i have a dream
T’other day whilst Kamikaze Kwasi was asserting that his party constituted “a humane society” his erstwhile ministerial colleagues begged to differ. First outta the traps, minister without portfolio, James Jacob Gilchrist Berry helpfully stated that those facing higher energy bills “can either cut their consumption, get a higher salary, or go out there and get that new job”. Not to be outdone, our newly installed home secretary without mandate, Cruella Slaverman castigated a perceived “Benefit Street culture” that needs “more stick”, before delighting the conference faithful with the heartfelt golden-nugget that she “would love nothing more than to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream.” Nice.
Describing the country as “one of the safest nations on Earth”, how right is Suella in believing Rwanda to be a safe haven for those asylum seekers she intends to send over?
Home to over thirteen million people in a landlocked area only slightly bigger than Wales, Rwanda is the second most densely populated nation on the African continent. Brought to most of our’s attention in 1994, within a period of just one hundred days, around 800,000 minority Tutsis and several hundred thousand Hutus were slaughtered in a genocidal exercise of horrific brutality, wiping out 10% of the country’s population.
Today, Rwanda is one of Africa’s most fast-developing nations and, in the fifteen years to 2019, posted annual economic growth of 8%, almost double the continent’s average. Its streets are relatively safe and clean; people pay their taxes; blatant corruption is minimal; its civil service is efficient and meritocratic. It has a working and efficient health system and over 60% of its population were safely vaccinated during the Covid pandemic. So far so good. Furthermore, the country already hosts around 140,000 refugees and its president since 2000, Paul Kagame, delights in offering cut-price, easy-fix solutions to supportive Western leaders.
Our own asylum plan, launched with a £120m payment, would see illegal asylum seekers placed on a one-way flight to the country, where they would be given accommodation and allowed to apply for legal asylum within Rwanda. Not the UK. If successful, a process that usually takes around three months, they will be allowed up to five years’ residency with access to education and support. If unsuccessful they will be deported to a currently unspecified ‘third’ safe country. It has been independently analysed that for each individual asylum seeker placed in this scheme, British taxpayers will fork-out somewhere approaching £30,000.
So, on the face of it, Rwanda could potentially be regarded as the safe haven described by the Home Office but, notwithstanding humanitarian concerns, there’s no doubting this is an extremely costly and highly cost-inefficient manner of dealing with the immigration issues we face. However, even though the constant flow of QE money following the 2008 financial crash and Covid pandemic have shown us there’s actually bags of cash available for the government to dispose of as they see fit, viewing this situation in purely financial terms is missing the point. A large proportion of asylum seekers are fleeing states that we have been particularly active within and, as such, we surely bear some responsibility for both the situation we helped create and the people subsequently impacted. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya are, amongst others, all countries where, in recent years, we have had a major impact.
Back in 1963 Martin Luther King had a dream. He spoke eloquently and from the heart of freedom and equality for the enslaved and dispossessed. It strikes me as being peevish, pernicious and repellent that our home secretary considers a plane full of asylum speakers jetting off to Rwanda as the answer to her dreams. Just when we’re all beginning to realise we’re better together, this selfish, isolationist policy seems to be taking hold and gaining traction. That moniker of being the nasty party looks being mighty hard to shake off.
