• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Do not call it Diaspora, call it a new dispensation

Do not call it Diaspora, call it a new dispensation

Q: This time around, there will be no remittances from this diaspora. There will be no Okonjo-Iwealas, Akinwunmi Adesinas, Oby Ezekwesilis, and Mustapha Chike-Obis to attract home to rebuild

Back in 2004 when I was in Year 9, there was a senior teacher called Mrs. Umebuani. There are many things I could remember her for, but the one memory that stands out, in particular, was what happened one day when she walked into the assembly hall and asked the seated students a simple question, “How many of you intend to live in Nigeria when you grow up?” She was talking to the roughly 200 students of Grange Secondary School at a time when Olusegun Obasanjo’s Nigeria was experiencing an economic explosion.

Of course, shielded and cosseted as we were, we did not really know or care about such things as economic growth, because the Nigeria we knew had never been especially hard for us and the families we came from. All we knew about the little bits of Nigeria we experienced was that it was this annoying place where NEPA took to light a lot and everywhere looked like it was painted in the yellow 3rd world colour filter of an M. Night Shyamalan movie. No hands went up in response to Mrs. Umebuani’s question. Why would we want to return to Nigeria after going to get our UK, US, and Canadian degrees?

Her light-skinned features darkened considerably and a deep frown appeared as she waited for even one hand to go up into the air. Not a single hand went up, to her obvious displeasure. She launched into an impassioned speech: The education, the privilege, the opportunities, she said, was not a right, but a gift from God via our parents. Our role, she said, was to exploit these opportunities and manifest them in our environment. What good was it for our parents to invest so much in us, she said, only for us to give the investment to other people and abandon our homes? We should think about our lives and our roles in the world around us, she concluded. A few hands slowly snaked up. Not many, but a noticeable few.

Read also: Will eNaira become a cheaper, faster option for remittances?

‘Jakpa’ is Not New, But…

My hand did not go up that afternoon, but 9 years later I would end up voting with my feet as I would exchange the freezing landscape of Bradford, UK, for the 30-degree temperature of Lagos. By that point, it was no longer a novelty for someone to leave Nigeria for an education and then return to become part of Nigeria’s growth story. Whereas the 80s and 90s had been dominated by multiple waves of Nigerian emigration, the 2000s and early 2010s brought several thousand of these erstwhile emigrants back home. It made sense at the time.

This is an important piece of context that has been conveniently omitted by several professional opinion-havers who have attempted to analyse the recent wave of public “Goodbye Nigeria” posts on social media platforms. Desperate to downplay the significance of this wave of fresh emigration, these types have attempted to typecast this as part of a cycle of ins and outs which takes place decade after decade. In reality, this wave is different for 2 major reasons.

First, the original emigration wave in the 1980s under General Babangida and his predecessor who shall not be named, was driven primarily by economic necessity. Nigeria was the country that had spent its adolescence in the bosom of an oil revenue boom in the 1970s, and suddenly found itself broke, over-leveraged, struggling with galloping inflation, and facing a Structural Adjustment Program. That initial wave of emigrants was an established professional class who simply found themselves economically beached in Nigeria. In many cases, their decision to travel in search of greener pastures was not initially supposed to be permanent, until events and life overtook them.

That group of emigrants had a very strong bond with Nigeria and had enjoyed the very best of the young country. Their strong flow of remittances which still persists to this day, even as they age and retire, is proof of this. The second wave of emigration in the 1990s was also economic, but more significantly, ideological. As Abacha’s brutal dictatorship forced thousands of Nigerians into voluntary and involuntary exile, it became impossible to separate those who fled due to NADECO affiliations and those who simply fled Abacha’s Nigeria. This group of emigrants also shared a very strong bond with Nigeria.

This Time is Different

The current wave of emigration has none of those distinctive characteristics. Nigeria has been in relative economic doldrums since 2015, but nothing close to the acute and sustained economic contractions of the Babangida era. While emigration has been steadily accelerating under He Who Shall Not Be Named, it has still been placed in the low tens of thousands annually. Compared to the Babangida-Abacha era where an estimated 2 million Nigerians became diasporans, the economic push factors are not as pronounced.

This is not a generation that grew up accustomed to a wealthy or even functional state, so the general condition of Nigeria alone, while being a cause for annoyance, is hardly the existential horror it was for the prior generation who grew up in the Cement Armada country. Lack of electricity, bad infrastructure, substandard education and a perennially underheated economy are not reason enough on their own for this wave – or else it would have happened sooner. You cannot even blame the pseudo dictatorship of He Who Shall Not Be Named per se, because despite his best attempts, Nigeria still retains a simulacrum of democratic institutions.

The reason for this period of ‘jakpa’ is more fundamental than those of prior periods – everybody has given up on Nigeria. It really is everybody. In prior waves, young professionals would typically seek to travel and find their fortune, while older professionals stayed back to hold the fort. This time around, as the young medical doctor working on his first post-graduation placement saves up money to write his PLAB or USMLE exams, the 45-year-old medical registrar with 19 years of experience working at the same hospital is also seeking opportunities to migrate. As parents send their kids to study abroad, they sell off their properties back home and also move abroad. I know of at least 2 serving members of the current National House of Assembly who are in the process of moving to Canada.

This time around, there will be no remittances from this diaspora. There will be no Okonjo-Iwealas, Akinwunmi Adesinas, Oby Ezekwesilis, and Mustapha Chike-Obis to attract home to rebuild post-He Who Has Still Not Been Named. There will be no pounds sterling, euros, and dollars flowing in to invest in real estate and set up businesses. There is zero positive sentiments or any subsisting bond with the idea and concept of the national entity called Nigeria that currently exists. The post-Abacha love-in is well and truly over, and now comes winter.

What does the future look like? Well if I knew that, I would be a very rich man.