By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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The “Rwanda asylum plan” roiled UK politics, and now it seems it will be many years before it goes away.

The plan, whose official title was the “UK and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership”, was an immigration policy whereby people identified by the UK as being illegal immigrants or asylum seekers would have been relocated to Rwanda for processing, asylum and resettlement. It became complicated very quickly.

Not since Rhodesia’s (now Zimbabwe) Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, and the 1970s to late 1980s international battles against the apartheid government in South Africa has an issue centred around an African country embedded itself in the heart of British politics like this.

The genesis of the Rwanda plan can be traced to two main points. First, to the ouster of Libya’s strongman Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 by revolutionaries, aided by heavy Nato bombing in which the UK played a key role. A fleeing Gaddafi was cornered in a trench, seized by an angry mob and lynched, ending his 32-year-long rule.

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Libya descended into the chaos of a failed state. Meanwhile, desperate Africans continued their headlong rush through Libya to get to boats on the Mediterranean and on to Europe. But with criminal gangs and violent militias ruling over parts of Libya, thousands of them were stranded and were held in what turned out to be horrid slave camps, sold and exploited for pennies. The “lucky” ones were detained in crowded prisons run by local authorities, where they endured appalling abuse and were starved.

A horrified Africa and international community scrambled to repatriate the marooned Africans out of Libya. Rwanda, citing pan-African responsibilities and compassion for those suffering the same kind of depredations it had endured during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, offered to take and help resettle them. It received praise, and many threw confetti over its head.

The second point happened in 2016 when, in a shocker, the British people voted to leave the European Union, in what came to be known as Brexit. Brexit came into effect in 2020.

The nativism that drove Brexit, made immigration a vexed political issue in Britain and helped the Conservative Party cling to power.

In April 2022, Conservative UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the Rwanda asylum plan. Rwanda said it was building on the success and tradition of the popular Libya repatriation plan, to help similarly stranded Africans in the UK – and the UK would pay the cost. Johnson fell from office five months later. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, his successors in rapid order, stayed with the plan.

This was not Libya, though. The plan got caught in a big political storm. The broad British left and activist community hated the plan, considering it inhumane and against international law.

In Africa, the plan had both its supporters and critics.

The critics argued that illegal African emigration is a legacy of European colonialism and post-colonial exploitation of the continent.

The chickens were only coming home to roost, and cooperating in any repatriation plan was, as one of them put it, to “give the imperialists a discount on their sins”.

The international anti-Rwanda global industry meanwhile sensed an opportunity to take the war to Kigali and piled on that Rwanda was unsafe – despite the fact people (especially Africans) were several times safer from being stabbed to death, robbed, raped, or mistreated by police in Kigali than any major British city.

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The Rwanda plan bounced between the House of Commons and Lords, the courts, and the European Court of Human Rights, than even the many battles over apartheid South Africa.

Caught between an organised and sharply focused left opposition, and a radical conservative constituency that wanted even tougher action against unlawful immigrants than the government was offering with the Rwanda plan, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak flailed about hopelessly. In July the Conservatives were annihilated at the polls, suffering their worst election in over 100 years.

The first action of victorious Labour Party Keir Starmer upon being sworn in as Prime Minister, was to cancel the Rwanda plan he had opposed and campaigned against. For Rwanda, to look on the bright side, it was an old lesson; no good deed goes unpunished.

Now, one of the candidates who has thrown his hat in the ring to head the Conservative party has said he would revive the Rwanda plan if he became its leader and was elected prime minister. And with the UK presently roiled by far-right anti-immigration protests, the Rwanda plan will likely remain in the British political tussle for at least another five years.

All the above, however, is a small part of a bigger story. Unsaid was that the Rwanda plan, whatever its merits and flaws, did something that challenged 800 years of colonial and neo-colonial tradition in Africa. It was the first time an Africa-anchored policy had been passed in the Parliament of a former colonising power, as offering a solution to its internal crisis.

Virtually all policies and laws by former colonisers do two things: punish a former colony for being wayward (e.g. sanctions against Zimbabwe) or seek to save it (from debt, the destruction of war, the ravages of famine).

In that sense, it was a journey into unchartered waters for a former imperial hegemony. And for those reasons, the Rwanda plan suggests we have arrived at a historic juncture in the coloniser-colonised history – only that we don’t know it yet.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3