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[VIEWPOINT] How Africa Should Curb Deadly Youth Migrations Across High Seas To Slavery In Europe & Middle East

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The world is today treated unceasingly to horrendous pictures of African youth killed, maimed, robbed and enslaved in several North Africa and Middle Eastern countries, and also dead on the high seas, while struggling to reach Europe, in a desperate search for jobs and better lives. Yet Africa where they run away from, is ironically the world’s richest in natural resources like arable land, water and minerals. I will not dwell in statistics here as mine is not an academic paper nor is it a policy statement. Plenty of data on Africa—wrong and right—is widely available everywhere on these issues. What is missing is what should be radically done and why it hasn’t been done to curb this human suffering? That’s what I’m attempting to dissect here as an African who closely watches these matters as a science journalist and a policy advocate. If Africa is today the continent with the “highest, largest, widest, deepest, hugest, most this, most that,” in terms of wealth and potential, why should it be the poorest, to necessitate its young and most precious resource (the human being) dare the worst of conditions along the Sahara Desert, across the seas, taken advantage of and fleeced off by rackets of human smugglers, to be humiliated, degraded and enslaved by would-be employers?