Generated Illustration.
I am writing this from Dallas, which should probably disqualify me from writing it at all.
Last December, I sat at a send-off in Abakaliki. Jollof, a cooler of malt, an aunty crying in a way that was about ninety per cent joy. The pastor prayed for journey mercies. In the middle of it, I realised that if you removed every mention of Canada and put heaven in its place, nobody would have noticed. It was a funeral. A very happy funeral. We were burying a young man into a better life.
We call it japa. Nigerians have always given funny names to funerals.
Every airport photograph in this country is a celebration and an indictment at the same time. Every “congratulations bro” in the comments carries a question underneath it that everybody can hear. When will it be my turn? We have arranged our affairs so that escape looks like achievement, because staying has begun to look like a failure of nerve. We raise the child to love the country, then applaud him for successfully leaving it.
The dream has a foreign address now. It wears a winter jacket. Ask a young Nigerian where he sees himself in five years, and he will answer you with geography. Canada is a career plan. Britain is a prayer point. America is the answer to a question nobody wants to put to Nigeria directly.
None of this is hatred of home. Nobody hates the soil where his father is buried, or the language his mother used the first time she called him precious. What the young resent is smaller and more daily than hatred. It is the humiliation of belonging to a country that does not behave as though they belong to it. It is the bereavement of giving to a country that demands more than it gives.
Consider what citizenship costs in Nigeria. You buy your own light. You sink your own borehole. You settle the vigilante at the end of the street. You pay tax to the government and then pay a second time to replace the government. The state invoices you for services it did not render and asks for your patriotism as a tip. But a flag cannot employ a graduate. An anthem cannot bring down the price of a bag of rice. People love a country when they can live inside it without rehearsing survival every morning.
Instead, we have made a virtue of endurance. We praise resilience because justice would cost more. Naija no dey carry last, we say. Or maybe Naija does not carry last because Naija has spent sixty years running from collapse and has learned to call it a sprint. We didn’t even go to the World Cup.
The young have been watching all of it. Watching honesty become an economic disadvantage. Watching a first-class graduate queue for a job. Watching men of no visible profession build houses no salary can explain, and then receive chieftaincy titles for it. Watching a politician defend Nigerian hospitals from a hospital bed in London. After a while, even satire gets tired.
So Nigerians study escape the way we used to study for WAEC. He knows the visa categories better than the history of his own state. She has memorised the immigration rules like scripture, including the parts that changed last year. At midnight they compare proof of funds in WhatsApp groups, which agent is genuine, whose IELTS is expiring. God when. My testimony is next. E go reach everybody.
I want to be clear that I do not think leaving is a betrayal. No young person owes a country a wasted life. Migration is not a rejection of home and certainly not the body simply refusing to die where it was born.
But abroad runs its own theatre. Social media shows the snow, the gown, the first car. It does not show the Sunday afternoons. It does not show a man who arrived physically four years ago and is still trying to arrive emotionally, or the old self folding itself smaller to fit through the new door. You can leave Nigeria and spend every night of your life sending money back into it. Abroad is not heaven. It is a place where the dysfunction is less ambitious.
What is happening is not really a hunger for foreign soil. It is a hunger for systems that work. Nobody I know wants to become Canadian. They want the light to stay on and the police to be boring. A teacher raising her children without begging. A nurse who can enter a hospital without becoming its next patient. The right to be ordinary without being punished for it. Ordinary is what has become expensive in Nigeria. Only suffering is subsidised.
Can staying stop looking like failure, and leaving stop looking like resurrection? I do not know. I am, after all, writing from Dallas.
What frightens me is not the leaving. It is that those who stay or remain now envy the ones who go more than they miss them. It is that we have started measuring a life by its distance from home. Nigeria may go on existing long after the idea of belonging to it has quietly died. One day the last hopeful one will stand in front of the departure board with his passport in his hand, and we will ask him why he is leaving. He will be within his rights to ask us why the country left first.
After all, what is the Nigerian dream that precludes emigration?
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