Borders and the convenient scapegoat by Eze Ogbu

In the realm of bizarre geopolitical plot twists, where irony waltzes with hypocrisy and history plays background jazz like a broken record Libya has just delivered an encore performance. Authorities in Tripoli have accused international aid groups of a grand conspiracy: apparently, they’re not just feeding the hungry and patching the wounded, but orchestrating an elaborate scheme to change Libya’s ethnic make-up by encouraging African migrants to stay.

You heard right. Medical tents are now allegedly breeding grounds for demographic manipulation. Humanitarian blankets? Trojan horses. Water bottles? Clearly, coded messages to stay and settle.

And in a decision that reeks of political theatre wrapped in the subtle fragrance of xenophobia, Libya has ordered these aid organizations to pack up and get out, effectively shutting their doors in the faces of those most vulnerable.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just about bad policy. This is about rewriting the narrative of suffering into a cautionary tale of foreign manipulation. It’s not the failed state structures, broken institutions, or post-Gaddafi chaos that are to blame, it’s the NGOs with their sinister... compassion?

One might assume that a country still teetering on the edge of internal disarray, struggling with basic governance, and battling a perpetual migration crisis would welcome international support. But no. Instead, aid groups have been rebranded as agents of cultural sabotage, an ethnic reshuffling operation, no less.

The accusation itself would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. It’s a page right out of the authoritarian playbook: when things get messy, find a scapegoat with no voting power, no guns, and no oil. Aid workers? Perfect.

Of course, there’s no evidence for this supposed demographic takeover unless you count the brown faces of exhausted men, women, and children desperately fleeing war, famine, or exploitation as part of some malicious plot. And therein lies the darker truth: this isn’t about NGOs. It’s about blackness. About otherness. About the deeply uncomfortable racial anxieties that sit just below the surface of far too many immigration discourses in North Africa and beyond.

In accusing aid organizations of encouraging Africans to stay, Libya has effectively reduced human suffering to a demographic inconvenience. The logic (if one dares call it that) is baffling. Are African migrants really itching to settle permanently in a country where they face arbitrary detention, abuse, and enslavement? Yes, actual slavery. Not the metaphorical kind politicians throw around, but the literal, auction-based horror that made headlines not so long ago and then promptly disappeared from collective memory.

These people, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, aren’t hatching a grand scheme to repopulate Libya. They’re simply stuck. Caught in a place they never intended to call home, with borders behind them closed and Europe ahead of them barricaded by barbed wire, bureaucracy, and political cowardice.

But truth rarely fares well in politics, especially when panic sells better. And what better way to whip up national anxiety than to point at those who are easiest to blame and hardest to hear?

Make no mistake: while Libyan authorities make the accusations, there’s a deafening silence or in some corners, polite applause, coming from Europe. After all, this fits neatly into the larger scheme of outsourcing migration management to countries far enough away that European voters don’t have to see the consequences.

Libya, with its murky warlords and opaque detention centres, is the perfect subcontractor for Fortress Europe. Don’t look too closely, don’t ask too many questions, just keep the migrants there. Let them rot, let them down, but for heaven’s sake, don’t let them land on our shores.

So when Libya cracks down on aid groups, many European officials will raise a symbolic eyebrow, issue a statement soaked in diplomatic beige, and go back to their spreadsheets. Meanwhile, people on the ground, people who have fled hellscapes we can’t begin to imagine, will suffer in silence.

What’s most chilling is the idea that humanitarianism itself has now been politicized to such a degree that offering food or shelter can be interpreted as ethnic engineering. It suggests that only certain types of people deserve empathy. That some national identities are so fragile, the mere presence of “others” is considered a threat.

And let’s not pretend this is just a Libyan issue. This flavour of ethnic paranoia, this fear of being “replaced,” “overrun,” or “diluted” echoes loudly across continents. From Great Replacement theorists in Western parliaments to dog-whistling demagogues in Eastern Europe, it’s a global illness wearing different masks.

But in Libya’s case, it’s all the more tragic because the country knows what it means to be displaced. To be invaded. To be manipulated by foreign actors. And now it chooses to turn that legacy of struggle into a weapon against the powerless.

Let’s set the record straight, in case it wasn’t already screamingly obvious: aid groups are not ethnic influencers. They are not agents of demographic change. They do not hand out citizenship with blankets or distribute passports alongside antibiotics.

They are the ones doing the dirty, thankless work of patching up the wounds that the rest of the world prefers to ignore. If anything, they are a mirror to our collective shame, reminders of every broken promise, every ignored border, every drowned child whose name we never learn.

So when Libya closes their offices and smears them as architects of cultural sabotage, it’s not just a cynical move, it’s a moral collapse.

And if we let it go unchallenged, then maybe we deserve the reflection staring back at us.