Dr. Franca Attoh & Dr. Kayode Eesuola: "A cross-sectional survey on IntraAfrican Migration and Xenophobia"

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Speaker 1: On the go sprint lectures on African mobilities podcast by Africa Multiple.

Speaker 2: Welcome everyone to the first spring lecture for the summer term. So the spring lectures is a series of debates on planetary mobilities and is hosted by the Mobilities Research Section of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. My name is Grace Akessi and I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bayreuth. I am very happy to welcome you all and especially to our speakers today, Professor Franca Ato and Dr Kayode Isiola who will be presenting findings from a cross-sectional survey on intra-African migration and xenophobia. So by way of introduction, Professor Ato is a professor of sociology at the University of Lagos Nigeria. Her research interests are in criminology, gender and migration. Dr Kayode Isiola is also a senior research fellow at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies also at the University of Lagos and they are both joining us from Lagos Nigeria today. Within the cluster, both Professor Ato and Dr Isiola are leads on the project Intra-African Migration and Xenophobia: The Imperatives for African Integration. So welcome everyone to the first spring lecture series and welcome to our speakers especially and I will leave it to them to present for the next twenty minutes.

Speaker 3: Yeah thank you very much Grace. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Franca. I am presenting from Lagos. We had planned our work. The title by the way as Grace said is Intra-African Migration and Xenophobia: Imperatives for African Integration. So we had planned this as a four-pronged work plan. Quantitatively, we did a study in Lagos which is one of the contexts and another in Ouagadougou. Then we still have two more things to do which would be starting in May. That is we are going to Ouagadougou and then Lagos we started yesterday for the KIIs and the IDIs. So what I am presenting today is the results from the quantitative. We've actually analysed the data we collected in the two contexts and it threw up something very interesting as far as migration and xenophobia is concerned. The methodology for the research was done electronically. We used the Kobo Toolbox mobile application and we administered a total of one thousand questionnaires, five hundred in Lagos and five hundred in Ouagadougou. For Lagos, I will be presenting Lagos while Kayode will present Ouagadougou. For Lagos, the team comprised of ten individuals, one supervisor, a French linguist. Initially I never knew I needed a French linguist until we went into the field and we discovered that the concentration of migrants especially from French-speaking countries, many of them who speak neither Yoruba nor English therefore we needed a French linguist. So at that point I had to employ a French linguist and then two collaborators. Now we toured four locations which were identified during the pre-field study. Now the pre-field was done in Abeokuta because the ethics of research, you know, everyone knows that if you use a context for a pilot you cannot go back to that context when you are doing your research proper. So we used Abeokuta because Abeokuta is also a small town not very far away from Lagos where some migrants find their way when they come into Nigeria. So we used there as a pilot, you know, administering about hundred questionnaires there to enable us to have a feel of what we are going to meet in the field. In Lagos we toured four locations okay namely Makoko, Agege, Maryland and Mile Twelve. But towards the end we had to go to Lagos Island because we understood that Lagos Island also had a very high concentration of migrants from places as far as Burkina Faso. Now these locations were identified as communities with concentration of migrants from different African countries including Benin, Niger, Togo, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso among others. And the research took us two weeks, fourteen days from the twenty fourth of February twenty twenty one to Saturday eleventh March twenty twenty one. We engaged migrants from African countries in these locations for the primary purpose of quantitative data collection as captured in the photographs below.

