A radical solution to Africa's migrant crisis; create a new country, 'Refugee Nation'

It may be a wild idea, but solutions must be found for the desperate.

THE world has a migrant and refugee crisis and there is no obvious solution. The European Union, Greece and Italy in particular, is grappling with thousands of desperate arrivals on its shores from Africa and the Middle East.

As always  happens when there is no solution, the blame game is quick to be played. The West, it is argued, is the author of many of the crises that migrants are fleeing from, a case in point being the Nato bombing of Libya and the country’s subsequent descent into chaos. African countries stand accused of mismanaging their resources and allowing ethnic wars to drive millions out of their homes to seek refuge in distant lands.

Whatever the cause, tens of hundreds of lives continue to be lost in the unforgiving Mediterranean Sea. Migrants will continue to head out into the big blue in the hope of reaching the promised land. The possibility of drowning is not a deterrent. For many, the lives they are leaving mean certain death.

The allure of possibly crossing, of making it to London’s streets, that lawmakers there recently warned are not paved with gold, makes many take the risk. That strong warning from MPs will not stop migrants. They will keep coming. Stationing majestic ships on the sea will not stop the tide. They will come in droves. They will keep coming from Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria and Eritrea and many other lands for as long as they are pushed.

Last week, a boat off the coast of Libya sent out distress signals. The rescue arrived too late. An estimated 200 people lost their lives. No one really knows the number. There is no record of those boarding the illegal boats that are sometimes just rafts. In April a boat, estimated to have had 800 migrants on board, went down. Only 28 survived the horror.

The International Organisation for Migration estimates that 2?000 have died at sea this year alone.

Migrants are also not deterred by the EU stopping its support for Operation Mare Nostrum, an Italian rescue programme that is credited with saving 100?000 lives last year. The EU argues that the rescue effort actually encouraged migrants to take a chance. That programme was stopped last October. Nothing will deter those in search of a better life.

The European plan to relocate 16?000 migrants over a two-year period is too little. So far this year alone, 124,000 migrants have arrived on Greece’s shores. Britain won’t participate and Hungary may roll out a 4m-high fence along its borders. The crisis is international, and it needs an international approach.

Last week, property mogul Jason Buzi suggested that land be found and a state be created for migrants. “Refugee Nation” he called it.

It is a bizarre-sounding idea — and not a new one — but in the face of few solutions, perhaps the time has come for Africa to debate this from an African perspective.

Those advocating for such a state suggest that land that is not in use be pooled together perhaps by nations in a region sharing a common border, and that refugees be allowed to be a start-up state.

It’s an outrageous and complex business to think about starting a state from nothing. It also borders dangerously on treating refugees as the “other”. Separating them from “normal” others would perhaps make them objects of unending pity and perhaps even targets of extreme forms of “othering” such as violence.

The first prize in dealing with the flood of refugees would be ending the crisis refugees are emanating from. This is easier said than done because most of the states at war have degenerated into failed states where finding resolutions and roads to recovery will be protracted and painful, taking decades and, in some cases, may not be possible at all.

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