Why Many Nigerians Are Checking Out

By Dan Amor

It sounds very much like an apocryphal tale. But it is true that the joke is once again on the Nigerian society. What I am saying is that Nigeria is constantly losing batches of experts to the larger world. Thousands of highly trained medical doctors and other professionals are daily departing these shores for greener pastures abroad.

They are going to join millions of talented Nigerian intellectuals, academics and professionals, who had been driven out of our land by the harsh realities of our current existence. It is not a matter of profound argument or intellectual debate to say that the death of the Nigerian middle class due to equivocation and compromise has long been awaited. Yet, implicit in the very meaning of compromise as a means of harmonizing the best features of opposing values is an element of tension.
And it is this unwearied straining after the ideal within the actual rather than any lame begging of issues that imparts so invigorating a tone on the social life of our dying middle class. Check out our various passport offices and international airports to confirm this. Nigerians are leaving as though there is war in the country, even though what is happening is more than the outright declaration of war. What with the magnitude of killings going on across the country?

In fact, it takes a thorough grounding and deep reflection on our belligerent and turbulent social system to appreciate the interplay of the social forces that impinge on the growth of the Nigerian educated elite. But the situation now exerts a critical immediacy and honest evaluation. We cannot pretend that the profound implication of the exodus of members of the Nigerian middle class to foreign lands have been intellectually confronted except in pious lamentations and official platitudes.

For instance, the Ibrahim Babangida task force on brain-drain was another comic relief constituted in 1988 only to signal the official recognition of the menace. Professor Ibidapo Obe who headed the committee even attempted to bamboozle Nigerians into believing that brain drain was a good thing.

Whereas, according to Professor Adebayo Williams, the inimitable critic and popular essayist, "Nothing can be more excruciating than the pain of having to abandon one’s patriotic post at a time when national events demand scrutiny and vigilance, yet to remain in Nigeria is to surrender your life to grinding poverty and penal servitude or even death.

 Hence the compelling need to choose between dying in abject poverty and negating your patriotic obligation by checking out”. Consequently, in 1986, the first batch of Nigerian experts, having felt the suffocation occasioned by a wanton reduction of their wages to mere pittance as a result of the senseless devaluation of the naira, fled to the United States, Saudi Arabia and other Asian Tigers for survival. It was indeed precipitated by a fall-out of SAP, a right-wing economic policy dictated, during the Ibrahim Babangida military dictatorship, by the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the World Bank. As at that time, 1986, the Nigerian currency exchanged for 2.02 to the American dollar. Now, the Naira exchanges for N365 to the American dollar.

Between 1985 and 1988, three years into Babangida’s regime, 260 specialist doctors had fled Nigeria to the United States, Britain, Western Europe and the Gulf region of the Middle East. Presently, three-quarters of our pilots and aeronautic and flight engineers have fled the country and only ten out of our 60 orthopedic surgeons are in the country. Of the 10 million Nigerians who are said to be living outside our shores, 7.5 million are highly skilled experts.

Now, even the illiterate and unskilled ones are leaving in drones in search of better life abroad. In the 1980s, Ghanaians flooded Nigeria in search of jobs, a condition necessitated by bad governance in their country. Today, millions of Nigerians flood Ghana in search of jobs and opportunity for good education. In 1984, General Muhammadu Buhari sent Ghanaians in Nigeria back home with the slogan, "Ghana must go." Today, Ghanaians are sending Nigerians in their country back to Buhari with the slogan, "Naija must go." What a bitter experience!

During the yearly United States Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery, an estimated 3 million Nigerians competed for the 4,000 visas allocated to the country. Even though it was revealed recently that about 2 million Nigerians reside in the United Kingdom, the emigration still persists. With a take-home salary that virtually cannot take him home, the average Nigerian middle class man, with his chains of academic degrees can no longer afford the commonest house-hold property like brand new sound systems, fridges, washing machines, microwaves, cookers, etcetera, not to talk of buying new cars. Most Nigerians are now economic and political refugees seeking asylum in countries to which they flee. To say therefore that we should remain silent while our beloved country is bereft of men and women of great and uncommon ability, who cultivate knowledge with such remarkable zeal, is to admit the absurd.

Of course, the military who brought us to this collective state of arrested development had always hinged their claim to power on the failure of politicians to make life meaningful to the people. Yet, since the past 58 years of our political independence (29 of which have been under, military rule), no unified political solution has been proffered to mitigate the social injustices inflicted on the middle and lower classes by our shameless and sadistic ruling class. It is unacceptable that the military generals who underdeveloped Nigeria since 1966 are still in the saddle in civilian agbada.

It is most unfortunate that the focal points of our national life do not have noble embodiments. For instance, how on earth can we rationalize the drift into the abyss which the country is currently experiencing even under a quasi-democracy? It is now safe to say that in terms of the security and essential needs of the average Nigerian, the Buhari administration has made the military era look like Eldorado. Public infrastructure and improvement in the people’s standard of living have been fleeting passages in this government’s programmes.

Apart from the general inclement climate of security orchestrated by violent robbery, kidnapping and ritual killings, which are signposts of a prostrate economy, what seems like an official state terrorism as seen in the herdsmen killings of innocent Nigerians especially in Central Nigeria, has become the order of the day. The Boko Haram Islamist sect which the government claims had been technically defeated since December 2016 and for which $1billion was unilaterally set aside by government without proper appropriation by the National Assembly, is still killing and abducting people including soldiers in their hundreds on a daily basis.

Many Nigerians are fleeing the country because they cannot afford to allow themselves and their loved ones to be exterminated by evil men while the State looks the other way. Many Nigerians are daily trapped in the desert of North Africa in an attempt to trek across to Europe to escape the drudgery of life and pornography of violence in the country. Some of them are eaten up by wild animals while others die of starvation in the desert or drowned in the sea in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in search of greener pastures. Also, there is a high propensity of capital flight from Nigeria as many multinational companies are daily relocating from the country to less endowed countries where the ease of doing business is high as Nigeria's political future is uncertain.

Nigerians must extricate themselves from a condition of helpless impotence in the face of overwhelming power show by incompetent politicians. This is the time for us to defend liberty and the advancement of democracy – not in the framework of mass exit to foreign lands, but in the fiery glare of a dramatic confrontation with the forces of retrogression ravaging as a cankerworm in our country.

There must be that humanitarian desire for a nation in which poverty, injustice and misery must be eliminated. To advance as a model nation, we must develop a faith in mankind based on belief in man’s dignity and innate desires given education and the right economic conditions to help his fellow man. Nigerians must shine their eyes and vote out this incompetent administration ravaging the country like a plague.