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What does it actually take for a person to reach Europe by land and sea? Nigerian investigative journalist Fisayo Soyombo decided to find out the only way that would yield the full truth: by living it. Posing as a migrant, he spent 47 days retracing one of Africa's most dangerous routes from Kano in northern Nigeria, through Niger's trafficking hubs, and into Libya, the last stop before migrants attempt the Mediterranean crossing to Italy.
His journey began deceptively smoothly. A "connection man" in Kano handed him off to the first of what would eventually be a long chain of traffickers, each passing him to the next until he reached Libya. According to FIJ's reporting, a single trip from Nigeria to Libya typically involves twenty to thirty different traffickers working in relay. Before setting off, Soyombo took real precautions: he sewed a hidden pocket into his jeans for cash, packed hygiene basics and food staples, and carried a GPS tracker so a support team back home could follow his location every hour a safeguard many of the migrants travelling alongside him did not have.
What followed was a slow unravelling of dignity. In Kano, he slept packed onto raffia mats with over a dozen others in a windowless room, paying for every basic need a place to sleep, a bucket of water, even phone charging. In Magaria, Niger, temperatures soared past 36°C, and he later crossed the desert in the back of a minibus already carrying crates of live chickens. When a young woman travelling with him desperately needed a bathroom stop, the driver refused yet minutes later halted the vehicle so his men could chase down an escaped chicken. It was a small moment, but a telling one: on this route, Soyombo found, a bird's value could outweigh a human being's.
The most punishing stretch came in Agadez, where his own "connection man," a trafficker known as Alhaji Buzu, strung him along with promise after promise of an imminent departure. Days became weeks. Confined largely to a bare room with no mattress, surviving mostly on bread, water and soaked cassava flakes, Soyombo spent thirteen days in near-total isolation, watching the skin on his ankles and forearms begin to blister and darken from heat and malnutrition. He wasn't alone in this limbo FIJ's report describes more than a hundred stranded Nigerian migrants in a nearby settlement who had been waiting over three months, some reportedly showing signs of mental strain.
Running through the account are the human stories that make the statistics real: a teenage girl travelling on a relative's decision she barely understood; a mother who spent millions of naira pushing her son toward a crossing she couldn't guarantee would work; two cash-strapped young men from Akure who didn't even know which Libyan city they were headed to, unaware they'd likely spend years, not months, repaying the smugglers who "helped" them.
Soyombo's reporting also lays bare the economics driving this migration. With Nigeria's poverty rate estimated at over 60 percent and projections suggesting a majority of the population could be living below the poverty line by 2026, thousands see the desert crossing as their only path to a better life despite a steadily worsening success rate for actually reaching Europe. Libya's fractured political landscape, split between rival governments and militias since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, has only made the journey more lawless and more dangerous.
By the time Soyombo climbed onto the bed of a pickup truck bound for Sabha perched on sacks of cargo, warned bluntly that falling asleep meant falling off, and falling off meant dying his account had already made one thing unmistakable: this is a journey people survive by chance as much as by will.
This is the first installment of a three-part series. The full investigation, with additional photographs and documentation, is available on FIJ's website.
Photo: 'Fisayo Soyombo / International Journalism Festival, licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0