Apparently many Nigerians have been moving to Canada recently. Skilled Nigerians at that. Almost everyone in formal employment in Lagos knows someone who knows someone who has packed up their families and migrated to Canada. Canada is not unique of course. We all hear the stories of doctors trooping en masse to the United Kingdom and even places as far as Australia, and young people going to study in the United States and never comings back. And then there are the hundreds or thousands who choose to make the long trek to Europe. The fact that Nigerians migrate is not new but since the 2016 recession there has definitely been a surge. According to data from the international migration database, the number of Nigerians who legally migrated into OECD countries increased by 54 percent between 2011 and 2016. So why are people leaving and in general why do people migrate?
Migration is of course not new. Since the beginning of human existence people have always moved from place to place mostly in search of food. We all have hunter-gatherer common ancestors and that logic of moving from places with less food and less safety to places with more food and more safety is still true. We may have countries and national boundaries and all the other psychological barriers that keep people tied to one place or that restrict people for moving but people usually tend to move to places where they feel they can do better or have a better quality of life. This is true for people who decide to move from Maiduguri to Jos, or from Enugu to Lagos, or from Lagos to Toronto, and so on.
The benefits from migrating can be very real in cash terms too. Consider a mid-level financial analyst who chooses to migrate from Lagos to Toronto. Even after taking the differences in cost of living into account, the increase in real income can be very significant. And that is before you include all the other things that can’t be quantified by money such as security or just breathing clean air every day.
But what are the consequences for a country that experiences a lot of migration? There is a lot of research on the impact of migrants flowing into a country but that is not the situation Nigeria is in. We are at the other end with people migrating out of the country. On the downside if a lot of skilled migrants leave then that is likely to have an effect on domestic productivity if they are not being replaced. And skilled labour is typically difficult to replace. If half your engineers leave then who is going to build all those bridges and machinery that need to be built? If half the healthcare professionals leave then who will staff the healthcare system? And if half the skilled bankers leave then who is going to manage all that risk?
The dynamics for low skilled workers is a bit different. Unemployment tends to be higher for low skilled workers. Note this isn’t really about certificates. Many countries also tend to make it difficult for low skilled workers to migrate into their countries. From the perspective of a country like Nigeria, low-skilled worker emigration is not really a serious problem.
On the positive side, migrants tend to send money back to where they came from and those remittances can be large. Over the last few years foreign exchange inflows into Nigeria from remittances has often been larger than foreign exchange inflows from crude oil exports. In other words, our migrants are now our largest export.
So, what do we do? We should definitely not try to stop people from seeking a better life for themselves and their families elsewhere. We aren’t running a slave economy after all. But we probably want to make sure the pipeline of talent is continuously flowing. So that if one skilled worker leaves, there is another to take their place. This doesn’t always mean we have to rely only on local talent and training, but we should work just as hard to attract talent from elsewhere to Nigeria.
We probably also need to think of a way of recovering training costs from those who choose to migrate. It’s a tricky one as on one hand we want to keep on investing in people here but if those people turn around and leave then it’s basically a wasted investment, at least as far as the country is concerned. Businesses know this problem too well. How do we ensure that people keep getting trained with costs recovered from those who choose to leave?
Morale of this story is, if skilled talent keeps leaving then who is going to engineer this economic growth we are looking for? Houston, we may have a problem. Something to think about for policy makers.
Nonso Obikili
Nonso Obikili is chief economist at Business Day.
