No Country for Young People? Creating a New ‘Africa Story’ for the Young and Ambitious

Somehow inside a major airport in an important city in the world’s youngest region by population demographics, I had stumbled upon an epiphany about Africa’s de-facto economic ageism

As a decidedly self-conscious person, whenever I sense eyes lingering on me, I instinctively run through a quick mental checklist. Are my clothes well matched? Laces tied? Did something stain me? Is my fly open? Last Sunday, while my girlfriend and I checked in at Kotoka Airport for our return flight after a weekend break in Accra, I felt the unmistakable sensation of several pairs of eyes on us, so I ran through this checklist again. To my eyes, nothing looked out of the ordinary, but the persistent stares told me that something was definitely amiss.

READ ALSO: The Nigerian middle class and the second exodus (3)

After two minutes of sneaking furtive glances at our outfits and surreptitiously using my phone camera to check whether my face was OK, a possible reason for the stares suddenly struck me. I took a slow 360-degree turn, taking a good look at everyone else in the busy departure hall. I saw security personnel, several middle-aged couples, airline check-in staff, a middle-aged Alhaji and his four giggling wives wheeling suitcases bursting with luggage, a few expatriates and pretty much everyone else you would expect to see in a typical African airport terminal.

Everyone except young people.

Another glance around confirmed my suspicion. We were the only travellers in the entire departure hall who looked like we were under the age of 40. With the sole exception of one of the Alhaji’s wives who looked like she might still be a teenager, everyone there who looked like they might be somewhere within our age bracket was there for work as janitors, security operatives and check-in counter staff. The others were either significantly older or expatriates –  often both. Somehow inside a major airport in an important city in the world’s youngest region by population demographics, I had stumbled upon an epiphany about Africa’s de-facto economic ageism.

Based on the glaring absence of young, upwardly mobile people and the persistent stares that accompanied us even to immigration counter were several questions to the effect of “What do you do for a living?” came up, I established two things. First, there was apparently no space in West Africa’s economic reality for a couple of ordinary 20-something-year-old Nigerians to treat themselves to the very mild luxury of a weekend trip to Ghana. Second and more importantly, there was no space in the popular imagination for such a thing to be possible. You apparently had to either be the offspring of rich people spending unearned family wealth, or a dodgy character involved in something illicit. 

Once again I was reminded that young Africans are not just generally poor, but are also expected to be poor by default. 

FOMO: A Guide to Understanding the Skilled Young African Émigré  

The first time I publicly made the point about my well educated and upwardly mobile friends and contemporaries fleeing Nigeria in record numbers, I did so from the point of view of starting a conversation about possibly fixing the push factors that make them emigrate. Cameroonian tech investor Rebecca Enonchong recently expressed similar thoughts, decrying the flight of the country’s youngest and brightest in what has become a recurring theme to the South of the Sahara:

“More and more young people around me want to leave #Cameroon. Flag of Cameroon. Repats that wanted so much to come home, build the country, are giving up. Those who never left are grasping at any opportunity to get out, to anywhere. These are our most talented, our brightest.”

Based on my understanding at the time, Nigeria did not need to be a particularly fantastic country to be able to hold on to much of its best talent. Nigerians I reckoned, are hardy people who retain a strong sentimental attachment to ‘home’ wherever on earth they may be. If only a few basic infrastructural and systemic improvements could be implemented permanently, a vast number of them would choose to remain in Nigeria or even return from the diaspora.

I held this view until a chance encounter with an old school friend in the UAE last month. Njideka (name has been changed) is among this group of people, having left Nigeria last year and moved to Dubai after pushing for a transfer within the multinational she works for. On the surface, you would assume that it is the same old story – ambitious and upwardly mobile young Nigerian professional who sees little future at home or is spooked by the difficult environment, and moves to greener pastures.

Over the course of a delightful evening picking her brain in a bar overlooking the Palm Jumeirah however, I came to a very different understanding about immigration, economics and the very foundations of Dubai itself as a global success story. As we spoke, I started to understand that it was not always the fact of Nigeria and Africa having several push factors, but the fact that said places have no pull factors. To put it very simply, Nigeria and Africa are boring.

Think about it – why does anybody want to work in Nigeria? To the best of my knowledge, the only group of professionals anywhere in the world who actively look forward to moving to Nigeria are helicopter pilots – because here they get paid significantly more than anywhere else on earth. If you are not actually from here, the only motivation is money. In terms of standard of living, tourism and leisure, hospitality, arts and culture, adventure and generally having a good time, Nigeria offers pretty much nothing. In fact, one of the biggest complaints expatriates have upon moving to Nigeria is that there is simply “nothing to do here.” 

Dubai, in contrast, offers the entire gamut of human sensory delights all day every day. Whether it is foreign cuisine, 7-star hospitality, unmatched retail experiences, outdoor adventuring, even ski slopes and skating rinks – everything is there. All of this exists in the midst of a near-zero crime environment with world-class transport, health and educational infrastructure. A highly skilled foreigner moving to Dubai will thus have not just a high salary but a generally stratospheric experience compared to where they are coming from.

Njideka’s salary in Dubai is the same as it was in Lagos, but she can do so much more with it there. She rents a beautiful high rise apartment on the Palm Jumeirah with some of the most spectacular balcony scenery in the world. She drives her brand new Volvo SUV anywhere she wants to go at any time of the day without a shred of fear. She can stay out late on a work night (as we did) without worrying about waking up at 4 AM to beat the traffic. She has a circle of similarly upscale African expat friends around her, enabling her to enjoy all of Dubai’s delights with the comforts of home without the burden of 3rd world cultural expectations like “When will you marry?”

