Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Barbut’s point was that this expanding World of Disorder problem is not just a Middle East war story. It’s an Africa climate, desertification, and population story. It breaks your heart to see the news footage of overcrowded, rickety boats full of migrants overturning in rough seas on the Mediterranean, as people scramble to get out of the World of Disorder into the World of Order, but what is often lost sight of, notes Barbut, is that only about one-third of those refugees are coming out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The other two-thirds are coming primarily from a cluster of very arid African states: Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, Gambia, and Eritrea. The best place to start to understand the spreading disorder in parts of Africa is by going to the headwaters of the human migration flows and then following the migrants northeast through Niger to Libya, where they try to sail to Europe. You can see all three accelerations at work.

  Let’s start in Ndiamaguene, a village in the far northwest of Senegal. If I were giving you directions, I’d tell you that it’s the last stop after the last stop—it’s the village after the highway ends, after the paved road ends, after the gravel road ends, and after the desert track ends. Turn left at the last baobab tree. It’s worth the trek, though, if you’re looking for where and why these migration flows start.

  I visited in April 2016 to write columns about the connection between climate change and human migration and to do another documentary with the team making Years of Living Dangerously, now for National Geographic Channel. The day we arrived, April 14, 2016, it was 113 degrees—far above the historical average for the day, a crazy level of extreme weather. But there was an even bigger abnormality in Ndiamaguene, a farming village of mud-brick homes and thatch-roof huts. The village chief gathered virtually everyone in his community to receive us, and they formed a welcoming circle of women in colorful prints and cheerful boys and girls with incandescent smiles, home from school for lunch. But the second I sat down with them, I realized that something was wrong with this picture.

  There were almost no young or middle-aged men in this village of three hundred. They were all gone.

  It wasn’t disease. They had all hit the road. The village’s climate-hammered farmlands could no longer sustain them, and with so many kids—44 percent of Senegal’s population is less than fourteen years old—there were just too many mouths to feed from the declining yields. So the men had scattered to the four winds in search of any job that might pay them enough to live on and send some money back to their wives or parents. This trend is repeating itself all across West Africa. Tell these young African men that their odds of getting to Europe are tiny and they will tell you, as one told me, that when you don’t have enough money to buy even an aspirin for your sick mother, you don’t calculate the odds. You just go.

  “We are mostly farmers, and we depend on farming, but it is not working now,” the village chief, Ndiougua Ndiaye, explained to me in Wolof, through a translator. After a series of on/off droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, the weather patterns stabilized a bit, “until about ten years ago,” the chief added. Then, the weather got really weird. The rainy season used to always begin in June and run to October. Now the first rains might not start until August, then they stop for a while, leaving fields to dry out, and then they begin again. But they come back as torrential downpours that create floods. “So whatever you plant, the crops get spoiled,” the chief said. “You reap no profits.”

  The chief, who gave his age as seventy but didn’t know for sure, could remember one thing for certain: when he was young he could walk out to his fields anytime during the planting season “and your feet would sink into” the moist earth. “The soil was slippery and oily and it would stick to your legs and feet and you would have to scrape it off.” Now, he said, picking up a fistful of hot sand, the soil “is like a powder—it is not living anymore.”

  Had he ever heard of something called “climate change”? I asked. “We heard about it on the radio and we have seen it with our own eyes,” said Ndiaye. “The winds from east to west have changed, and the winds from the west are now warmer. Winter doesn’t last long anymore. And this year, there wasn’t even any winter. We live in constant summer.”

  We live in constant summer. The chief’s rough impressions were not wrong. Senegal’s national weather bureau says that from 1950 to 2015, the average temperature in the country rose 2 degrees Celsius, much faster than anticipated. Since 1950, the average annual rainfall has declined by about fifty millimeters (about two inches). So the men of Ndiamaguene have no choice but to migrate to bigger towns or out of the country. The lucky few find ways to get smuggled into Spain or Germany, via Libya. Libya, it seems, was like a cork in Africa, and when the United States and NATO toppled the Libyan dictator—but did not put troops on the ground to help secure a new order—they essentially uncorked Africa, creating a massive funnel to the Mediterranean coast.

  The less lucky find work in Dakar or Libya or Algeria or Mauritania, and the least lucky get marooned somewhere along the way—caught in the humiliating twilight of having left home and gained nothing and having nothing to return to. This is creating more and more tempting recruiting targets for jihadist groups such as Boko Haram, which can offer a few hundred dollars a month—a king’s ransom when you are living on two dollars a day.

  The chief introduced me to Mayoro Ndiaeye, the father of a boy who had left to find work. “My son left for Libya one year ago, and since then we have no news—no telephone, nothing,” he explained. “He left a wife and two children. He was a tile fixer. After he made some money [in the nearby town] he went to Mauritania and then to Niger and then up to Libya. But we have not heard from him since.”

