon calmly, persistently, without the theatre of grievance is equality as the baseline for any engagement. This means equal standing in the international institutions that set commodity prices, trade rules, intellectual property regimes, and debt terms. It means reciprocity: if African workers are not welcome in Western labour markets, Western companies are not entitled to privileged access to African resource markets. It means an end to the extraordinary arrangement by which African governments are lectured about governance by the representatives of countries that gave the world the 2008 financial crisis, the Iraq War, and, for the avoidance of doubt, the Atlantic slave trade.
The West, to its credit, has occasionally produced the intellectual tools for its own critique. The language of sovereignty, self-determination, and equal dignity under international law originated largely in Western political philosophy. Africa is simply proposing to use it.
VII. A Note on Sentiment
There will be those who read this argument and conclude that it is driven by hurt feelings. That is both incorrect and irrelevant. It is incorrect because the argument is structural, not emotional: it does not rest on whether Western countries are unkind, but on whether the existing terms of engagement are rational from Africa’s perspective. They are not. The case for renegotiation does not require anyone to have been insulted, merely anyone to have been paying attention.
It is irrelevant because the notion that African countries should calibrate their foreign and economic policy around the management of Western sentiment is precisely the colonial dynamic being questioned. African governments do not owe the West comfort. They owe their own citizens prosperity, security, and dignity. These obligations are not in conflict. They merely point in a different direction from the one that has been travelled for the past several generations.
The West has a choice. It can continue to run the performance the hostile environment, the Rwanda scheme, the points-based system, the border crisis that never resolves and discover, in due course, what a continent that has decided to keep its gold, develop its own institutions, and invest in its own people looks like as a counterparty. Or it can decide that the performance has been adequately applauded, bring down the curtain, and negotiate something more durable.
Either way, Africa should prepare for the second option. Not as a threat. As a plan.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 