Before Babies Begin To Emigrate

 By Adekunle Adekoya

There must be a problem in the land, a very big one. I am not talking about the usual that we have lived with for decades — lack of potable water, epileptic power supply, parlous healthcare system and all that. I am talking about a feeling of disenchantment, perhaps hopelessness, especially among the youths which has fuelled what we now call “Ja pa.”

On the internet, it has trended for a few days now that 266 Nigerian doctors have been licensed to practise in the United Kingdom. In my hood, I noticed that I have not seen some of the younger men with whom I relate for some time. To be candid, I don’t remember having seen any of them since before the election. I asked around. Someone volunteered that the guys after whom I’m asking have joined the Ja pa train. “They left for Canada three weeks ago,” my informant said. I shuddered in disbelief. 

Everywhere you turn and ask after somebody, you get the japa reply. It seems that emigrating, especially by the youths is the way out of the morass in which this country has found itself, and which worsened spectacularly in the last eight years. We just concluded(?) the general elections. I remember that some of the promises made by politicians during the campaigns dwelt on education, potable water, electricity supply, roads, and the like. I equally remember that 40 years earlier, the same issues were what the politicians of that era campaigned with. The late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, and also Mallam Aminu Kano campaigned with these issues in the run-up to the presidential election which held August 9, 1983. That was a few months short of 40 years ago.

What it means is that very little progress has been made in the last 40 years, except perhaps at individual levels. When the coup of December 31, 1983 took place, the putschists accused the politicians of the Second Republic of having turned our hospitals to mere “consulting clinics”. One of them, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, who emerged military Head of State on January 1, 1984, later became our civilian president in 2015. He would break all known records as the Nigerian leader who spent the longest time, cumulatively on healthcare outside the country.

Between June 6, 2016 and May 11, 2018, President Buhari had spent a total of 169 days on medical trips outside the country. Meanwhile, hospitals back home remained death traps, worse than the consulting clinics he and his fellow coup plotters called them back in 1984. Even, the State House Clinic fared no better, leading his wife, Aisha, to complain bitterly in 2017 about lack of facilities there, and indeed, demanded an inquest into how the clinic’s budget was being spent. 

Then came insecurity. All kinds of criminal elements ran, and are still running riot all over the country. It became difficult to travel anywhere by road for fear of kidnappers. Train journeys, considered relatively safer, also fell victim of terrorists as they successfully derailed the Abuja-Kaduna train service and abducted scores of passengers. It is not known till date whether anybody had been arrested and prosecuted for the train kidnap. In the middle of all these, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, embarked on a strike that shut down the nation’s public universities for more than 10 months.

For students and their parents, it was a season of hopelessness. Just as ASUU was calling off the strike, we landed right inside another round of petrol scarcity, since November last year, and is still on-going. Then, the Naira re-design policy. Remember that in 1984, General Muhammadu Buhari, in a bid to curb corruption, re-minted the Naira.

Those who are old enough to remember will recall the anguish Nigerians went through before the new Naira notes circulated nationwide. Re-enacting a similar exercise to curb vote-buying, Buhari empowered monetary authorities to confiscate the hard-earned money of fellow Nigerians. A season of deprivation and state-sponsored torture set in: people had money in their bank accounts but could not get it to spend. Electronic transfers became the option, but the switching infrastructure was perhaps too fragile to handle the volume of transactions, resulting in countless failed deals. 

Amid all of these, electric power supply remained epileptic, with the DISCOs behaving as they like, potable water remained out of reach, while roads fell into disrepair and became death traps. In the same vein, some institutions of state  in the transport sector decided to abdicate. As a result, countless containers fell off their pallets and sent innocent Nigerians to untimely, excruciating death, while hoodlums took control of the roads.

Elsewhere in the country, non-state actors were rising like the proverbial phoenix, performing functions that only state actors were empowered to do. Seeing these, it is easy to aggregate the frustrations of our system and conclude that emigration is a solution. It might be, at the individual level, but will our country as an entity also emigrate? To another planet? Let the power elite take good stock of the prevailing situation and fashion out a rescue plan, lest unborn babies start emigrating from their mothers’ wombs.

