Europe Is Drowning Our Children and Paying Senegal to Look Away

Thirty-nine people. That is the latest count from a flat-bottomed pirogue that overturned off the Lompoul dunes in Senegal's Kebemer department, 180 kilometres north of Dakar, on a Sunday afternoon. The toll began at 21. Then rescuers kept searching, and it climbed to 34, then to 39. Only one passenger came out of the water alive. Several others are still missing, and nobody has told their mothers whether to keep setting a place at the table.

Ask yourself who was on that boat. Fishermen's sons whose nets came up empty. Young men who sold what little they owned to pay a smuggler. Women who had decided that a risky crossing was better than watching their children go hungry in a village where the sea no longer feeds anyone. We do not know their names yet. We should. Their deaths are not an accident of the ocean. They are the predictable outcome of a system that has failed us from every direction at once.

Consider the numbers. Walking Borders, a migrant rights group, counted 635 people who died trying to reach Spain's Canary Islands in just the first five months of this year. Those are not statistics. Those are 635 funerals that most of their families could not afford, in towns where a single death can break a household for a decade. On the Spanish island of El Hierro, authorities declared an emergency on Saturday, a day before this sinking, after more than 3,300 people arrived on around 30 boats since the start of November alone. Think about what that means. Thousands of human beings, many of them Senegalese, Malian, Gambian and Guinean, gambling everything on the Atlantic because they see no future at home.

Now look at what our governments and our partners have offered in response. The Action for Human Rights and Friendship, known as ADHA, pointed to an announced 300,000 euros, roughly $336,000, for the Senegalese Navy and the training of more than 300 agents. Spread across a coastline that stretches hundreds of kilometres, that is a patrol budget, not a solution. ADHA put it bluntly: the number of interceptions goes up while the number of drowned goes up with it. You cannot count your way out of a crisis that you refuse to understand. And ADHA is right to demand a parliamentary inquiry, because an inquiry asks the questions that a press statement avoids. How many people were on board? Who sold them the boat? Which officials knew the departure was planned? Why did the Interior Ministry describe the passengers as people "seeking to migrate irregularly" without even stating how many were aboard? A government that cannot count the dead is a government that does not want to be counted.

President Bassirou Diomaye Faye offered condolences and promised to crack down on the traffickers who run these journeys. We take him at his word, and we hold him to it. Traffickers are real, and they are monsters who profit from desperation. But a crackdown on smugglers that never touches the conditions producing the smuggling is a press conference, not a policy. Every young man who leaves Saint-Louis or Mbour is a verdict on the economy that failed him.

Here is the context Brussels and Madrid would rather you forget. Senegal's coastal waters have been stripped by industrial fishing fleets, many of them foreign-owned, that vacuum up the sardines and mackerel that once fed families in fishing villages. Fishermen who once earned a living now watch European and Asian trawlers work the same waters. In 2024, the European Union signed a migration partnership with Mauritania worth about 210 million euros, a deal designed to push the border further south and away from European beaches. The pattern is clear. Europe wants the migrants stopped, not the causes addressed. It funds the fences, the patrols and the detention centres, then lectures us about human rights when the bodies wash up on the wrong shore. You lecture us about democracy and dignity while you bankroll the very machinery that drowns our people. We are not asking for charity. We are asking you to stop contradicting your own declared values.

And we must be honest about our own failures. Too many African governments treat emigration as a safety valve rather than a warning light. Youth unemployment across the continent remains brutal. Corruption siphons the revenue that should be building ports, fish processing plants and vocational schools. When a young person sees his neighbour build a house from remittances, while his own leaders build nothing, the Atlantic starts to look like the only honest opportunity on offer.

But there is a better road, and Senegal itself has shown it can be walked. In 2024, when a sitting president tried to postpone elections, Senegal's citizens, its courts and its civil society refused to let democracy die. The Constitutional Council stood firm, the vote went ahead, and power changed hands peacefully. That is what strong institutions look like in practice. Botswana built decades of prosperity on property rights, fiscal discipline and an independent judiciary. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub by welcoming investment and rewarding merit. Rwanda's economic growth, whatever we think of its military adventures abroad, shows what focused state capacity can deliver at home. None of these models is perfect. All of them prove that African nations can create work, keep their young people at home and make the sea a place of livelihood rather than a graveyard.

So what must happen now? Senegal's National Assembly should launch the parliamentary inquiry ADHA has demanded, with subpoena power, public hearings and a binding deadline for findings. The government should publish a full accounting of the dead and missing, and it should compensate the families of the lost. The fishing sector must be protected through enforced licensing, transparent contracts and real penalties for illegal fishing, so that coastal communities are not forced to choose between the sea and the boat. Investment in fish processing, cold chains, and small business credit should become a national priority, measured not in press releases but in jobs created in Kebemer, Saint-Louis and Mbour. Spain and the European Union should be told plainly that funding patrols without funding livelihoods is complicity, and any partnership must come with binding human rights safeguards and independent monitoring of every interception.

Citizens have a role too. Demand that your MP answer the question of how many people died and who is responsible. Support the journalists and civil society groups who are counting the bodies while officials count their press releases. Refuse the lie that these deaths are inevitable.

Thirty-nine people went into the water. Some of them are still in it. We owe them more than a condolence message and a promise that never arrives. Our children should not have to choose between hunger at home and drowning on the way out. Enough. Demand the inquiry, demand the jobs, and demand that everyone who profits from this misery answer for it.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA