As half of adult Nigerians want to emigrate

A LMOST half of Nigeria’s adult population have indicated their willingness to abandon all hope and vote with their feet in the next five years, according to a survey conducted by a US-based research firm, Pew Research Center (PRC). In the report tagged “Many Nigerians, Tunisians and Kenyans say they plan to leave their countries in the next five years” and published on the Fact Tank webpage recently, the research firm indicated that the survey was conducted in 2018 across 12 countries.

To be sure, the research merely echoed the inclinations of the youth population which prefers the adventurous route through the desert into Europe to legal migration. The truth is that the African continent has consistently proven to be a hostile environment to its native populations. The increasing barriers to self-actualisation due to poor governance are making many people forlorn and desperate.

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In many African countries, the profligate political class ensures that citizens bear the brunt of its own criminal enrichment. The fact that this predatory system ensures the continued impoverishment of the citizenry is well known. Left entirely despondent, the adult population resorts to the gambit of survival in foreign lands. These destination counties are stable and more commodious to existence, and African citizens do not wish to pass up the opportunity to infuse some meaning into their otherwise dreary, miserable lives. Already, some of these adults who have trouble in relocating abroad have devised a way of providing cheap labour during their annual leave, earning foreign exchange in order to lift themselves out of the jaws of misery. The preference for migration should be seen as a loss of confidence in the governance and leadership climate of the affected countries. For instance, with Nigerians being recently rated as the sixth most miserable people on earth, it should not be surprising that a major chunk of the adult population rendered hopeless by governments at all levels is determined to exit the country’s shores by any means.

The real tragedy, though, is the loss of human resources which such emigration of trained manpower constitutes to the economy. It is tragic enough to export Africa’s primary products to Europe and America just to earn a pittance as foreign exchange. But to lose trained manpower and skilled human capital is a monumental catastrophe.

The implication is that poor, underdeveloped African countries are subsidising the rich, developed Western and Asian countries because of the refusal of the political elite to create an environment of possibilities on the continent. Nigeria and the other countries covered by the survey incurred huge expenditure in training and developing human capital, only to lose it to the developed climes.

This development is a serious challenge which underscores the serial failures of what is called national planning in the affected countries. If any planning took place in these countries, their human resources would not be up for grabs by the outside world. For instance, things have become so bad that medical doctors and engineers who have become consultants in their respective fields here in Nigeria are writing basic exams in foreign countries in order to be able to ply their trade.

Sadly, governments in Africa do not see anything untoward in this situation. Rather, they dedicate themselves to the looting of the treasury. For Nigeria, the fact that it is the most populous country in the continent makes the problem unique in the sense that many of its citizens are now proudly in the Diaspora. It has in fact become a kind of status symbol to have these citizens abroad as the government regularly exults in their contributions to the GDP via remittances. To be sure, Nigerians may work abroad, but to do so solely on account of a hostile socioeconomic environment at home is a crying shame.