By Innocent Onoh
The immediate past President of Ghana, John Mahama has joined Africans in the Diaspora calling for open borders in the continent. Mr. Mahama says the time has come for African countries to open up their international borders in order to boost economic activities and create jobs among their teeming youths.
He observed that Africans in the Diaspora are right to frown at the desperation of most of the continent’s youths to migrate abroad. However, the ex-President said affluent Africans and African-Americans in the Diaspora were more concerned about the deadly risk the youths have been taking to cross the Sahara desert and Mediterranean Sea. He argued that this was because of limited opportunities available in the continent, which would improve if the national borders were opened. Mr. Mahama made the submission in Pretoria, South Africa, on the sidelines of the commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the Adoption of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance.
The former President said he was aligning himself with the Canada Declaration of September 2017 which reflected the views of African technocrats, academics and businessmen as well as their African-American counterparts on the worrisome Libyan immigration issue. He argued that the strategy to contain the matter, which he said had certainly gone awry, required the input of all concerned Africans.
Mr. Mahama, who regretted that the aspect of selling Black African as slaves in Libya was totally repulsive, posited that the issue could have been nipped in the bud if the ousted regime of Muammer Gaddafi had allowed the African Union to intervene in the 1980s.
Returning to the suggestion to open up international borders, the former Ghanaian leader admitted the potential challenges in pursuing that approach but insisted that in order to usher in free trade as well as to resolve some of the economic challenges facing the continent, it is the only way to go.
In his words, “There is a value of trade amongst ourselves. The difficulty of opening the borders to trading is something that one cannot understand. If we must remove some of the challenges that Africa faces then let’s open the borders and allow our people to move freely, allow goods and services to move freely across the continent”.
According to the ex-President, more youths in the continent risk being auctioned as slaves if steps are not taken to provide the congenial environment for trade in order to keep them engaged. “If we don’t accelerate the pace of economic growth and throw up the essential jobs that will keep the youths engaged, then we will keep having the kind of situation where our young people struggling to cross the Sahara would be auctioned as slaves in Libya or die trying to cross the Mediterranean”, he stated.
The other aspect mentioned in the Canada Declaration concerned youth migration within continental Africa. Africans in the Diaspora are of the view that free and unfettered cross-border migration would reduce the trans-Libya-Mediterranean crossing.
