Let’s buy some disused land in Africa and create new countries for African refugees
There are also disputed territories between countries that might be resolved by a purchase. There are the borderlands of Kajokeji between South Sudan and Uganda; and the Ilemi Triangle occupying the north-western corner of Lake Turkana, an 11,000 square-kilometre territory that Kenya and South Sudan have been beefing over. ILLUSTRATION | JOSEPH NYAGAH | NMG
Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
A recent report says that a record 75.9 million people in the world are living in internal displacement due to conflict,
Nearly 50 percent of that number is in sub-Saharan Africa, said the report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Overall, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) projects that there are 131 million forcibly displaced and stateless people on this fair Earth.
The East and Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region are expected to host 23.6 million forcibly displaced and stateless people by the end of 2024.
Uganda hosted the largest number of refugees in Africa as of April this year — about 1.62 million. Usually praised for having the most progressive refugee policy anywhere, it could see that number increase, with the continuing influx from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Uganda is also home to the oldest refugee settlement in Africa, Nakivale, in the western part of the country. It was established in 1959, when Rwandan Tutsis fled the first episode of violent conflict in the country that came to be known as the Hutu Revolution. About 330,000 Tutsi were forced to seek refuge outside Rwanda.
A much smaller number remain in Nakivale, the majority having returned home in the years since the Rwanda Patriotic Front took power in 1994. They left a camp that has probably grown bigger.
Nakivale today is the eighth largest refugee camp in the world, and hosts about 180,000 people, mostly from the DRC, Burundi, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. It boggles the mind to think of the diversity.
However, the refugees in Nakivale typify the new generation of refugees that has arisen around Africa over the past decade. Perhaps with Africa opening up more, and prospects of being resettled in a rich Western country that had abundance 25 to 40 years ago having become a mirage, more and more African refugees are increasingly treating their sanctuaries as home.
It is still far from a refugee mass movement, but the train has left the station. After many years of pressure and exploitation, a few years ago all the trees in the Nakivale disappeared.
The depleted energy resources created tension between the refugees and host communities. Fuelled by a new climate change awareness, the refugees rallied to a programme working with NGOs to plant trees. In six years, they returned Nakivale to a small, green paradise.
By the end of last year, they had planted woodlots equivalent to over 350 hectares with over 460,000 trees around Nakivale. The evenings in Nakivale are merrier; the refugees and local communities are again breaking bread and drinking from the same beer pots happily.
It is a similar story in Minawao in Cameroon’s Far North region, about 64 kilometres east of the Nigerian border. In the past six years, over 70,000 Nigerian refugees who fled violence by the jihadist Boko Haram have turned the arid and hot landscape into a vast oasis.
By the start of the year, they had planted nearly 500,000 trees and other plants over a nearly 600-hectare swathe, turning the desert into a lush forest.
A people who give so much life to lands that they found barren, or that they resurrected from the dead, deserve to be gifted a piece of it — even as transient owners.
That vaunted Ugandan progressive refugee policy is evident in the northwest part of the country, which hosts the Kiryandongo refugee camp. In the very opposite direction from Nakivale, Kiryandongo has more than 65,000 people. Most are South Sudanese refugees, but also Burundian, Congolese, and a sprinkling of Rwandan and Kenyan refugees.
Many refugees live and work as free people around Kiryandongo. The main town in the area, Bweyale, has become a booming, lively, multicultural commercial centre. The buzz and frenzied activity in the place can be a cultural shock for the uninitiated.
Bweyale is what most towns outside the big capitals in East Africa should strive to be.
The reality, though, is that refugee politics remains fraught. Still, Nakivale, Bweyale and Minawao point out a way for enlightened action on refugees.
There are many rich men — and these days women — who are giving away billions of dollars to good causes. Few causes would be as worthy as creating a new country — or countries — for African refugees.
African countries are also leasing millions of hectares to rich nations like the United Arab Emirates and giant corporations to offset their pollution. The trees they are growing can be planted and tended by refugees. So, why not get a billionaire philanthropist to buy some unloved and unused land, give it to the refugees as their homeland, and let them unleash their creativity on it?
It might not be necessary to buy. There is the arid tract of land known as Bir Tawil at the Sudan and Egypt border. None of them even lay claim to it. Buy it for a dollar, and we see what happens. There is a whopping 2,060 square kilometres of it.
There are also disputed territories between countries that might be resolved by a purchase. There are the borderlands of Kajokeji between South Sudan and Uganda; and the Ilemi Triangle occupying the north-western corner of Lake Turkana, an 11,000 square-kilometre territory that Kenya and South Sudan have been beefing over.
If there’s fear of new, independent and successful nations, they could be created as republican versions of a principality like Monaco and, just like that, the African refugee in Africa could be history.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X@cobbo3
