Substack (02 May 2026)
Migration is rational. It is not a pathology. It is a response to a leadership emergency.
When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni addressed her European Union colleagues in Rome in January 2024, she made a remark that cut through the usual diplomatic chatter. Here in Europe, she noted, we talk a lot about the right to emigrate, but we rarely discuss guaranteeing the right not to be compelled to emigrate. It was a deliberately framed argument, one that critics from both sides of the Mediterranean quickly dismissed as too paternalistic, too self-interested, and a cynical exchange of investment for border control. Some of those criticisms are valid. However, the conversation Meloni sparked, albeit imperfectly, is one that Africans urgently need to have, not with Europeans, but with their own leaders.
At the recent 39th Session of the Assembly of the African Union in February 2026, Meloni returned to her characteristic framing: she emphasised the goal of guaranteeing “the men and women of this continent a freedom that has often been denied them, the freedom to choose to remain in their country, to contribute to its growth without being forced to leave it, often paying unscrupulous traffickers to risk their lives.” Her sentiments attracted further criticism; however, I argue that by going to Addis Ababa and speaking at the AU Assembly itself, Meloni was engaging in a deliberate act of symbolism, participating in Africa on African territory rather than summoning leaders to Rome. This detail slightly complicates the “neo-colonial” critique, even if the underlying political interests remain unchanged. The right not to be forced to emigrate is being eroded daily, from within.
The Map of Managed Chaos
The 2026 World Happiness Report, published by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, and Gallup, offers a valuable starting point. By assessing life satisfaction across 147 countries, the report ranks Mauritius as Africa’s happiest, followed by Algeria and South Africa. However, the nations at the bottom of the list require our attention. The ten least happy countries in the world are almost all in Africa, including Sierra Leone, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Eswatini, Tanzania, and the DRC.
Look closely at those names. Several are members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the regional organisation created specifically to bind its members to the principles of democracy, human rights, and good governance. SADC countries dominate both ends of Africa’s happiness spectrum. South Africa and Mauritius are at the top of the list, while Zimbabwe and Malawi are at the bottom. The divergence is not coincidental. It directly reflects the quality of governance, or rather, its deliberate erosion.
A pattern is emerging across the continent that must be clearly identified. Leaders, some democratically elected, many having come to power through elections of dubious integrity, and others through outright force, are governing not with vision but through chaos. The strategy, whether deliberate or instinctive, follows a recognisable logic: keep the people distracted by disorder, weaken the institutions that might hold power to account, and criminalise the act of demanding better. Doing all three simultaneously makes it difficult for the population to organise in their own defence.
Zimbabwe is the most vivid current example. On 31 March 2026, a public hearing on proposed constitutional amendments at a Harare sports complex descended into violence. The amendments would allow President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power through a coup in 2017, to extend his term beyond 2028, shift the presidential election from a popular vote to parliamentary selection, and lengthen both presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years. At the hearing, prominent human rights lawyer Doug Coltart was attacked by a crowd shouting support for the amendments. He was shoved and slapped, his glasses were broken, and his mobile phone was stolen. He was among the critics who walked out in protest at the intimidation that saturated what was supposed to be a democratic consultation.
This was not an isolated incident. It was part of a sustained crackdown. In October 2025, the SAPES Trust’s Harare offices, a think-tank that had organised a civil society dialogue on the constitutional crisis, were severely damaged in a suspected arson attack. The night guard was abducted, and the locks were changed. A few hours later, police and suspected ZANU-PF supporters shut down a similar event in Bulawayo. In February 2026, armed men wearing balaclavas forced their way into the National Constitutional Assembly’s offices, assaulting members gathered for a meeting and injuring NCA leader and constitutional lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, who has filed a court case seeking to halt the amendment process.
Throughout all of this, authorities have denied suppressing dissent even as they have done so extensively. The hearings are compulsory, but since public input is non-binding on Parliament, they serve as theatre. The chaos at these hearings sends a message: speak, and we will harm you. It also tells others: focus on the disorder, not on us.
