The media is awash about the UK opening immigration to Nigerian teachers, among others. I hope that Nigerians understand that we’re real-time watching how countries compete.
The UK shot itself in the foot with Brexit and is doing everything to fill the canyon that moment of madness has created. This includes getting people to keep their country going wherever they can find them.
It does not matter whether you are white, brown, black or green, just come and collect some £££. Ironic, considering that in the very same government, you have the likes of Suella Braverman chatting shit.
But for Nigeria, I find it hilarious that the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) is beating its chest that Nigerian teachers are great, which is why the UK wants them. As always, we’re barking up the wrong tree. High-end schools such as the BIS, Dowen College, Vivian Fowler, Corona, and St Saviour’s will suffer the effect of this most immediately. It is their teachers who are paid well enough to be able to attempt the costly migration exercise in short order.
These more affluent schools will end up seizing teachers from second-order private schools, so middle-class education will suffer as those that will be left to teach in middle-class schools would be those who are currently teaching in places like Ugbogiobo Comprehensive School, and frankly, when you remember the tests that Adams and Nasir set, and the results of those, the future looks bleak for education in these parts.
Eventually, the middle-class teachers who moved to upper-class schools will follow their predecessors and leave Nigeria, and that is how the cookie will crumble as even the St Saviour’s will end up taking teachers from Ugbogiobo. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Essentially, we will see even further gutting of our education system, making the japa crisis we are facing even worse. As I’ve said in the past, we won’t know what hit us when this shit hits the fan. Even worse, our government just doesn’t care, and care we have to because these things will affect the lower classes of our country, an effect that will percolate upwards. Let me tell a story…
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A friend left with his family last year. When they left, their driver, maiguard, and house help, all became unemployed. I have no clue what has become of either driver or maiguard, but my driver is acquainted with the former house-help, and recently, I got updated on her history post-March 2021, when her employers left the country for Canada.
She is from Benue State but had nothing to return to there because of various issues, top of which are a lack of jobs and insecurity, so she ended up moving to Ibadan and staying with friends there. As these things go, she met a young man and, in short order, got pregnant and now has a baby boy. The father, who is unknown to my driver, abandoned her with the child, and she is now virtually destitute and begging for food up in Ibadan.
She was advised to go back to her village with the baby, reasoning that in the village, at least food would be the least of her problems. Yes, she would lack a lot, and yes, there would be no money. But the thinking was and is, “go back, stay a while with the child, let your family get used to having him around, then come back to Ibadan/Lagos on your own and find a job so you could be sending them money, and as you stabilise, you could send for your son.”
This otherwise sensible advice was rejected off-hand. Apparently, she is too ashamed to go back. I understand that social pressures could be significant, and I accept that most people in her position could not cope with the shame of falling from being the breadwinner to being virtually destitute. Plus, large tracts of our country are still socially conservative, so an unwed young mother being seen as a burden on a poor family is unlikely to go down well. I see why she would not want to go back home. This story of just one person is symptomatic…
According to the UKVI, almost 32,000 Nigerians were granted student visas last year alone. Most of these people left Nigeria with dependents, which means they had the resources to move with family. That ability to move multiple dependents across borders places, such people, solidly in Nigeria’s upper middle class. The very kind of people who were able to afford to, while living in Nigeria, employ domestic staff. Nannies/stewards/house helps were typically the one essential member of staff that such people hired.
In the last year, at least 32,000 low-skilled workers in Nigeria have lost their jobs. The average wage for stewards (at least as of 2019) was N30,000. Many of these people used to support families that were poorer still, and through no fault of theirs or of their erstwhile employers, if we are to be brutally honest, that essential lifeline was yanked away.
We are about to watch a repeat of this in our education sector. The highly skilled people will move, leaving lower-skilled people to fill positions they cannot fill. Where does all of this lead?
Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence
