here is what is happening in africa now recently there is some discussion we have
entered into with one of our partners
and friend united kingdom something to do with the migration
i know it has caused another confusion and i want to explain it to you
and again i first had to say what i said and i brought then i bring this because
it should be seen in that context of who we are and who we want to be
because i have seen some people say you know
that united kingdom gave us money and then we want to dump people here
no we don't do that kind of thing we don't buy and sell people we can't do that again because
of our core values but i'll tell you what happened and
so that everyone is clearing their minds
in 2018 if many of you may recollect i was the chair of the african union and
during that time
so many stories you know
many young maybe some of them old africans were
perishing dying in big numbers in the mediterranean
being taken through libya and to many parts of europe
and i remember reading a story about a ghanaian young man an engineer who happened to be following
this path and there are people they are smugglers they have networks who take people from africa
different parts and smuggle them into europe and that time they were using libya because of its
statelessness there was confusion there was no state in control
and in fact hundreds if not thousands of them were trapped in libya in different places in
the prisons starving to death others abused in all sorts of ways some people had started
coming picking some of them and taking them to their countries to use them as slaves slaves
so and we were somewhere discussing with some of the readers and i was telling them why don't
we address this program i said for example for me i'm not just going to suggest this
theoretically that it can work i want to even provide an example
i said let's find ways if we got all these people trapped in libya who can't
they can't go back to where they came from they can't move ahead to europe where they wanted to go
and i told them i can assure you with all our weaknesses and whatever we have in our country
these people if they are brought through under they would live a better life
than they are living in arabia in these prisons
they said so if we brought them
then other countries interested in helping this problem we can do the following one
we can ask these people
whether they want to go back to where they came from now that they found themselves
mistaken and in a very terrible situation in arabia they may end up wanting to go back home
because i had read that story of the ghanaian i was telling you who was for him he was an
educated man young man but i think illusion what i i think he was an engineer i read it but for some
reason he wasn't employed and so the networks that were smuggling people to europe took him
and when he was in arabia he got stuck he found he was not going forward he would so he had paid
some amount of money which he got from his parents you remember the story we were
talking about eight or nine hundred dollars we had been paying through these smugglers
and so he started so negotiating with the smugglers to take him back
and he would pay the same amount again the other same amount of money which means 1600 or 1800
but this time he didn't have it it would be paid when he got back
to ghana by i think his parents so the smugglers took him back but this is because he discovered
there was no way of continuing to europe but even if he had reached europe
by the way i'm not sure maybe what he had in mind he would become or was going to be the case
maybe he was just going to be the same person as he was in ghana even in europe wherever he would
be he wasn't going to get that good living but anyway so agreed if they arrived here
they could easily be taken back home if they choose to go back home second
those european countries that have allowed migrants to come to europe should
come and stably select those they want to take to their countries and
that would be still better than these people being trapped in libya then a third we provided another
option we said for those who can't go back who don't want to go back for some reason of their own
and may not be selected by the countries that want to absorb them we are giving them another
option we can actually find ways in which they can stay here there were these three options in 2018
so i think that's how now this administration developed with the uk and others
contacting us it's like they learned from this case and said can we have people
processed here stably instead of being smuggled into our countries and doing this and that
and this time they are not just going to be africans
they may be a number of them africans they're going to be other people from other countries
we allowed people from afghanistan to come here
they are even now they are still students who were brought here they are still staying with us
so
i'm saying there are things that have really changed about us so i'm saying we don't have
to learn values from anybody ourselves we have values in us that we go by uh
so we can we can absorb off against people from afghanistan from wherever from
and if they're from africa we are even happier because they are like we take them like
uh family so when uk approached us and because of that problem they have i think they are
smuggling people in these countries left right center and
so if we could talk about
how to deal with that problem we are happy to deal with that problem there is
i understand the denmark
so there is nothing
uh bad about this there's nothing we can't be transparent about this there's nothing
so this is what it is so and this is who we are too so i wanted to clear this place we are not
no
that's why i was saying things you can't buy about us yes we are who we are and we
are proud people too we are not so we are not involved in buying and selling
of people around the uk but no it's just a problem that
people will have different views about it they look at it differently they know what happened
about it that's okay people would have looked but at the end of the day you've got to do something
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