Across the continent, the same pattern of repression is being constructed with different materials. In Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in a coup in September 2022, formally dissolved all political parties by decree in January 2026, with the transitional legislature ratifying the move in February. Political parties had already been suspended since the coup. The state has now seized their assets. The official reasoning cites national unity and the need to rebuild a fractured state. In April 2025, Traoré declared that Burkina Faso was “no longer in a democracy” but in a “progressive people’s revolution.” Since the coup, the junta has used emergency laws to arbitrarily arrest, forcibly disappear, and unlawfully conscript critics, judges, and journalists. A recent Human Rights Watch report states that almost 2,000 civilians have been killed since the coup.
What makes this moment particularly important is that it highlights a precedent that most of Africa has allowed to persist unnoticed for decades. Eswatini, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, has been governed by King Mswati III since 1986. Political parties have been banned since a royal decree in 1973. Not suspended. Banned. The largest opposition party, the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), is outlawed under anti-terrorism legislation. In Eswatini, membership of a political party is treated as terrorism. Pro-democracy lawmakers have been sentenced to decades in prison on terrorism charges for merely advocating democratic and political reforms. Human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko was murdered at his home in January 2023, in front of his wife and children. His murder remains unresolved.
What has SADC done? The regional body, of which Eswatini is a full member, has dispatched fact-finding missions and called for calm. It brokered an agreement in 2021 for a national dialogue, facilitated by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Years later, that dialogue has yet to occur. At the 44th SADC Summit in August 2024, Eswatini was formally removed from the regional body’s Organ Troika agenda, at Mswati’s request. The bloc agreed. An absolute monarch, ruling over a country where nearly two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line while he acquires fleets of luxury cars for his large family, successfully lobbied his regional peers to exclude him from the accountability agenda. And they agreed.
Culture as a Weapon
There is a particular kind of authoritarianism that hides behind culture. It is arguably the most dangerous because it cloaks itself in African tradition, religious values, and community to shield itself from accountability. When leaders use culture to justify the suppression of rights, they do more than repress people. They tell people that their repression defines who they are.
Eswatini’s Mswati illustrates this approach. The prohibition on political parties is presented not as authoritarianism but as a return to indigenous governance, the tinkhundla system, rooted in traditional constituency structures and framed as more authentically African than multi-party democracy. The annual sibaya, the traditional gathering where citizens are meant to speak to the king, is described as dialogue, yet only the king speaks, and citizens are expected to sit silently and respond with ‘bayethe’, an exaltation to him, not as the head of state but as the country’s traditional leader, the lion. When SADC attempted mediation, the king proposed holding the national dialogue through this format. Opposition groups and civil society rejected it precisely because it was, as human rights defenders rightly called it, a monologue disguised as consultation. The culture is real, and its weaponisation is deliberate.
The same pattern is now evident in Senegal, where in March 2026, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye enacted legislation that doubles the maximum prison sentence for same-sex relations to ten years, criminalises the ‘promotion’ or ‘glorification’ of homosexuality, and introduces penalties of up to seven years for anyone, including organisations, donors, or journalists, who support people targeted by the law. The bill passed the National Assembly 135 – 0, with three abstentions. A lawmaker declared from the podium, to applause, that “homosexuals will no longer breathe in this country.” The law, a campaign promise of both Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, was presented as a defence of Senegalese values against Western cultural imperialism. What the framing conceals is what the law achieves: it does not merely regulate private conduct. It criminalises civil society activity, journalism, healthcare provision, and advocacy. It is not a law about sexuality. It is a law about who is allowed to speak.
Burkina Faso and Mali have followed similar paths, both criminalising same-sex relationships in 2025. In Senegal, activists report that many LGBTQ+ individuals have already fled the country, while those unable to escape face arrest after phone searches and public denunciations. This pattern is no coincidence. When governments criminalise certain groups, they also criminalise the organisations that defend them, the journalists who cover them, and the international bodies monitoring the situation. They are not merely persecuting marginalised and disenfranchised people; they are dismantling civil society itself, using marginalised people as an entry point.
The Chaos and the Clock
In all these cases, including Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Eswatini, and Senegal, the same mechanism operates. People remain fixated on the chaos: the violence at the hearing, the arson attack, the arrests, the coup, and the wave of homophobia. Each incident demands attention and saps energy. Meanwhile, the systems that could hold power to account are systematically weakened. Constitutions are amended, electoral commissions are dissolved, political parties are disbanded, and independent media are shut down. Lawyers are assaulted, and human rights defenders are either murdered or forced into exile in South Africa or to flee abroad to Europe.
