Migrations, Public Policies for ‘Foreigners’ and Citizenship in West Africa
By: Francis Akindès, Sociologist and Professor at Université de Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire.
The text has been translated from French by Kristin Couper.
The area covered by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), as a political region, is shared by fifteen states which could be divided into three groups: the Sahel region (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger); the extreme west (Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Senegal and Sierra Leone); and finally the Gulf of Guinea (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo). In 2000, the population within this Community (at that time including Mauritania) was estimated to be 224 million, or 28 percent of the population of Africa. This population increased at the rate of 2.7 percent per annum between 1995 and 2000, faster therefore than Africa as a whole (2.4 percent) and the developing countries in general where the rate of growth was only 1.6 percent. This region has been subject to the influence of three colonial systems: British, French and Portuguese. Four decades after independence, the first two systems still strongly influence the social and cultural dynamics at work in the ex-colonies. This region is also characterized by an extraordinary cultural, religious and linguistic diversity. The adoption of French and English as official languages adds to this linguistic diversity.
History of West African migrations
The sociological configuration on the ground is the product of several centuries of exchanges which are now well documented. In the course of the pre-colonial period, between 1250 and 1850, important trading networks had already been set up from the three main areas of production: the Sahel for salt, gum arabic, gold, copper, perfume and dyes; the Sudan for indigo, shea butter (karité), cloth and iron; Guinea for sea salt, gold, ivory and cola nuts. The trade in these various goods encouraged the development of entrepôt towns on the edge of the forest and the savannah. The flow of trade went even further than this to reach the Mediterranean basin. The dynamics of these trading networks also contributed to a mixing of cultures and nationalities. Between 1850 and 1960, colonization reconfigured the directions of the flows around strategic cash crops such as groundnut, palm oil, cocoa, hevea and coffee. From that point on, two urban basins emerged: the Cape Verde/Lake Tchad axis and the coastal towns which opened doors to the outside world. However, these new axes did not lead to the disappearance of the pre-colonial trading routes which adapted in parallel circuits to the new order. Thus, in French West Africa, to fulfill the training requirements of an intellectual elite for the colonies, colonization promoted emigration towards Dakar where the leading educational institutions were located. The same was true for the organized, even forced, migration from Upper Volta towards the Côte d'Ivoire between 1932 and 1950, to supply labour for the exploitation of the Lower Côte d'Ivoire. The frontiers inherited from colonization have remained artificial because they have never prevented economic and cultural exchanges between the various communities scattered over several countries. A considerable number of informal transfrontier exchanges organized around manufactured goods and basic products defied the barriers put up between peoples and conveyed the desire of the population to maximize the comparative advantages of the national entities which were at last interconnected from the coast.
Before as well as after colonization, the motives for migration were mainly economic. After independence (1960–1970) economic migration still exists, but the main reasons for population movements are political instability and agro-climatic difficulties in the Sahel. The States in the area attempt, with varying degrees of success, to transcend the political compart-mentalization by setting up institutions for regional integration such as the Central Bank of West African States, the West African Economic and Monetary Union, the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS), the Conseil de l’Entente, the sub-regional Fishing Commission, the Inter-State Committee against Drought in the Sahel, etc. These institutions are intended as mechanisms for the collective management of the political and economic constraints of the area, but also for the regulation of its potential.
Inefficient legal arrangements
As a region, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a political construction given legitimacy both by the history of its peoples and by the various historical interactions since the pre-colonial period. Even if today’s difficulties in administering the social diversity within the national political entities originate in the borders created during the colonial period, the latter in no way interfered with the interactions and migrations of the population. After independence, migration even tended to increase. The causes for this are now well known, and so are the consequences. But, since independence, the pogroms targeting immigrants in several States (for example Mauritanians in Senegal and Senegalese in Mauritania due to the conflict in 1989 regarding the river Senegal), the successive waves of expulsion of immigrants to their country of origin (the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria in 1983 and 1989, the expulsion of Ghanaians, Burkinabes and Malian fishermen from the Côte d'Ivoire) and more harmful phenomena such as the fatal accusations implicating immigrant communities of being ‘soul sellers’ or ‘penis shrinkers’are good demonstrations that immigration is beginning to pose problems in these countries beset by the integration into a republic of their constituent nationalities which are still poorly incorporated. In 1979 a draft agreement on free circulation of goods and persons was signed by the member States, but it did not produce the expected effects. (As if to give substance to this ‘political will’ an official ECOWAS passport was even launched in May 2000 by the Conference of Presidents.) These texts which, within the Community, grant settlement facilities to the citizens of the member States are unknown to the populations who are supposed to be the beneficiaries and are deliberately not applied by the authorities. Moreover the agreement is subject to a certain scepticism among politicians and intellectuals who rarely refer to them. As a result, the agreement has in no way changed the situation. The limited efficiency of these community legal arrangements is also explained by the lack of systematic thinking about what a public policy for ‘foreigners’ really ought to be within the member States of the Community.