  The father started to tear up. These people live so close to the edge. One reason they have so many children is that the offspring are a safety net for aging parents. But the boys are all leaving and the edge is getting even closer. Which means they are losing the only thing they were rich in: a deep sense of community. Here, you grow up with your family, parents look after children and children then look after parents, and everyone eats and lives together.

  But now with the land no longer producing enough, they are losing their community, said the chief. “Everyone has a [male] family member who has had to leave … When I was young, my brothers and I would go together to cultivate the field for our father. Our mothers would wait for us to bring the production home so they could take care of the rest. And the whole family would be here to enjoy the harvest. If this situation continues, there will come a time when we won’t be able to stay here, because we won’t make a living. We will be compelled to follow our children to other places.”

  All the data points in that direction. Ousmane Ndiaye, head of the climate unit for Senegal’s National Civil Aviation and Meteorology Agency, trained at Columbia in climate science. In his drab office at the Dakar airport, Ndiaye clicked through his climate graphs for me on his Dell desktop, telling a horrifying story.

  “Last week the weather was five degrees Celsius above the normal average temperature, which is a very extreme temperature for this time of year,” he explained. Click to graph two. “From 1950 to 2015 average temperature in Senegal has gone up two degrees Celsius,” said Ndiaye, adding that the whole 2016 Paris U.N. climate conference was about how to avoid a two-degree rise in the global average temperature since the Industrial Revolution … and Senegal is already there. Click. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “in 2010 gave four scenarios for Senegal, and the worst was unbelievable—and now,” he said, “the observation says we’re following that path even faster than we imagined, and it leads to four degrees Celsius rise in average temperature by 2100. People are still doubting climate change, and we are living it.” Click.

  “You live here and you see on TV people having a good life, and democracy [in Europe],” he added, “and here you are in a poor life, people have to do something … They don’t have the tools to survive here. The human being is just a more intelligent animal, and if [he or she] is
pushed to the extreme, the animal instinct will come out to survive.”

  To complete the picture of the refugee flow, you have to move west and north to Agadez, Niger, at the southern edge of the Sahara. Starting in 2015 a regular ritual is repeated there every Monday evening and only Monday evenings: thousands of young men, crammed into the back of Toyota pickup trucks, gather in a large caravan to make the long trek from the (mild) World of Disorder—Niger—through the (wild) World of Disorder—Libya—in hopes of catching some of kind of boat into the World of Order—Europe. The caravan’s assembly is quite a scene to witness. Although it is early evening, it’s still 105 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Two of our cameramen were overcome by heat, lugging round their equipment. This is desert, just on the edge of Agadez, and so there is little more than a crescent moon to illuminate the night.

  Then, all of a sudden, the desert comes alive.

  Using the WhatsApp messaging service on their smartphones, the local smugglers, who are tied in with networks of human traffickers extending all across West Africa, start coordinating the surreptitious loading of migrants from safe houses and basements across the city. These almost entirely young men have been gathering in Agadez all week—from Senegal, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Chad, Guinea, Cameroon, and Mali, as well as towns in Niger. With fifteen or so men crammed together into the back of each Toyota pickup, their arms and legs spilling over the sides, the vehicles pop out of alleyways and follow scout cars that have zoomed ahead to make sure that no pesky police officers or border guards are lurking who have not been paid off. It’s like watching a symphony, but you have no idea where the conductor is. Eventually, all the vehicles converge at a gathering point north of the city, forming a giant caravan of one hundred to two hundred vehicles, depending on the Monday. They need this strength in numbers to ward off desert bandits.

  I was standing at the Agadez highway control station watching this convoy. As the Toyotas whisked by me, kicking up dust, they painted the desert road with stunning moonlit silhouettes of these young men, silently standing in the back of each vehicle. They will have to stand for more than twenty-four hours as they head for Libya and the coast. The thought that their promised land is war-ravaged Libya tells you how desperate are the conditions they’re leaving. Between nine thousand and ten thousand men are making this journey every month.

  Agadez used to live off adventure tourism and trade. With its ornate mud-baked structures, it is a Unesco World Heritage Site, because of its “numerous earthen dwellings and a well-preserved group of palatial and religious buildings including a 27 m high minaret made entirely of mud brick, the highest such structure in the world,” according to Unesco.org. Now all the tourist vehicles are being repurposed for the human trafficking of people out of the World of Disorder into the World of Order. Or, as one human smuggler told us: “Before, we were in tourism. It’s the tourism industry that we did here in Agadez. And tourism, it no longer exists. Now, we have our vehicles. That’s how we make our living. We transport. We live off of this.”

