Eswatini Is Accepting US Deportees

In this week’s Analysing Africa newsletter John McDermott, The Economist’s Chief Africa correspondent, wrote about how the continent is handling the deportees that America is sending. Here is an abridged version. For more reporting on and analysis of Africa, sign up to the newsletter. I first heard of the Matsapha Correctional Complex, a prison in Eswatini, when two MPs were jailed on what human-rights groups say are spurious charges. As both were arrested for participating in and supporting pro-democracy protests, their real offence may have been to challenge the rule of King Mswati III, Africa’s fifth-longest-serving leader. His royal court includes at least 11 wives; courtiers drive Rolls Royces while most of his 1.2m subjects live in poverty. In Matsapha at least one of the MPs is said to have been beaten and deprived of food and medical care. The prison is in the news again because it houses five migrants sent by America as part of Donald Trump’s increasingly theatrical and aggressive deportation policy. The autocracy, once known as Swaziland, is one of four African countries, alongside South Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda, that have recently agreed to take deportees. I suspect the appeal to Mr Trump is twofold. First, African deportation deals fire up those in the MAGA base who enjoy performative cruelty towards migrants. Second, they are a deterrent—migrants would rather be sent home than to an African country they know nothing about. But what is in it for African countries? For Eswatini and South Sudan, neither of which has much to offer the world’s most powerful country, it is ad hoc deal-making. Eswatini wants cash (more than $10m to take more than 150 deportees, according to the New York Times) and exemption from high tariffs on sugar exports. South Sudan wants to undo a decision by America in April to bar its citizens from the country and revoke visas that have already been issued. Politicians see taking deportees as a way of getting back into Mr Trump’s good books. And both Rwanda and Uganda have a history of striking deals with larger powers to take in unwanted migrants. African countries’ eagerness to help solve Mr Trump’s migration problems underlines the narrowing of America’s relationship with the continent. For America the policy can be summed up by three Ms: mercantilism, minerals and migrants. African leaders can benefit from appearing to help America in these areas. But I still find it sad that, whereas American diplomats once decried, however inconsistently, the conditions in African prisons, the very grimness of these places is now part of their appeal.