Over 13,000 Nigerians evacuated from Libya in three months

Photo caption Immigration officials screening Nigerian returnee from Libya

TMP – 19/02/2018

The Nigerian government announced on 31 January that it has evacuated more than 13,000 of its citizens from Libya between November 2017 and January 2018.

Nigerians form the largest national group among all African migrants in Libya. At the beginning of January, the West African country began its own initiative to evacuate all of its citizens who wanted to return from Libya.

“The main objective, and we’re very focused on that objective, is to get these Nigerian citizens back home as quickly as possible,” Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyema told reporters during a visit to Tripoli in early January.

“Our president has made available all the resources necessary to repatriate all the Nigerians here,” he said.
On top of the 13,000 migrants who have been returned home since the CNN report showing footage of slave auctions in Libya aired in October, Nigeria expects to bring back an additional 5,500 migrants. However, the situation on the ground makes a definitive number hard to confirm.

“Some of the difficulties with getting precise numbers is that some are within the control of the central government in camps, some are clearly outside the camps, some are also in less accessible areas where there might not be full central government control and authority,” Onyema said.

Since local armed factions and Libya’s coastguard began blocking more migrants from leaving in July last year, large numbers have been trapped in Libya, where they often face dire conditions and abuse, including forced labour.
In October, reports about widespread migrant abuse, squalid and overcrowded conditions in detention centres in Libya and alleged slave auctions renewed international concern for the condition of migrants trapped in Libya.

IOM, the UN migrant agency, identified 432,574 migrants in Libya, but estimates the number of migrants could be between 700,000 and one million.

In 2017, IOM evacuated a total of 19,370 migrants from Libya back to their countries of origin. The top four countries of return were Nigeria, Gambia, Guinea Conakry and Mali.