Japa: The courage and cost of Nigeria’s great exodus, By Dakuku Peterside 

Japa is not a simple story of brain drain or economic migration. It is a reckoning. It is a mirror held up to a nation that has failed too many of its brightest and bravest. But it is also a thread — an invisible umbilical cord — that connects the streets of Lagos to the clinics of Manchester, the classrooms of Toronto, and the startups of Berlin. And through that thread flows not just money but longing, memory, identity, and love.

I still remember the evening I first heard the term “Japa.” It came in the form of a meme — “If you’re seeing this, pack your bags” — plastered over an image of a dusty road disappearing into a golden horizon. The joke wasn’t just funny — it was painfully accurate. “Japa,” a Yoruba word meaning “to flee,” has evolved into a cultural and economic phenomenon, serving as a shorthand for the restless exodus of Nigerians, particularly the young and educated, in search of a better life. What was once a quiet movement of the desperate and the privileged has now morphed into a defining feature of Nigeria’s national psyche. It reflects not only a failure of the state but also the boundless courage of individuals who continue to chase dignity, safety, and opportunity across oceans.

Beneath the headline-grabbing migration figures lie deeply human stories, complicated by trade-offs that span continents and generations. When Aisha, a surgical nurse from Kaduna, arrived in London in 2022, she secured an NHS position that paid her over three times her salary in Nigeria. Her new life was a dream on paper — financial stability, functional healthcare, and reliable electricity. But the price was steep: her mother, widowed and diabetic, was left behind with no one to accompany her on clinic visits. Her younger siblings, used to Aisha’s help with tuition and groceries, now relied on irregular remittance flows and prayers. Her calls home, filled with reassurance and cheer, barely masked the weight of her absence. Aisha’s story is not exceptional — it is replicated across tens of thousands of households in Lagos, Yenegoa, Owerri, Ilorin, and beyond.

In 2023, Nigeria received an estimated $20.13 billion in remittances, the highest in sub-Saharan Africa and one of the few bright spots in the country’s bleak economic landscape. Remittances now account for nearly 4 per cent of Nigeria’s GDP — greater than direct foreign investment — and they serve as a vital buffer for families struggling with inflation, food insecurity, and crippling unemployment. These inflows fund school fees, hospital bills, building projects, and sometimes entire family businesses. For many, having a child or sibling abroad is the difference between collapse and survival. But money doesn’t hug you. It doesn’t walk your grandmother to the mosque or church. It doesn’t explain puberty to your 13-year-old son now growing up without a father figure.

What’s less visible but just as real is the emotional price of migration. There’s the guilt of leaving ageing parents in precarious health, the pain of missing births and funerals, and the slow erosion of intimacy with friends and siblings. Couples stretch their marriages across time zones, relying on WhatsApp calls that feel both immediate and artificial. Children born abroad grow up with hybrid identities, sometimes unable to speak their parents’ language(s) or understand the values they left behind.

The psychological price of migration is huge. Take Emmanuel, a Computer Science graduate from Enugu who arrived in Toronto in late 2023. At first, he thrived — new friends, a buzzing tech hub, crisp winter mornings. Within weeks, though, he began waking at 3 a.m., heart pounding, unable to shake the fear that he was alone in a strange land. Migraines set in, his appetite vanished, and he drifted into a fog of irritability and despair — a textbook case of “Ulysses syndrome,” an immigrant stress reaction marked by anxiety, insomnia, and somatic pains. A 2020 meta-analysis of Nigerian-American immigrants found that higher acculturative stress was strongly linked to poorer mental health outcomes. Emmanuel endured six months of silent struggles before reaching out for therapy, finally realising that the cost of leaving home included the erosion of his well-being.

But the cost of this “success” is staggering. Over 75,000 Nigerian professionals have emigrated between 2019 and 2024. The health sector has been particularly hard hit: the Nigerian Medical Association estimates that more than 50 per cent of registered doctors are practising abroad, widening the patient-doctor gap at home and prompting emergency staffing drives that still fall short. In 2023 alone, over 3,600 nurses were licensed to practice in the United Kingdom.

Nigeria, as a state, teeters between the benefits and burdens of this migration wave. On the one hand, remittances boost foreign reserves, provide fiscal stability, and enhance the purchasing power of recipient households. Diaspora investments are also reshaping the tech ecosystem. Diaspora entrepreneurs in London and Toronto have launched some of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech startups. Additionally, Nigeria ranks second only to India in terms of long-term migrants to the UK, with approximately 120,000 Nigerians relocating there as of June 2024. Nigerian-led startups in the UK, Canada, and the US are channelling capital, ideas, and tools back home, with Lagos fast becoming a West African tech hub, despite its infrastructural challenges. Culturally, the country is undergoing a kind of global flowering — Afrobeat now dominates international music charts, Nollywood films are streaming on Netflix, and Nigerian chefs are redefining fine dining in New York, Toronto, and Berlin.