  A few of those being smuggled out agreed to stop and talk—nervously. One group of very young men from elsewhere in Niger told me they’re joining the rush to pan for gold in Djado in the far north of Niger. More typical were five young men who had their faces covered in, yes, ski masks and spoke in Senegalese-accented French. They told a familiar tale: no work in the village, went to the town, no work in the town, heading north.

  Here and elsewhere, desertification acts as the trigger; climate change and population growth act as amplifiers; interethnic and tribal conflicts are the political by-product, and WhatsApp provides both an alluring picture of where things might be better—Europe—and a cheap tool for hopping a migration caravan to get there. “In the old days,” says Barbut, “we could just give them a Live Aid concert in Europe or America and then forget about them. But that won’t work anymore. They won’t settle for that. And the problem is now too big.”

  No walls will permanently hold them back. I interviewed twenty men from at least ten African countries at the International Organization for Migration aid center in Agadez—all had gone to Libya, tried and failed to get to Europe, and returned, but were penniless and unable to get back to their home villages. I asked them, “How many of you and your friends would leave Africa and go to Europe if you could get in legally?”

  “Tout le monde,” they shouted, and they all raised their hands. I don’t know much French, but I think that means “everybody.”

  What is most striking about this explosion of both refugees and economic migrants that we are witnessing on the world stage today is that it is largely the result of nation-states melting down, not interstate wars. Indeed, noted David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, which oversees relief operations in more than thirty war-affected countries, more people in the world today are “fleeing a conflict” at a time when wars between nations “are at a record low.” That is because we now have nearly thirty civil wars under way in weak states that are “unable to meet the basic needs of citizens or contain civil war,” a sign of states cracking from inside under the pressure of the age of accelerations.

  The United States has not been immune to this flood. Although migration from Latin America has declined greatly in recent years, in October 2014, the United States was inundated with more than fifty thousand unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. “They’re fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries,” noted Vox.com, “where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north.” Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most environmentally degraded and deforested regions in Central America. They cut their forests; we got their kids.

  It is not only Europe and America that have become the promised land for economic and climate migrants from the World of Disorder. So too has the Promised Land. In recent years, Israel has been flooded with some sixty thousand illegal immigrants, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan. Stroll the blocks around the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, where many have found shelter, and you’ll see African men on cell phones on every street. They sailed, walked, or drove to Israel’s borders and either slipped in on their own or were smuggled in by bedouins across Egypt’s Sinai Desert. They were attracted not by Zionism or Judaism, but just by the hope of order and work.

  On June 20, 2016, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies, and UNHCR’s own reporting, issued a report stating that a total of 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, compared with 59.5 million just twelve months earlier. At the end of 2013, that number had stood at 51.2 million, and a decade ago at 37.5 million. Moreover, the report said the situation was likely to worsen further. Globally, 1 in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, the report said, it would be the world’s twenty-fourth biggest.

  The Inequality of Freedom

  The accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law are stressing frail states not only from outside but also from below. That is, both technology and globalization today are empowering “political makers,” who want to remake autocratic societies into more consensual ones, and “political breakers,” who want bring down governments in order to impose some religious or ideological tyranny, even though they may lack any ability to govern effectively.

  Let’s look at both—starting with the political makers. The historian Walter Russell Mead once pointed out that after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, Russians liked to say: “It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”

  It is never easy, under the best of conditions, for inhabitants of a country to reconstitute it as a going concern after it has collapsed, but it may be even more difficult in the age of accelerations.
The lifelong learning opportunities you need to provide to your population, the infrastructure you need to take advantage of the global flows, and the pace of innovation you need to maintain a growing economy have all become harder to achieve. And if your country has spent the post–post–Cold War destroying itself—in an age when no superpowers will dive in to rebuild it for free or even for a fee anymore—catching up is going to be very, very difficult. And then there is one more—surprise—factor: the Internet. There is mounting evidence that social networks make it much easier to go from imposed order to revolution than to go from revolution to some kind of new sustainable, consensual order.

  Influenced by Isaiah Berlin’s concept of “positive” and “negative” liberty, Dov Seidman argues that all over the world we now see people creating unprecedented levels of “freedom from—freedom from dictators, but also freedom from micromanaging bosses, from networks forcing us to watch commercials, and freedom from the neighborhood stores, freedom from the local banker, freedom from hotel chains.”

  But when it comes to politics, the freedom people cherish most, he argues, is “freedom to”—the freedom to live the way they want because their freedom is anchored in consensual elections, a constitution, the rule of law, and a parliament. There are growing swaths of the world today where people have secured their freedom from, but failed yet to build the freedom to. And that explains a lot of the spreading and stubborn disorder. Seidman calls the gap in those countries, such as Libya or Syria or Yemen, or Egypt after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, that have secured their freedom from but not their freedom to, “the inequality of freedom.” And it may be the most relevant inequality in the world today.