I sold all I had to go to Europe, now I’m home and broke – Nigerian man

Here is Colin Freeman, a BBC Correspondent’s report about Evans Williams, a Nigerian who sold his TV, bed, refrigerator and other items to pay some smuggling gangs to help him cross the Sahara to Libya.

In all, it cost him £750 ($1,000), but he wasn’t worried. Once in Europe, he figured, he could quickly earn enough to pay off his creditors, and eventually return home to start a business of his own.

It didn’t quite work out like that. After six miserable months in Libya, where the gang forced him to work for nothing, he finally boarded a rickety boat to cross the Mediterranean. It got stopped by the Libyan coastguard, who threw him and 140 other passengers into a detention centre.

By then he’d had enough. When I met Evans last month, he’d just returned home to Benin City in southern Nigeria, where he was among hundreds of migrants staying in a government-requisitioned hotel. They’d been flown back by the International Organization for Migration, a UN body that helps illegal migrants who want to return home.

As well as a free plane ticket, they get a few nights’ hotel accommodation, and £200 in pocket money while they find their feet. They’re also offered job training, to give them a better chance of a livelihood.

The scheme is partly bankrolled by a £3bn fund set up by the European Union in 2015, the year the migrant crisis dominated the news.

The EU hopes that by offering migrants better prospects in their own countries, they can be persuaded to leave Libya – where up to 700,000 are still thought to be waiting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe – and turn back.

More than 3,000 Nigerian migrants have already returned, and a further 20,000 are due to do so this year.

Yet for those who take up the offer, arriving back home can be a depressing experience.

Evans, for example, doesn’t even want to go back home – even though it may be the only place he’ll get a bed once his pocket money runs out.

“I still don’t want to stay in Nigeria,” he tells me. “Although next time, I’ll try to go to Europe by legal means.”