The first place we visited was a place called Makoko. Makoko is actually a conglomeration of people from Benin Republic, Togo and then some Nigerians. This was the palace of the Bale of Makoko. They call him the Bale of Ado'bu. So here we engaged him, introduced ourselves and then he was the one who now gave us somebody to take us to the Bale of the French speaking places. Most of the people here are fishermen. They came initially, you know, as fishermen but over time they were able to settle. They were able to settle down in Makoko and, you know, they built homes there. But initially I thought that Nigeria didn't have the issue of xenophobia. Unfortunately when we moved into Makoko, we now discovered, we discovered a palpable fear among the migrants. Now many of them thought that we were government workers because according to them they had had an incident the year previous with the Lagos State Government. You know, they came in and they wanted to demolish the neighbourhood. You will see some of the pictures. They wanted to demolish the neighbourhood because the place had become a slum. So many of them now said they were not Nigerians. But then the Bale of Ado'bu, who was the first person we met, convinced us that these people are not really Nigerians. Many of them came from Benin Republic and then Togo and then as, you know, as far as even Cote d'Ivoire. So eventually we had to find one of the counsellors who is from their place. He was the one who now convinced them that we were not government workers, we were researchers and the information we were looking for was for the purpose of research. Now from there we visited another place. I told you that we went to four places. We went to a place called Kane Village which is in Maryland, okay. This is a community where people weave baskets, you know, using the raffia, they make all kinds of things. And you find most of the people are from Ghana, Benin and Togo. So here we were also able to interview some of them. Even though they told us that at the time we came, most of the migrants had gone home because of the Covid. And some of those people who came, who went home for Christmas did not return because of the Covid. Now from there we went to a place called Agege Abattoir. The Agege is a very interesting space because it has the biggest abattoir in Lagos State and it also has a market. So with the result that it attracts people from different parts of Lagos, even people come as far as Abeokuta, those who want to purchase, you know, meat in large quantity. So we interviewed here, you find people mainly from Ghana. You also find people from Togo. The interesting thing about this place is that behind this bus station you have a large population of migrants from Ghana, Togo, Guinea who live there, okay. In addition to the space serving as a bus station, it also serves as a residential area. So for instance we spoke to an elderly Ghanian, okay, who told us that he has been in Lagos since first start nineteen seventy seven. And there was this argument about obtaining the national identification number. Some of the people we spoke to were complaining that they were unable to do so. But this guy said that he didn't find it difficult because he knew what to do. That for you to obtain the NIN, all you need was to present your basic documents like the immigration card, okay, to the NIMC people so that they would help you to register. Once they are able to ascertain that you're genuinely a migrant living in Nigeria, that you'll be registered and then you'll be given the national identification number. So this community is a mix of decent residences and shanties housing mostly non-Nigerians. Now I want to take you back to this, the fluidity of mobility in West Africa which does not take cognisance of the policies that states make, you know. People move in and they move out at will. They are actually not interested in some of the things. We also went to the palace of the Olubadan of Ogbaland because, you know, the tradition in Nigeria is that when you move into a space, the first thing you do is to look for whoever is the leader of that particular space, you know, to pay homage to them and let them realise that you are here in their space and this is what you want to do. If you don't do that, you will not be allowed to work or interview anybody. So anywhere we go to, the first thing we do is to find whoever is the leader, the community leader of that space and then we pay homage. And of course paying homage in Nigerian palaces, you don't pay homage empty handed. If you're going to the house of an elder or a big man like a chief, you go with a bottle of hard drink, okay. So these were some of the things we did to make our passage very easy.

We met a concentration of migrants and it was interesting because within this space there is an eatery and then people who eat and also converse and discuss about some of the things that are happening in the country at the moment. Now the art team here I found most interesting. The French interpreter made the administration of questionnaire very easy for us and seamless because he was able to communicate with most of them who were not English speaking and then they could not also speak Yoruba. So he was able to speak to them in French and they felt at home. So they answered our questions without any hindrance. From there we moved to a place called Maza Maza. Maza Maza is a bus station, is a very big bus station in Lagos. In fact, it is a place that when you come to you'll be amazed. I call it mini West Africa because in Maza Maza you find West Africans from different parts of West Africa. You find people as far as Burkina Faso and then you find very long vehicles going to Ghana and different places in West Africa. Now this is our French interpreter. His name is Mr. Frederick. He was born in Cote d'Ivoire. He spent almost all his life in Cote d'Ivoire but he schooled at the University of Lagos. So we had to engage him and in addition to speaking French, he is a polyglot because he could speak five native languages in West Africa. So that made it very easy for us to talk to people as we were going. Now let's look at the major observations from data collection exercise. We discovered that a large number of the migrants came to Nigeria in search of greener pastures. The deteriorating economic condition in the country at the moment is a source of discouragement for many of the migrants. This is at the heart of the desire of some of the respondents who felt that they might want to return back to their countries where the conditions are similar or where the conditions are improving like most of the Ghanaians we spoke to. Many of them they said that for instance in Ghana health insurance is compulsory. Health insurance is compulsory and people can access it easily. This is a difference. You don't find health insurance is not compulsory in Nigeria. It is mainly for the rich and then the enlightened and those who are working in government spaces. For instance those who are lecturers. Now the challenge for migrants and their intention to return back to their country is the rising cost of international transport especially by road. In the past the transport fare from Lagos to Ghana was twenty thousand naira. Now the price is seventy thousand and many of the people are finding it difficult. Another issue they raised is education. They say that education is not easily accessible for the children of migrants and private schools are very expensive. Then most of the people we interviewed also spoke about the Nigerian immigration officers who try to extort them from time to time with threats of deportation. They also talked about difficulty in getting jobs due to language barriers. Hence the preference for the informal sector. This report gives the highlights of the data generated in Lagos study on intra-African migration and xenophobia, the imperatives for African integration. It provides findings on the sociodemographic profile of respondents, African migrants' access to public education, health and political activities. How the nature of the access determines the security of the migrants in their host communities. How the security of the migrants determines their investments preference in the host communities. Their roles played by language, security and other factors in the conflicts between migrants and host communities and how the ECOWAS and African Union migration policies help to address identified problems and resolve manifest contradictions. Most of the migrants, the respondents fall within the age category of twenty to thirty nine years old. So migration is a youth phenomenon. It's only young people, most of the people who migrate are young people, not old people. Now it shows that the mean age for most of the respondents was put at thirty eight point one years which falls within the youth population in Nigeria. Now distribution by sex. Most of the migrants are male. Sixty one percent of them are males while thirty nine percent of them are female. So migration in West Africa is gendered. It is men that migrates mainly. Most of the respondents have no formal education. Others have primary and secondary education. Very few of them have tertiary education. So in essence it is no wonder that you find that many of them are found in the periphery of the economy because they don't have the requisite educational qualification to be able to access jobs in the formal sector. Distribution of respondents by occupation. Now you find that most of our respondents are petty traders and virtually all of them are from the informal sector of the economy. Now like most of them rightly agree when we were interviewing them that they found it difficult to access government jobs. Yes, the data from their educational qualification buttresses that because if you're not educated you don't have any business coming to look for job in the formal sector of the economy.

Speaker 1: There is also an almost equal distribution of documented and undocumented migrants in Lagos because that was one of the things we set out to ascertain, whether respondents were documented or undocumented. And we discovered that documented migrants were forty-four point one percent while undocumented migrants were fifty-two point ten percent. So you find that it's almost at par. So the difference is not much. Now within Lagos, by the time Kayode presents his own data, you'll find the variation in terms of migration-to-context. In Nigeria, people migrate mainly to urban slums. And that was where we went to. We started with Makoko. Whereas in Ouagadougou, you find that most of the migrants are found in the suburban areas and then the urban areas. But in Lagos, you find them mainly in the urban slums. Why that is the case is because the slums offer them the anonymity they require, especially those of them who are not documented. Even though the immigration now from time to time goes there to harass them and try to extort money from them. But in the past, like some of them argued, the slums offered them a lot of anonymity. Nobody would even know that they are not from Nigeria since the skin tone is the same. So and especially if the person can speak Yoruba, then you can pass as somebody from Badagry, which is the last town before you move into Cotonou, the Republic of Benin. Let me just conclude so that Kayode will come and present. This research has shown the fluidity of mobility within the West African sub-region. As citizens of this region move in search of livelihood and greener pasture without recourse to the artificial boundaries created through colonization. The emphasis should be on how to harness these movements and interactions to achieve migration and craft a framework to achieve formal trade and development. This is because most of the trade is not captured in the macroeconomic framework. It is expected that the analysis and conclusion derived from the gathered data will inform valuable policy recommendations for tackling the challenge of migration and xenophobia in Africa. Now for future research, one of the things we discovered is that we need a Hausa linguist, somebody who speaks Hausa. Because people from Niger, Ghana, Chad, Cameroon, other places speak Hausa. So we found it difficult to interview them in English. Fortunately for us, Frederick was able to speak passable Hausa and that also helped us. Completion date: we are likely to conclude this research in October twenty twenty-one. We have started the IDIs and KIIs in Lagos. In May, by the second week of May, we should be in Ouagadougou where we'll complete the last leg of this research and then we call it a day. Thank you very much and may God bless you for listening. Now Kayode has the floor.

