The Monday Convoy

Until 2016 the trucks left Agadez on a Monday. They loaded in yards on the north side of town — Toyota pick-ups with thirty people sitting in the bed, gripping sticks driven into the sides so the ones on the outside would not go over — and they left together, with a Nigerien army escort for the first stretch north, because the danger everyone agreed on was banditry. Nobody in Agadez had to be told which day it was. This was not a clandestine trade. It was the largest employer in the region: drivers, mechanics, fixers, the men who ran the compounds where passengers waited, the women who fed them, the phone-credit sellers, the fuel dealers.

In May 2015 Niger's parliament passed a law that turned all of it into a crime, and from the middle of 2016 the police in Agadez started enforcing it. In November 2023 the government of the day repealed the law, quashed the convictions and released the men still serving sentences under it. What happened in between is the most closely watched migration experiment run anywhere in Africa, and the laboratory was one town.

What Agadez is for

The sultanate of Aïr moved its seat to Agadez in the fifteenth century for a reason: this is where the routes meet. Salt and dates came south from the Kaouar, gold and grain and slaves went north, and the town took its cut of the traffic in both directions. Nothing about that has changed except the cargo and the chassis. Nigeriens and Malians and Ghanaians have gone north to work in Libya for as long as Libya has had money, and the trade in carrying them was legal, taxed, and organised out of the same yards. The passengers heading for the Mediterranean rather than for a building site in Sabha were a later and much smaller share of the same traffic, and no distinction was made between them at the point of sale. The International Organization for Migration's monitors counted something in the order of 330,000 people moving through the Agadez region in 2016, which made this the busiest overland corridor on the continent.

A law against a legal journey

Here is the part that anyone in Agadez will raise within about four minutes. Niger was a founding member of the Economic Community of West African States, whose 1979 protocol on free movement lets citizens of member states enter one another's territory and stay for ninety days without a visa. The overwhelming majority of the people in the back of those pick-ups were ECOWAS citizens who had entered Niger entirely lawfully and were, at the moment the truck pulled out, doing nothing whatever that was illegal. Law 2015-36 did not make their journey a crime. It made carrying them a crime — prison for the driver and confiscation of the vehicle — north of a line drawn across the driver's own country.

Almost everyone in the back of the truck was travelling legally. It was the man at the wheel who was committing the offence, and the offence was driving his own passengers past a line north of his own town.

What enforcement actually did

The European Commission reported that between mid-July and the end of October 2016 alone, 95 vehicles were seized and 102 people arrested; the prosecutor in Agadez put the vehicle figure considerably higher. Recorded departures collapsed within months, and for a while that was reported in Brussels as the result. What it actually produced was displacement. The trade did not stop, because the demand did not stop; it moved off the escorted piste, which followed the wells, onto longer routes chosen for being empty of patrols, which meant empty of everything else too. A driver who could lose his truck and his liberty had every reason to abandon a broken-down load and drive away, and drivers did. The IOM has run desert search-and-rescue teams out of Dirkou since, and they bring people out of the Ténéré who were dropped there. The people who paid the full price of the policy were not the smugglers.

The 2,300-euro cheque

The European side of the bargain was money, and part of it was meant to buy the town a different economy. The Plan d'Action à Impact Économique Rapide, funded through the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa and universally known in Agadez as PAIERA, offered a former transporter 1.5 million CFA francs — about 2,300 euros — to convert to some other trade, on a validated application. Roughly 5,000 applications went in. Around 400 were approved. About 1,500 were rejected outright, largely those from compound owners and vehicle owners, on the grounds that they were the profiteers rather than the workers. A confiscated Toyota was worth several times the cheque, the cheque was paid once, and the thing it replaced had been an income. It is difficult to design a compensation scheme better calculated to convince a town that it had been bought cheaply, and Agadez drew exactly that conclusion.

The repeal, and what it did not settle

On 25 November 2023, four months after the coup that removed President Bazoum, an ordinance repealed Law 2015-36. Convictions under it were annulled and prisoners released. The government framed the law as something adopted under foreign pressure and against the interests of Nigeriens, which is a political argument and also, on the ECOWAS point, a legal one. The European Union objected. In Agadez the yards reopened and the pick-ups loaded in daylight again, and the price of a seat fell because the risk premium came off it.

The tidy ending is unavailable, for two reasons. The first is that the corridor is no safer for being legal again — Libya at the far end of it is what it is, and a truck that leaves openly still crosses six hundred kilometres of desert. The second is that in January 2025 Niger left ECOWAS, alongside Mali and Burkina Faso, which complicates the free-movement principle the repeal was argued on even as the bloc has said it will keep those rights running for the time being. What the eight years did establish, and it is worth stating plainly because a great many policies elsewhere rest on assuming otherwise, is that a route of this kind can be made more expensive, more circuitous and considerably more lethal, and it cannot be closed. The argument in Agadez was never really about whether people should move. It was about who gets to decide, and about what a town is owed for giving up its trade.