The Journey Begins
In Part 2, Jimmy’s quiet desire and longing to escape Benin turned into a plan, a dangerous land route through Niger into Libya. With three friends by his side, he set off armed with nothing but an ECOWAS passport, borrowed funds, and the belief that the road, no matter how deadly, might lead to freedom.
Through the Desert
The road out of Nigeria was bumpy. The road into hell was sand. From Niger, Jimmy and the others made it to a city called Sabha. That's where the journey stopped being difficult and became deadly.
To cross the Niger-Libya border, they had to ditch the buses and climb onto motorcycles. Not regular okadas. These were desert bikes, operated by men known as "Fani people." They were notorious for one thing: speed. "They drove like madmen," Jimmy said. "Because if you get caught by Arab traffickers out there… your nightmare begins."
It wasn't a metaphor. Getting caught meant being sold. By then, there was no turning back. Once you entered that part of the route, the desert swallowed you whole. No rescues. No calls home. Just the silence of sand and the ghosts of people who never made it.
The Price of Escape
They had already spent close to a million naira. In the eyes of smugglers, that made them walking wallets who must have family in Europe or foreign sponsors footing the bill. That assumption alone painted targets on their backs. They crossed into Libya and spent the night at the first border stop. There, under the frozen breath of the desert night, the real journey began.
"There's nothing out there," Jimmy recounted. "Just sand. No trees. No buildings. Not even birds." From that point, it was Tripoli or nowhere. Hundreds of miles of desert. No map. No promise of arrival. Only open-back trucks loaded with human cargo. Jimmy was one of them.
"They packed over a hundred of us into one truck," he recalled. "Some sat on the floor, others dangled from the edges. They put planks between our legs so we wouldn't fall off." The trucks sped through the desert at what felt like 200 miles per hour. The drivers, mostly Arabs or Fani guys, never stopped. They couldn't. Stopping meant risk. Rebels could spot them, ambush them, rob everyone, and worse, take the people.
Life in the Desert
Libya wasn't governed by laws; it was governed by whoever held the gun. And in the absence of leadership, the desert had devolved into a battlefield ruled by armed gangs, pirates with Toyota Hilux trucks and cheap radios. If they caught you, your fate would be splintered into three categories:
Women were sold into sex slavery. Men were auctioned off for hard labour: construction, farming, loading heavy goods for weeks without food or water. Some were never seen again. That was the reality Jimmy was barreling toward. And there was no going back.
The Harsh Journey
The desert didn't kill you quickly. It wore you down, inch by inch, hour by hour, until your body forgot how to fight. Jimmy's journey through the Sahara lasted nearly three weeks. Three weeks of thirst, heat, and silence. No towns. No trees. No shade. Just the wind, the sand, and the bones of those who had gone before and never made it out.
"There were no birds," Jimmy said once. "No sound. Just the wind blowing the sand like a storm." When they started out, they had a few jerrycans of water, maybe 20 litres shared among dozens. But it didn't last. Starving people turned on each other. They stabbed for a piece of bread and stole for a sip of water. You couldn't fall asleep without clutching your bag like a lifeline. One wrong move and someone would take everything you had.
It was madness. Real-life Mad Max. When the water ran out, they drank the only thing they had left: their own urine. Eventually, there wasn't even urine left to drink. You couldn't pee without water in your body. And for Jimmy, it got worse. He had a condition where he used to pass blood in his urine, even back in Nigeria. The dehydration turned it into agony. His body shut down, and all that came out was blood.
"I looked like a dying Somali refugee," he would later say. "I was bones. Just bones and desperation." Some didn't survive. Two girls and a man from their group died in the desert. Their bodies were left behind. Burials were impossible in sand. Two others turned back. No one ever heard from them again.
A New Hope
Eventually, they stumbled into Sabha, one of the last cities before Tripoli. But Libya wasn't Nigeria. There were no highways, no express roads. Even between cities, people still travelled by desert. In Sabha, the promise of Europe returned like a mirage. They were told someone named Charles would take them to Tripoli. He was a Nigerian, an Edo man like Jimmy, one of the so-called "burgers" who facilitated the route to Europe. They had his number. He was supposed to meet them at a city called Benolene.
So they waited. And waited. And waited. Days melted into weeks. No one came. They were stranded in the desert, surrounded by nothing. Just plastic tarps strung into makeshift tents to block the sun. Sandstorms came without warning. Flies feasted on open mouths. Bellies shrank. Hope drained.
And then, the Arabs who controlled that part of the desert realized something: these migrants had nowhere to go. So they were used. "They made us work," Jimmy recalled. Heavy lifting. Manual labour. Moving stones. Carrying bricks. Building barricades. Filling sandbags. They were made to haul granite under the open sun, barefoot and barely conscious. And for all that, they were paid with bread, rock-hard, round loaves you couldn't bite through, or, if they were lucky, plain pasta boiled in water, served without salt or oil or taste.
"We worked like that for days, maybe weeks," he said. "It's hard to tell time when you're in the desert and every day feels like death." Bodies collapsed. Some stopped eating. Some stopped speaking. No one had the energy to swat the flies that climbed into their noses and ears. The men looked like skeletons, the women like ghosts.
At their lowest, they decided to pray. "We were out of strength. Everyone was sick, hungry, and broken. So we gathered in the sand, and with what little energy we had left, we begged God to save us."
And then, something happened… Don’t miss Part 4 of Jimmy’s story next Friday, where the horrors of Libya take a darker turn, and survival becomes a test of the human spirit.