Her contemporaries in Lagos who visit her or keep in touch with her soon realise that they could or should have so much more out of life than what Africa currently offers them. As soon as they realise how much they are being shortchanged by living and working on the continent, they become very dissatisfied. Once that happens, the seed of emigration has been planted and will be nurtured to germination by the fountain of FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out. 

How can I be sure of all this, you may ask?

Because that is exactly the effect it had on me.

Equatorial Guinea is Africa’s Trump Card – Shame They Don’t Know It 

When I started researching the rise of Dubai, several assumptions quickly fell away. The biggest was the assumption that Dubai is an oil-funded potemkin village. Due to the fact that oil-rich Abu Dhabi has funded so much of Dubai’s dizzying development, I grew up with the popular assumption that Dubai’s rulers are money-drunk oil Sheikhs who spend billions of dollars on tall buildings and impressive structures in the middle of the desert to boost their ego.

This has to be one of the biggest and most unfortunate misconceptions on earth, right up there with “Africans are miserable objects of poverty who need aid and prayers.” What Dubai really is in fact, is the result of a carefully calculated plan to benefit from a fortunate location at the centre of the inhabited world by bringing in unprecedented numbers of tourists, travellers and business people. The UAE is located right at the junction of Africa, Asia and Europe, putting it a maximum of 8 hours away by air from anywhere on the three most populated continents in the world. 

In other words, two-thirds of all humanity is just a single flight away from Dubai. This gives it a strategic advantage that it has fully exploited. Dubai International Airport overtook London Heathrow as the world’s busiest airport in 2014. The state-owned Emirates airline is the fourth largest in the world. Of the UAE’s $382bn GDP, Dubai alone accounts for $102bn, or about $34,000 per person, compared to about $6,900 per person in Lagos. Everybody wants to be there – EMEA businesses, tourists, transit travellers, working professionals, everybody. Which brings me to the little known Central African country called  Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea really does not like Africans

Equatorial Guinea’s history reads suspiciously like someone copied the UAE’s answer sheet in an exam hall. Also once a poor and desolate country that needed food aid, since discovering oil in 1995, it has also embarked on an ambitious infrastructure program that has seen it build two entire cities out of the jungle. In the process, it has become Africa’s wealthiest country with a per capita GDP topping $22,000. Like the UAE it is also located fortuitously, being at the junction of Africa’s four main official languages. Officially a Spanish speaking country, it is bordered by, or in close proximity to six major Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone countries namely Cameroon, Angola, Gabon, DRC, Nigeria and Ghana.

Its history and its equatorial location on the coast of west-central Africa give it two distinct advantages. It is perhaps the most unspoiled area of pristine natural beauty in all of Africa, potentially setting it up to be a future tourist goldmine, and it is an important port destination. Its new capital city Oyala (officially ‘Ciudad de la Paz’) and the recently constructed Malabo II city follow in Dubai’s blueprint of funding visually spectacular development to attract visitors and exploit its location. It would really be a Dubai story in the making were it not for one major problem.

Equatorial Guinea really does not like Africans.

Perhaps seeing an influx of African neighbours as a threat to the country’s high per capita wealth and a brake on development, the administration of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has made it a point to deny access to the country to everyone in general (except Americans who can enter visa-free), but especially to African immigrants who face a convoluted and opaque visa application process. Official figures are not available, but it is often said that it is easier to obtain entry clearance for skilled work in Equatorial Guinea as a European expat than it is to do the same job as an African expat.

In other words, the African country best placed to replicate the UAE’s highly successful development strategy is wasting its shrinking oil revenue window. Instead of doing so as Nigeria did by transferring practically all the revenue to offshore accounts linked to a succession of kleptomaniac military dictators, it is instead wasting its opportunity by ring-fencing its economy for the exclusive participation of European and American expats. Inevitably when the oil revenues dry up (as they are already doing), these expats will return home, leaving an unprepared and still impoverished local population in charge of a ghost economy.

A better strategy would be for the Equatoguinean government to follow the Emiratis’ lead and set up a program designed to attract Africa’s biggest businesses and multinationals to set up management bases in Malabo or Oyala. These businesses would bring thousands of high earning African expats with them, which would have a predictable knock-on effect on the local economy. In conjunction with the existing infrastructure program, the government would provide guarantees to aid the development of leisure, hospitality and adventuring infrastructure to create an endearing experience as the UAE did.

This program would also look to recruit Africans who are active participants in the digital economy with monthly incomes topping $1,000. In doing so, they can avoid the pitfalls of opening their borders to millions of desperate unskilled migrants without sacrificing their future economic competitive prospects. When young African high earners move to Equatorial Guinea and experience lifestyles similar to what Njideka has in Dubai, the resulting FOMO will for the first time fuel a wave of skilled African migration even from outside the continent into an African country. The country would thus gain the inexhaustible asset of a high earning, highly productive workforce as Dubai has done, and Africa would finally – finally – get to change its miserable emigration and brain drain narrative.

This suggested strategy, in my opinion, makes far too much sense for it to ever be implemented on this continent. After three decades in Nigeria, I, of course, know better than to ever be optimistic about an African government doing something sensible and realistic. In all probability by this time in a few weeks, I will remember writing this while once again sharing drinks with Njideka at the Palm Jumeirah. She will ask me why I have that wistful look on my face and I will show her this article and tell her what she told me the last time she insisted on paying for my drinks:

“This is my contribution to Nigerian journalism.”

Then we will laugh and life will go on.