Nigeria has witnessed massive migration of its youths in recent years. This has created loopholes in the country’s social hierarchy. The exodus is captured in a slang known as japa in Yoruba, a language spoken in the southwest part of Nigeria, meaning escaping from a difficult situation to a pleasant one.
Migration at all costs began for the Nigerian youth around 2015 and the number has not receded since.
British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Richard Montgomery, revealed that the number of Nigerian students in the United Kingdom’s universities rose from twenty thousand to one hundred and twenty-seven thousand in three years.
Montgomery also disclosed that Nigeria alone received three hundred and thirty-five thousand visas out of three million issued for international students and other immigrants in 2022.
According to reports, between the years 2019 and 2022, over fifty thousand skilled Nigerians migrated to Canada. Also, Nigeria lost over nine thousand medical doctors to the UK, Canada, and the US between 2016 and 2018.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), says young people will not be keen to relocate abroad if they can thrive in their country. Iweala is also worried that the most popular phrase in Nigeria now is “I am going to japa.”
It is estimated that sixty percent of Nigeria’s population is under the age of twenty-five, making it one of the youngest countries in Africa.
The expected exuberance that should have been, is being dwindled by youth unemployment which is put at fifty-three point four zero percent, according to estimates from the National Bureau of Statistics in 2022.
A March 2023 report by the Foundation for Investigative Journalism revealed that the fifty-three percent youth unemployment makes Nigeria the world’s second worst after South Africa, which has sixty-one percent youth unemployment.
However, it is not all rosy abroad, as some migrants’ dreams of greener pastures have turned into a nightmare instead.
Many Nigerian jobseekers have become destitute, hungered, and jobless in the UK US, and Canada after paying travel agents thousands of pounds and dollars to travel on skilled worker visas only to realize that the jobs don’t exist.
Most countries seen as choice destinations for Nigerians have been rolling out hostile migration policies. But in every stance, the japa generation breaks the hurdle, either travelling by road, sea, or even through human smugglers.
Many youths have died while trying to reach Europe through the Mediterranean Sea. That route is now seen as a cemetery with about nine hundred people drowning in six months.
Nonetheless, the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has introduced policies that have been carefully designed to address youth migration. One of them is the students’ loan scheme, which is an interest-free loan to Nigerian students in tertiary institutions to fund their higher education with ease.
The president also vowed to generate one million new jobs in the digital economy; a place Nigerian youths have proven to be good at. The Tinubu administration has also pledged to remove all bottlenecks to investments, especially for startups by repositioning the economy to favour the youth.
Nigerian youths must be empowered as stakeholders in building a thriving Nigeria. This must be backed up with human welfare development policies.
Sanitizing Nigerian society based on rewarding hard work and excellence could breed a new generation that would have a rethink of societal hierarchy.
An Indian social reformer, Kailash Satyarthi once said “The power of youth is the common wealth for the entire world. The faces of young people are the faces of our past, our present, and our future. No segment in the society can match with the power, idealism, enthusiasm, and courage of the young people.”
If Nigeria invests in grooming its youths today, it stands the chance of writing a beautiful story that all will be thrilled to read someday.
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