Modern Nigeria is scarcely a genuine enterprise. It is an unfinished article. The imitation of everything foreign and a very bad imitation at that. No thanks to our distaste for Nigerianness.
Here, in Nigeria, humanity dims to artifice and patriotism thrives as a currency of political racketeering, within and outside government circuits.
Sadism dominates our culture. It runs like an electric current through political transitions, dismal newscasts and biased analyses. It is at the core of our nationwide cynicism, varnishing the plaint of boondocks dissent and the dreariness of rural poetry.
Modern Nigeria crushes the capacity for moral choice and diminishes the individual’s prospects for growth thus forcing him or her into the shackles of the imperiled collective.
This desolateness bears the frightful consequence of an exodus of the country’s young – and even the circumspect middle-aged and the elderly – in search of greener pastures abroad.
This exodus has over time assumed the nature of a flight, an escape or an economic expedition, widely labelled the “Japa” syndrome. Japa, meaning “to flee” is a colloquial term used to describe the migration of Nigerians to America, Asia, Europe and even other African countries. This term is severally conflated to connote migration for better opportunities even in cases whereby the migrant fails to fulfill the prerequisites of a legitimate skilled traveller.
In 2018, Schengen countries such as Germany, Hungary, Finland, Italy, and Spain, which are Nigerians’ popular destinations, experienced increased visa applications from Nigeria. A total of 88,587 visa applications were received, of which 49.8% were rejected. This means that 44,076 applications were denied. The most recent statistics show an increase of 51% in the rejection rate of Schengen visa applications lodged by Nigerians, according to 2020 Schengen visa statistics.
Recent statistics released by the UK government show that 486,869 study visas were granted as of June 2022, about 71 per cent more than in
2019. Nigeria ranks third after India and China, increasing from 8,384 to a record high of 65,929 applications for study visas to the UK.
These days, everybody takes pride in their ability to Japa (flee) or relocate their wives and children overseas. Despite the grim narratives of the harsh realities of life for migrant families abroad, any attempt to counsel folk to keep faith in Nigeria attracts a petulant retort.
Not even cautionary stories like the recent Sky News report detailing how Nigerians are being left stranded and duped in the UK, after emptying their life-savings to relocate there could deter Japa enthusiasts.
The investigative report by Sky News, reveals the plight of Nigerian migrants duped by “travelling agents” into paying exorbitant fees to relocate to the UK, only to find themselves stranded and without the skilled work opportunities promised them upon their arrival.
The expose detailed how a rising number of Nigerians are conned off substantial sums running into millions of Naira in their bid to access job opportunities that do not exist within the UK’s skilled worker visa system.
A Nigerian woman, who paid £10,000 to an “agent” for a skilled worker visa that was supposed to secure her a job as a carer in the UK, was one of the unfortunate victims. The woman was one of the several Nigerians currently forced to survive on handouts from food banks while sleeping on the streets.
Many cite the deplorable living conditions in Nigeria as their reasons for fleeing overseas; the reasons run deeper than that. The sheer cost of the fees – running into millions of naira – paid by Nigerians travelling through legitimate and irregular paths depict the gravity of their disenchantment with the affairs of the country.
Interestingly, some migrants take loans at outrageous interests from loan sharks to fund their relocation abroad; and several families who are well-to-do over here, have been known to pawn off their assets to fund their relocation too. Thus many bank managers, journalists, medical doctors, nurses, and engineers, to mention a few, have packed up and fled Nigeria with their families for an uncertain fate abroad.
Although a few have been known to enjoy a better fate abroad, many more eventually settle for menial jobs as security men, restaurant waiters, street sweepers, janitors, hospice caregivers, and even commercial sex workers abroad.
The resistance to counsel blooms by a lack of ignorance about the drudgery of starting from scratch abroad. But who cares?
Recent reports reflect a decline in Diaspora remittances since 2019 when migration peaked. According to World Bank statistics, in 2018, the Diaspora remittances peaked at USD 25 billion, which was 6.1% of Nigeria’s GDP. In
2019, it dropped to USD 23.81 billion; in 2020, it dropped further to $17.21 billion – four per cent of the GDP.
The World Bank attributed the slight increase in remittances to USD 19.2 billion in 2021 to the relative stability of the Naira-US Dollar rate but with the devaluation of the naira cum the massive migration in 2022, experts predict a greater drop in overseas remittances to the country.
Against the backdrop of the situation, the incumbent administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu speaks hope to our desolation, promising greater revenue drive and resuscitation of our comatose manufacturing sector.
How he intends to achieve this amid a culture of public governance and citizenship that, over, institutionalised and entrenched our lack of compassion for the homeless, the unemployed and the poor has become the subject of endless public debates.
As the disenchantment spreads and more Nigerians scurry for greener pastures overseas, the imperative to remedy the situation becomes even more manifest.
This is hardly another cautionary treatise on the perils of relocation abroad. Rather, it is about everyone’s role (government and governed) in perpetuating the grotesqueness that renders Nigeria uninhabitable to all of us. It is about what must be done to remedy our situation.
The responsibility for the collapse of the Nigerian economy must be shared by all classes of Nigerians who have a stake in the country’s multiplex of corruption.
The malady manifests from the corridors of power to the impoverished boondocks and rural areas; from the media soapbox to the manicured quadrangles and lecture theatres of the academia; from the banking halls to the comatose industrial sector and the random trade zones of municipal sidewalks.
This anomaly subsists as frightful swathes of political extremes coalesce and clash in pursuit of their coarse and selfish interests. The aggregate misfortunes that beset Nigeria, from our bungled economy to the shredding of our constitutional rights, to our lack of universal health care, to sponsored terrorism in the country’s northeast and northwest, and the neocolonialist afflictions of our media and politics, can be adduced to the institutions that produce and sustain our political elite.
While every Nigerian is a politician, including all those who declare their disdain for politics, not all politicians are Nigerian, it would seem. Yet Nigeria suffers the fallacy of enlightenment of its political elite. The latter, however, asserts assiduously, the mediocrity of the Western education and indigenous culture that produced them.
Progressive politics is now too often merely empty rhetoric, divorced from the everyday life of the people for whom its proponents claim to speak. If the incumbent leadership truly seeks to revive the country from its cataclysmic descent, attention must be paid to the quality and tone of the institutions that produce the country’s political actors.
•Written By Ololade Olatunji
