FAILED ECONOMIES OF BLACK AFRICAN COUNTRIES AND THE Modern Slave Trade on Sub-Saharan Black Africans in Libya

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     Here is a story no one likes to tell or even the hear. Selling Black African slaves in auctions held on the African continent in this 21st Century may sound far-fetched to many.

·         The incredulity of this matter compelled the CNN to dispatch its investigative journalists to Libya to ascertain the veracity of modern-day slave auctions organized routinely to buy and sell Black Africans whose luck may have run out as they desperately risk everything to escape their countries in sub-Saharan Africa to seek greener pastures in Europe and elsewhere. The American journalists were led to a typical slave auction venue inside Libya to confirm the fact.

Further research show that hordes of migrants from the West African countries of Niger, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroun, Liberia, Mali etc leave their home countries in droves to escape mass impoverishment and dearth of economic opportunities that abound in sub-Saharan African nation states.

Even in oil-rich Nigeria, the national economy has been on life support forever. Revenue derived from sale of crude oil and natural gas is collected in a central location in Abuja where it is shared out, on monthly basis, to minders of the status quo ostensibly for onward transmission to the populace. The cash collected from Abuja, somehow, end up as deposits into private bank accounts while the country's socioeconomic infrastructure and services subsist in a state of near collapse.

The populace know that huge earnings are derived from export of the country's natural resources, but have become used to making do with little they can eke out from struggling on their own without any help whatsoever from those they had elected to oversee the government on their behalf. Often confronted with a future life of hopelessness and despair, the unemployed and forgotten hordes opt to get the hell out of the country and seek greener pastures elsewhere.

This means that governance failure in countries of sub-Saharan Africa is the main cause of mass exodus of desperate migrants who then end up being captured in locations like Libya where they are sold into slavery by their captors. Whoever wish to arrest this sort of migration must first pay attention to addressing the dysfunctional governance and instability which have become a routine feature of a country like Nigeria. This is job ONE for LONIM and its partners in months and years ahead.