Speaker 2: Okay. What is peculiar about Ouagadougou is that it is a direct opposite of Lagos, Nigeria. There at Ouagadougou, a ten-man team moved into the communities. Migrants live in four major areas, principal of which is Camp Sawan. And then we have the market, Yaari and all these things. Our major findings from Ouagadougou indicate that almost all migrants, about ninety-eight percent, accept Ouagadougou as the best place for African migrants. Like the opposite of Nigeria, access to education, access to healthcare, access to political participation, access to economic integration in terms of ease of doing business, at Ouagadougou is practically the same between the citizens and migrants. To the extent that very few of them express any desire to return to their home country. What we will suggest from here is that the African Union and ECOWAS integration policies are not ineffective in several parts of Africa. Ouagadougou is a very good model for the practical application of the policies of AU and ECOWAS. However, we discover from Nigeria and other places that the domestic...

Speaker 1: rendition of these policies create problem as you can see in Nigeria. It's a West African country. Oga Duku is a West African country. The way Oga Duku interpreted the policies makes it very easy for African migrants there to settle down and integrate and show no sign of xenophobia at all. So part of the recommendations would then be that we bring a journal article out from that place to explore that lacuna between the policy itself and the domestic rendition. And then from that, we can roll out pieces of advice for ECOWAS and AU on the need to emphasize how the member states domestically interpret and of course implement the policies that have to do with integration of ECOWAS in Africa. I think that's just a summary that I'll give. In addition, we can then wait for questions and comments from the floor. Thank you.

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Speaker 2: Thank you very much Dr. Ato and Dr. Kayode Isola. So I would ask that you pose your questions. We don't have much time, so the questions and answers period would be quite swift. Okay, I can see Martin's hand up. I have another question, but then I would resort to him asking his question first. So Martin, you have the floor.

Speaker 3: Okay, thank you. Thank you so much Franca and Kayode. I have two questions. The first one concerns the context of your research. I mean, in this context of ECOWAS integration efforts in regional free movement and the end on the other side, the externalization of European migration policy, I think we currently observe two aspects. First, the incomplete implementation of the nineteen seventy nine protocol and free movement of persons. And second, the increasing securitization of internal borders gradually restricting freedom of movement of ECOWAS citizens. I mean, the border between Nigeria and Benin was closed for one year, I think. So my question is, did the interviewees make this an issue? My second question is perhaps a bit special. Does the language background of migrants make a difference? I mean, migration from Benin to Togo and Niger to Nigeria has a long history, especially with the oil boom in the nineteen seventies. Many people from these countries came to work in the service sector in Nigeria, in particular those from Benin who speak Nagô, I mean, language which is more or less the same as Yoruba had always told me that they did not stand out as foreigners at all in Nigeria. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much. From the field, the migrants are not placing much emphasis on difficulty to navigate across West Africa. After all, they don't use the legitimate routes of the border. They will get informally into several countries and that reflects in the questionnaire. But for your information, the Benin-Nigeria border is open now. But the Ghana, I mean the Togo-Benin border is closed as we speak. But people still have their way to migrate. I think the category of people that migrate all around West Africa are those who would not mind passing through informal routes. They mostly may not have passport, they don't have anything. They will just navigate through one means or the other to get wherever they're going. So those incomplete aspects of the protocols are not a barrier for them from what they gave us during the interviews.

Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. Let me just also add like I said in the conclusion that the migration in West Africa actually moves away from the artificial borders that were created as a result of colonization. For instance, to move into Benin Republic, I don't need to pass through that border. There are about more than fifteen routes from Ogun State where you can just cross with your leg and it won't take you up to fifteen twenty minutes. In fact, many of them intermarry because they are actually neighbors. So the people we meet are not interested in passport. They don't even own them. They don't believe in them. So they don't have any difficulties at all. The ones with difficulties are those, of course, who are educated, you know, who want to go through the legitimate system. In fact, each time I want to go to Benin Republic, they will ask you, do you want to go through the official route or you want to go through the unofficial route? If you want to go through the official route, you can wait until a big man comes to stamp your passport. But if you want to go through the unofficial route, you just pay one thousand five hundred. It is the officials themselves who get you a motorcycle, which we call an okada, that will take you to crossover and then you do your business and return.

Speaker 2: Thank you for that. Franca, in your case, you mentioned the gendered disparity in the population that she surveyed and I was wondering if that gender differentials also reflect on people's experiences of xenophobia. Do women or men or differently gendered people experience xenophobia differently? If you could speak to that.

Speaker 1: Yes, thank you very much Grace. The truth of the matter is that, you see, it depends on the areas where you go to. For instance, areas that are really purely slum like Makoko. The problem Makoko has is that Makoko is very close to the University of Lagos. In fact, they are our neighbors. I call them the laboratory for the University of Lagos. So in context like that, you find that officials can go in and come out, okay, because they are closer to a higher institution. But in places like Abattoir in Agege, you find that the women there, many people know where they come from and people patronize them. They don't experience, like the woman who sells wanki, for instance, she's a very popular madam in that neighborhood. Even the immigration officials patronize them, okay. So it is those who move through, you know, who are very close to elite areas who have these issues. You don't have issue of xenophobia being gendered, okay, but the issue is that migration itself is gendered. Because of course, Grace, you should know this, it's only recently that women began to access migration as, you know, agents on their own. Initially it used to be that you either move with your family or you move as a result of marriage. So you find that most of those women who are in Makoko or living in those areas, many of them came either with their husbands or they are living with their sons and their daughters. Very few young ladies migrate on their own. Those of them who do, they move in and they move out. So they are more or less like itinerant laborers, not actually full migrants so to speak.

Speaker 2: I have a question here from Paddy then I would tend to Nadine. So Paddy has a conceptual question and he's wondering how you're defining migrants. For instance, are you considering Nigerians to who migrate from different parts of the country to where you're studying as also migrants in this context?

Speaker 1: Okay, thank you. No, you see, in migration we have two definitions. We have international and internal migration. When we are looking at migration in this context, we are looking at international migration. Those who have crossed borders, not those who moved from say other parts of Nigeria to say Lagos. No, we are not looking. And then if you unfortunately we didn't have time, if I've had time to take you through the notes, you would have seen the Nigerians were angry. Why were we interviewing only the foreigners? That they too also want to be interviewed because they thought something good will come out of it at the end of the day. So no, we are not looking at those who left their villages to come to Lagos to seek greener pastures. We are only looking at foreign migrants. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3: Nadine, you can pose your question.

Speaker 4: First of all, thank you so much for this wonderful thing. I live in Cameroon, very important Nigerian community of migrant here. And I almost wanted to engage in French with the researchers because I guess with all this you improve your French with the Francophone migrants. Actually, I wanted to know from you if somehow I would say the European policy, I don't know if you've had that question, maybe Martin said something around it, but it's about what we call frontierization. With the EU policy having impact on the way African countries manage their migrants. So I was wondering if somehow you've noticed in this research form of an impact, the fact that there is a closing of borders upward, is it somehow impacting the way states, I'm taking really the official part of it, the public policy of it, is it touching the way they interact with or they manage migration? I am asking this because we have noticed actually that borders are getting closed in many African countries. I notice that as far as ECOWAS is concerned, since the borders are quite open, maybe there is not the same issue. But well, I was wondering somehow please.