Towards a public policy for foreigners?
A public policy for foreigners is the sum total of the institutional and constitutional arrangements which integrate the mechanisms for the control of migration at the borders, identification and the administrative management of immigration files and transcends them. What is also very important is that it must include legal and political schemes for the incorporation and reassurance of minorities of immigrant origin.
Within a State, a public policy for foreigners must be understood as the set of formal and informal mechanisms acting on the mobility of sociological borders and the psychological rapprochement of ‘them’ and ‘us’; it must also work towards more and better integration of the fringes of the immigrant populations who desire this. In this respect, the setting up of Ministers for Integration and a preferential price for residence permits in a good number of the Community States should not lead to illusions, any more than the existence of naturalization procedures which are only known to the happy few. The use made of these arrangements does not give the impression of corresponding to societies which may have become aware of their complexity, in particular in matters of immigration, and of the moral need to create the conditions for social justice, equality and an integrating civic citizenship. What takes the place of a policy for foreigners in most of the Community States is merely implicit. The African tradition of hospitality which is used in an attempt to justify the absence of an explicit public policy for foreigners is now subject to considerable pressure when foreign communities become scapegoats, particularly in periods of prolonged economic crisis. The topicality of the treatment of immigrants in West Africa over the past twenty years clearly demonstrates that attempts are made everywhere to ward off social malaise using the pretext of the ‘invading foreigner’. The argument for an African predisposition to welcome foreigners no longer stands up to analysis, the possibilities for the professional integration of foreigners in the national economic fabric or the transfer of plots of land are no longer sufficient to justify and guarantee integration, and still less to reassure the foreigner. ‘A policy of recognition’ also has to be formulated to ensure dignity for all, and prevent the existence of ‘first-’ and ‘second-class’ citizens which the destructive ideology of ivoirité (‘Ivorianness’) tends to produce in the Côte d'Ivoire.
The policy of recognition, theorized by the American philosopher, Charles Taylor, is based on the liberal principle of human rights, while remaining close to what is still meaningful in Africa: the fact that individuals are rooted in religious, ethnic and linguistic communities. To be meaningful, the integration of immigrants has to involve the recognition of this multiculturality which successive waves of immigration have contributed to enriching. Well managed, these additional differences as well as the knowledge and know-how they include, constitute valuable human capital for the host societies. Unless foreigners are to be citizens without rights, no modern State which respects the rule of law can afford not to formulate a public policy for foreigners. The old democracies in Europe and North America have understood this. Even more than the legal arrangements for the protection of minority rights, the dissemination of information on the conditions and procedures for naturalization, the possibilities for integration in the economic fabric, and the political procedures for the recognition of minorities of immigrant origin should also be effected in a deliberate, pedagogical manner. This may require the re-writing of school textbooks.
The complex sociological realities in each society determine the appropriate policies to be adopted for this recognition. In the emerging democracies in Africa, the on-going process of decentralization constitutes a favourable political opportunity for experimenting with policies for recognition on a scale which can be controlled. For example, foreigners voting in local elections enables a trial run, on a reduced scale, of a public policy for foreigners which is more acceptable because it is gradual. Local authorities can act as social laboratories where the inclusion of immigrants in decision-making at a local level can be tested in real life. The spatialisation of citizenship would then be a transition between the status of foreigner and entry into the full rights of civic citizenship for individuals who feel a need for a more all-encompassing integration. Encouraging the involvement of immigrants in the associations which local authorities finance would also be another means of transforming the shared space of proximity into a political tool for integration. But a policy of recognition will only be efficient if it is backed up by an equally specific cultural policy, supported by the public and private media, to deal with the principal source of intolerance: the co-existence of communities who do not know one another! Getting to know one another enables the rejection or the destructive fear of one another to be mitigated; what seems strange can be minimized and the spontaneous hostility regarding the unknown attenuated; in other words the ‘aversion to the different’ or the natural antipathy towards those who are not like us can be dealt with.
Policies for community management of migrations in the ECOWAS sphere will have limited effect as long as the member States have not each understood, and admitted, the need for a public policy for foreigners. The latter should not be restricted uniquely to immigration control and identity procedures. Its originality and relevance will depend primarily on the articulation of a policy for recognition which is explicitly debated and defined and a cultural policy for mutual knowledge among the respective communities. The task is urgent.
Selected topical literature and internet sources
Habermas, Jürgen, Droit et démocratie. Entre faits et normes. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Rawls, John, Théorie de la justice. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987.
Schnapper, Dominique, La communauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Schnapper, Dominique, La démocratie providen-tielle. Essai sur l’égalité contemporaine. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.
Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of Recognition’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Waltzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice, A defenses of Pluralism and Equality. New York : Basic Books, 1983.
Waltzer, Michael, Traité sur la tolérance. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
ECOWAS internet site: www.ecowas.int