Meanwhile, the AU, the continental body responsible for enforcing the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, observes. In the Central African Republic, Sudan, or the DRC, a war of extreme violence and complexity has persisted for decades, with Sudan facing increased atrocities in recent months. Yet the AU has failed to establish lasting peace. In Sudan, where the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces have destroyed civilian infrastructure and displaced millions, the AU’s interventions have consistently fallen short of what the crisis demands. The disconnect between the AU’s declared principles and its actual ability or willingness to enforce them is not a bureaucratic issue. It is a political issue. The member states that make up the AU are often the same ones whose leaders prefer a regional body that issues statements rather than acts.
The Accountability That Must Come
It is in this context that we must revisit the migration debate honestly. Millions of young Africans are emigrating. They first move to the nearest place offering economic stability and institutional reliability. South Africa takes in large numbers of Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and others from the SADC region, creating its own political tensions, which have repeatedly erupted into Afrophobic and xenophobic violence. From there, they move further: to Europe, to North America, or wherever they can build a life that their own governments have made structurally impossible at home.
Migration is rational. It is not a pathology. It is a response to a leadership emergency that the continent’s institutions have consistently failed to address.
This brings us back to Meloni. Whether one agrees with her methods or questions her motives, her core point stands: the question of why people leave is as important as what to do with them once they arrive. Dismissing her focus on Africa as neo-colonialism, or reducing the migration debate to European border policies alone, allows Africa’s leaders to avoid the scrutiny they deserve.
Yet that scapegoating has hardened into organised violence in South Africa, a country whose constitution is among the most progressive in the world and whose institutions, although imperfect, still serve as meaningful checks on power. Vigilante movements such as Operation Dudula and March and March have spent the past year storming clinics to force patients to produce citizenship documents, blocking foreign-born children from attending school, and marching under the explicit slogan that foreign nationals must leave. In November 2025, the Gauteng High Court interdicted Operation Dudula and named the conduct for what it is, “xeno-racism,” a hatred disproportionately directed at black African non-nationals. The order is routinely ignored. In April 2026 alone, an Ethiopian national was shot dead in central Johannesburg in what police described as an execution-style killing; schools were stormed; and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights formally condemned a pattern stretching from the 2008 attacks that displaced 100,000 people to today’s hospital blockades. This is what awaits Africans who flee one set of failing leaders only to seek stability under another.
When South Africans attack Zimbabwean or Nigerian immigrants, they are directing their outrage at the wrong target. The dispossessed are attacking the displaced rather than holding those responsible for their dispossession to account. The real question is not ‘why are they here?’, but rather: what drove them here, who benefited from those actions, and who is being shielded from accountability by this misdirection of rage?
There is no technical fix for Africa’s governance crisis. Political, moral, and collective decisions remain to be taken.
SADC must mean something. A regional body that lets an absolute monarch evade accountability, watches opposition leaders be sentenced to decades in prison for seeking a vote, and fails to honour its own mediation promises in Eswatini is not a defender of democracy. It merely offers diplomatic courtesy to authoritarians at the expense of their citizens.
The AU must choose between the Africa depicted in its charters and the Africa dictated by its member states’ political convenience. The AU’s founding documents contain language of extraordinary ambition. The African Charter, the Constitutive Act, and the Agenda 2063 vision all speak of accountable governance, democratic participation, and respect for human rights. None of that language means anything if the bodies convened to uphold it refuse to act when it matters, whether in the DRC, Sudan, Eswatini, or Zimbabwe.
Civil society across the continent, in the diaspora, and in the international community must resist the temptation to treat each authoritarian move as an isolated incident. The dissolution of political parties in Burkina Faso is connected to the attack on a lawyer in Harare, which is linked to the criminalisation of advocacy in Senegal, and further linked to the murder of a human rights lawyer in Eswatini. These are not separate crises; they are expressions of a shared logic: the logic of leaders who believe their survival depends on preventing the populations they govern from holding them accountable.
Africans and those in the diaspora must resist the politics of distraction. Xenophobia is a distraction. Pointing the finger at Meloni is a distraction. Every hour spent debating whether European development plans are sufficiently respectful of African agency is an hour not spent demanding that African leaders respect African people.
People have the right not to be forced to emigrate. They also have the right to loudly and persistently demand that those in power create conditions in which staying becomes a genuine choice, without being beaten for it.
That demand is not a European or Western idea. It is a human one.