On the fringes of the recent sensitization forum on Irregular migration organised by a charitable organisation called “The Rural Child”, in conjunction with IOM Office, held in Mandinaba Village of Kombo East, a migrant returnee Mr. Muhammed Bah, had been recounting their ill-fated journey to Libya with the hope of reaching Europe in search of a better or more promising situation.
Speaking to Mansa Banko Online, Bah, a tailor who left the shores of the Gambia to embark on the locally-dubbed perilous journey called “backway” but suffered in Libya before returning home, blamed his decision to travel in 2013, on “high taxation” in The Gambia.
Claiming “taxes in The Gambia are very high”, the tailor said he normally pays tax three times in a year, and “as a result, I decided to sell my materials to embark on the back way journey to make better money for myself and my family as well.”
But as he lamented to this medium, the journey wasn’t an easy one for him because he’s faced so many difficulties in that he was not seeing his relatives, and access to food and water was also a problem.
Reason: Because when they arrived in Libya, they were captured by the Arabs and imprisoned for more than two months; and that during their first three days in prison there was neither food nor water for them to eat and drink.
Bah recounted further: “I decided to come home in 2017 April, after spending more than D300,000 in the journey which I regretted because right now, if I got that amount of money am not going an inch.” Bah thanked Almighty Allah for being able to stand there and narrate his story, lamenting “because I was asked to pay about US$300 and when I contacted my mother to pay the amount for me to be set free from prison, my mother was unable to get that amount and pay for me. Thus I and some [of my] colleagues who were in that prison, decided to break the windows and jump; and ran away to the desert again.”
Describing the desert as very terrible, Bah bewailed that one could see dead bodies on the ground, and people dying because they were tasty but there was no water to drink. Furthermore, he said things were very difficult for them in Libya which led to the death of some of his colleagues including his best friend Omar Bayo, who, he alleged, was shoot by an Arab man as a result of an attack in December 2014, when they were asked by the Libyan people that they (Libyans) didn’t want to see “any black man in the area and they started shooting at us”.
The migrant returnee opined that one would not know the beauty of this country until he or she goes out of the country. He, therefore, advised Gambian youths that when they are traveling, they should use the safe migration routes instead of using “back way” journey; and before going they should make more findings about irregular and safe migration.