Speaker 1: Yes, Nadine, thank you very much. I was actually smiling with Kaya there because you see, we catch a lot of fun when we do some of these things. You know, the truth is that, you know, the borders are actually for, let me use our lingo in Lagos. The borders are for akokowe, you know, the educated and the enlightened. The non-educated and unenlightened people, that is the people you find in the informal sector. They don't, in fact, they don't care about your borders, okay. So if the people are closing their borders, probably they are closing them for the purpose of whatever policy it is they are interested in or maybe they want to get one form of assistance from whoever. The average man in the street, let me give you an example of something that I found very interesting. In Togo, for instance, I went to Togo one day in Lomé. I saw an itinerant herbalist selling drugs, okay.

Speaker 1: And the way he was speaking the French, I knew he wasn't from Togo. So I now spoke Yoruba to him. I now asked him, are you a Nigerian? He looked at me. Then I'm from Ogbonmọshọ. If you know the distance between Ogbonmọshọ and Lagos, it's almost like three hundred kilometers, isn't it? And I engaged him. I asked him. He said he comes here like, you know, once every six months. He comes with all kinds of herbal remedies. He settles down, he sells and he goes back. And I can tell you, for instance, unfortunately it's not in this work because the context is not, but in a chapter I am writing at the moment, there is a direct transport from Egbu in Oshun State to Côte d'Ivoire. In fact, there is no family in Egbu in Oshun State that does not have somebody in Côte d'Ivoire. The young man that works with us is actually from Egbu, Frederick, but he was born and bred in Côte d'Ivoire. So you find this transportation, people move every morning from Egbu to Côte d'Ivoire. So whether there is a border or not, we don't care. That doesn't concern the average person on the street. That concerns those living in Abuja. It has nothing to do with those of them who are pepper sellers and fish sellers.

Speaker 2: Okay. So I can quickly add, the experience in Ouagadougou took us to a place they call Maison San Fran, Andre Seva House. That Maison San Fran is the first point of call for every migrant from all parts of West Africa. They have their own vehicles, you know, with which they transfer people from one country to the other unofficially. And of course the drivers, the conductors and everybody have over the years perfected the act of settling their ways, knowing the informal routes to navigate. So once you want to migrate, you just go to that Maison San Fran, you tell them where you are going, they will take you through. And when you get to the place you are going, you don't need to stay in a hotel, you don't need to interact with any formal structure that will register you and document you. They will allow you to sleep over for under seven per day until you find your way into the society. So this informal dimension to it, do not make the prominence of border closure very key in this situation.

Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Stefan?

Speaker 4: Thank you for this very interesting presentation. A brief last question. With what understanding of xenophobia did you enter the study and how has it changed now after you've gone through the data and what these people said? Have you arrived at a different understanding of xenophobia at the end of your study? Thank you.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Thank you, Stefan. We've actually not ended the study. But you see, the concept of xenophobia that plays out in Nigeria is not as complex and intense as what we have in South Africa. Because what actually gave impetus to this study was what played out in South Africa in twenty fifteen and then as recent as two years ago. So it's not as intense. But you see, because of that fear, the fact that the world is now a village, that what plays out in other contexts kind of traumatizes people in other contexts. So even those who are living in Nigeria, when government is trying, like Makoko, government wants to clean up the place for them to have a better environment. But they are kind of afraid. They are believing that, you know, why government is coming into this context now is that government wants to throw them out of where they are staying. So the fear is there, but it's not the kind of fear that people are running for their lives. No. Nobody is actually endangering anybody's life. But it's just because of the things they see on the internet, on the social media, you know, they have this feeling that anytime government comes in, it means government wants to take over the space and then throw us out of our space. And finally, by the way, the woman that supplies me fish at the University of Lagos comes from Cotonou. She is from Republic of Benin. And you know, it's interesting because as far as she's concerned, she goes there, brings fish, sells in the university for all of us. And she's comfortable where she's staying. So it's an interesting world.

Speaker 3: Thank you very much to Professor Akpo and also Doctor Shola. And we'll see you all next month for the next one. So thank you.

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This was On the Go: Sprint Lectures on African Mobilities.

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