Democracy Letter to PM and President Pedro Sanchez, Madrid, Spain

Mr. President,

I share my sorrow and deepest condolences on the loss of life and horrendous dislocations caused by the historic flash flooding in the eastern region of your country around Valencia. I pray for the dearly departed and for the bereaved families. I am confident the resilience and collective spirit of the great peoples of Spain will help to reestablish a semblance of normalcy expeditiously.

Mr. President, I have been duly informed that you recently traveled to Banjul, Gambia, to sign a Labor Migration Agreement with President Barrow, an agreement, negotiated by your Ambassador in Gambia, to facilitate visas for a limited number of Gambians to travel to, and to work on Spanish farms for a limited duration of time, and or on an annual rotational basis. I believe your intent is laudable and humanitarian to relieve the urge for irregular migration through the Mediterranean Sea graveyard, which has piqued the conscience of all peoples around the world. However, and unfortunately so, the Agreement with President Barrow is riddled with foreboding and spectacular red flags.

Firstly, the educational (grade 10) and experiential (no leadership experience and having been deported from Germany for having illegally migrated there or for other nefarious reasons) level of President Barrow, and most of his government Ministers suggests any agreement or contract with him is not one made with a partner of sound mind and body. Further, and since he came to office as accidental president, his hallmark ignorance and negligence exacerbated the level of illegal (backway) migration of Gambians and other West African nationals who understand that using Gambia as their port of origin afforded them certain humanitarian and graceful regard in the EU. This has inevitably led to the increased level of deaths in the desert and in the Mediterranean. You or your Ambassador in Gambia may confirm this with Mauritanian, Tunisian, Libyan, and Cape Verdian authorities. Rather than discourage the morbid illegal migration, this sanitized human trafficking Agreement will only attract more West Africans to Gambia, and the pressure cannot possibly be relieved by the limited number of visas (50 per year). The semi-literate closet tyrant in Barrow sees these additional immigrants to Gambia as stock for his electoral fortunes. Whatever bribe you, Spain, or EU pays to the semi-literate to secure this Agreement, goes directly into his ever-vided pockets, and to add insult to injury, it has created a burgeoning industry of illegal migration middlemen and women who have begun to extort an arm and a leg in fees from the aspiring migrants for the opportunity to merely be considered for the limited Spanish visas.

Second, and as was expected, President Barrow is personally managing this visa program via his NPP party bureaus. Similar to a modern-day slavery agreement he offered Saudia, the accidental president is opaque with the National Assembly, and there will be no legal framework to underwrite and guide either the logistics or compliance regime for the Agreement. It means that the hapless and trafficked 'Gambians' will be at the mercy of their Spanish farm owners when it comes to their health, safety, and labour rights. When they cannot tolerate their suffering anymore, they will find their way to other member countries of the EU or end up in the festering migrant refugee camps of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, etcetera, or dead and unaccounted for.

Third, the same middlemen and women who used to ferry these hopeless and unskilled migrants from Gambia, through desert and sea, will be the same agents overseeing this sanitized human trafficking Agreement you just concluded with the Wheelbarrow. And because the visas you are offering in the Agreement are limited, it is inevitable that the backway agents will merely transfer their former clients into the ill-conceived program, and continue to extort from newer aspiring migrants in Gambia, thereby elevating the stakes for drug trafficking and consumption both inside and outside of Gambia, on their way to the EU. If inadvertent, the net effect of the Agreement will be increased 'backway' migration through the desert and seas, only now, Spain will become the preferred destination of most such additional migration.

The list of red flags is inexhaustible. It will suffice just to add the new internal pressures on local communities in Spain itself.

Mr. President, I understand that you are a leader of the Socialist Workers Party of Spain, having come to office on a vote of No Confidence against your predecessor. I encourage you to reflect on, and to terminate this ill-advised and unenforceable Agreement with the accidental president of Gambia. I am informed that, buoyed by these callous Agreements with you and Saudia, he, like Yahya before him, has proclaimed he would be President-For-Life, and after him, his son, and then his grandson. You cannot get a more somber lantern than that.

Haruna Darbo