Before Babies Begin To Emigrate

There must be a problem in the land, a very big one. I am not talking about the usual that we have lived with for decades — lack of potable water, epileptic power supply, parlous healthcare system and all that. I am talking about a feeling of disenchantment, perhaps hopelessness, especially among the youths which has fuelled what we now call “Ja pa.” 

On the internet, it has trended for a few days now that 266 Nigerian doctors have been licensed to practise in the United Kingdom. In my hood, I noticed that I have not seen some of the younger men with whom I relate for some time. To be candid, I don’t remember having seen any of them since before the election. I asked around. Someone volunteered that the guys after whom I’m asking have joined the Ja pa train. “They left for Canada three weeks ago,” my informant said. I shuddered in disbelief. 

Everywhere you turn and ask after somebody, you get the ja pa reply. It seems that emigrating, especially by the youths is the way out of the morass in which this country has found itself, and which worsened spectacularly in the last eight years. We just concluded(?) the general elections. 

I remember that some of the promises made by politicians during the campaigns dwelt on education, potable water, electricity supply, roads, and the like. I equally remember that 40 years earlier, the same issues were what the politicians of that era campaigned with. The late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, and also Mallam Aminu Kano campaigned with these issues in the run-up to the presidential election which held August 9, 1983. That was a few months short of 40 years ago.

What it means is that very little progress has been made in the last 40 years, except perhaps at individual levels. When the coup of December 31, 1983 took place, the putschists accused the politicians of the Second Republic of having turned our hospitals to mere “consulting clinics”. One of them, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, who emerged military Head of State on January 1, 1984, later became our civilian president in 2015. 

He would break all known records as the Nigerian leader who spent the longest time, cumulatively on healthcare outside the country. Between June 6, 2016 and May 11, 2018, President Buhari had spent a total of 169 days on medical trips outside the country. Meanwhile, hospitals back home remained death traps, worse than the consulting clinics he and his fellow coup plotters called them back in 1984. Even, the State House Clinic fared no better, leading his wife, Aisha, to complain bitterly in 2017 about lack of facilities there, and indeed, demanded an inquest into how the clinic’s budget was being spent. 

Then came insecurity. All kinds of criminal elements ran, and are still running riot all over the country. It became difficult to travel anywhere by road for fear of kidnappers. Train journeys, considered relatively safer, also fell victim of terrorists as they successfully derailed the Abuja-Kaduna train service and abducted scores of passengers. It is not known till date whether anybody had been arrested and prosecuted for the train kidnap. In the middle of all these, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, embarked on a strike that shut down the nation’s public universities for more than 10 months.

For students and their parents, it was a season of hopelessness. Just as ASUU was calling off the strike, we landed right inside another round of petrol scarcity, since November last year, and is still on-going. Then, the Naira re-design policy. Remember that in 1984, General Muhammadu Buhari, in a bid to curb corruption, re-minted the Naira. Those who are old enough to remember will recall the anguish Nigerians went through before the new Naira notes circulated nationwide.

Re-enacting a similar exercise to curb vote-buying, Buhari empowered monetary authorities to confiscate the hard-earned money of fellow Nigerians. A season of deprivation and state-sponsored torture set in: people had money in their bank accounts but could not get it to spend. Electronic transfers became the option, but the switching infrastructure was perhaps too fragile to handle the volume of transactions, resulting in countless failed deals. 

Amid all of these, electric power supply remained epileptic, with the DISCOs behaving as they like, potable water remained out of reach, while roads fell into disrepair and became death traps. In the same vein, some institutions of state  in the transport sector decided to abdicate. As a result, countless containers fell off their pallets and sent innocent Nigerians to untimely, excruciating death, while hoodlums took control of the roads.

Elsewhere in the country, non-state actors were rising like the proverbial phoenix, performing functions that only state actors were empowered to do. Seeing these, it is easy to aggregate the frustrations of our system and conclude that emigration is a solution. It might be, at the individual level, but will our country as an entity also emigrate? To another planet? Let the power elite take good stock of the prevailing situation and fashion out a rescue plan, lest unborn babies start emigrating from their mothers’ wombs.

*Adekoya is a commentator on public issues