One
The scale of the problem
The true number of people affected by the crisis of citizenship and statelessness in Africa is difficult to estimate, but they
are certainly in the millions and possibly in the tens of millions.
The largest groups include at least a quarter of Côte d’Ivoire’s 17
million people; several hundred thousand Banyarwanda in the
DRC; hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans of European or Mal
awian, Mozambican and other African descent; around 150,000
Ethiopians of Eritrean descent still living in Ethiopia; around
25,000 black Mauritanians expelled from their country in 1989/90
who were as of early 2007 still refugees (though a repatriation
process began under a new Mauritanian government in 2007, the
process was thrown into doubt by an August 2008 military coup);
perhaps 50,000 Muslims in Madagascar; thousands of Sierra Leoneans of Lebanese descent; and tens of thousands of Ugandans
of Asian descent. Moreover, there are uncountable numbers of
people with a citizen mother and foreign father who are denied
citizenship in all those countries in Africa that still discriminate
on the basis of gender in the right to pass citizenship to children
(at least sixteen states on paper; many more in administrative
practice).
Added to these totals must be long-term refugees in countries
that do not recognize the right of refugees to naturalize after a
period of residence: these include tens of thousands of refugees
in Egypt, especially those of Palestinian origin, as well as the more
than a hundred thousand refugees from the Moroccan-occupied
territory of Western Sahara, largely still living in camps in Algeria,
with identity documents issued by a liberation movement which
are recognized only by a small minority of countries, most of
them African.
Moreover, many would include in the list of those who are
effectively stateless those Africans who are members of pastor
alist, hunter-gatherer or other nomad populations who find
themselves on the margins of African states, often the object of
government suspicion or excluded from the benefits of citizenship. Their legal status as citizens may not be officially denied, but
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