But the cost of this “success” is staggering. Over 75,000 Nigerian professionals have emigrated between 2019 and 2024. The health sector has been particularly hard hit: the Nigerian Medical Association estimates that more than 50 per cent of registered doctors are practising abroad, widening the patient-doctor gap at home and prompting emergency staffing drives that still fall short. In 2023 alone, over 3,600 nurses were licensed to practice in the United Kingdom. University classrooms, once bustling with brilliant lecturers, now depend on visiting professors and part-time faculty. Hospitals are forced to recruit unqualified assistants to fill gaps. In the public sector, civil service talent is drying up, with young officers resigning en masse. The result is a talent vacuum that weakens national institutions just when they are most needed.

Government responses have been largely reactive and uncoordinated. Proposals to bond medical graduates to public service contracts for five to ten years have sparked outrage, especially among young professionals who argue that the state has no moral authority to restrict their freedom after failing to provide basic infrastructure, job security, or personal safety. Some state governments have introduced scholarship retention schemes and returnee investment incentives, but these remain too few, poorly implemented, or overshadowed by more attractive foreign offers. Policy inertia persists because Japa isn’t just a problem of economics — it is a verdict on governance. People are not leaving because they lack patriotism; they are leaving because patriotism no longer feeds them.

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And while the Nigerian government tries to cope, Western host countries also wrestle with their own dilemmas. Nigerian migrants now comprise a significant portion of new arrivals in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. In Canada’s 2024 immigration data, Nigerians ranked among the top five sources of skilled workers. Western host nations find themselves in a precarious balancing act. Nigerian nurses and engineers fill critical shortages, bolstering public coffers through taxes and consumer spending. In the UK, they are heavily represented in the National Health Service and private care homes. These workers are praised for their diligence, education, and resilience.

However, the systems receiving them are often ill-prepared to integrate them. Many face bureaucratic roadblocks, including slow credential recognition and expensive licensing exams, which delay their full participation in the workforce. Years of retraining blunt the momentum of eager professionals, and discrimination can turn anticipation into anxiety. Others face subtle racism, wage disparities, and cultural isolation. Britain’s new Code of Practice for ethical health-worker recruitment aims to ensure that “poaching” talent doesn’t hollow out Nigeria’s fragile health system, yet the debate over “brain drain” ethics continues amid NHS staffing crises.

Perhaps, over time, japa will evolve from a flight to a return, as seen in India. Possibly, one day, Aisha will bring her NHS experience back to Kaduna to build a clinic of her own, and Emmanuel will reopen his old bedroom as a co-working space for local tech startups. Perhaps Nigeria will invest in a future that gives people a reason to stay, not just a means to leave. Until then, the suitcase remains half-packed, the visa application opens on the browser, and the heart is torn in two — between what is and what should have been.

Despite these challenges, the Nigerian presence abroad is growing stronger and more confident. Nigerian culture is reshaping Western norms — Afrobeat now pulses through Glastonbury stages; jollof rice trucks line the streets of London; Yoruba phrases are sneaking into British slang; and the children of migrants are rising to prominence in politics, academia, and the arts. In 2025, the UK’s political landscape saw its first major-party leadership candidate of Nigerian descent. In America, Nigerian-American students consistently excel academically, and Nigerian churches and businesses have transformed entire neighbourhoods. These are not signs of assimilation — they are signs of expansion, the Nigerian identity flowering beyond borders.

Yet, the question remains: What happens to the country they left behind? Who teaches in the schools from which they once graduated? Who rebuilds the hospitals where they were trained? Who ensures that power stays on long enough to power a mother’s air conditioner? Who stays to fix the power grid, redesign the curriculum, enforce the laws, and tell the next generation that hope is still possible at home?

Japa is not a simple story of brain drain or economic migration. It is a reckoning. It is a mirror held up to a nation that has failed too many of its brightest and bravest. But it is also a thread — an invisible umbilical cord — that connects the streets of Lagos to the clinics of Manchester, the classrooms of Toronto, and the startups of Berlin. And through that thread flows not just money but longing, memory, identity, and love. Japa is not unequivocal gain. It is a human response to systemic failures — economic, social, and political — and to the boundless courage of individuals chasing the promise of a better life. Its actual impact is braided across continents: in the phone calls between a migrant nurse and her mother, in the budget sheets of national ministries, and the urban rhythms of Toronto’s Chinatown.

Perhaps, over time, japa will evolve from a flight to a return, as seen in India. Possibly, one day, Aisha will bring her NHS experience back to Kaduna to build a clinic of her own, and Emmanuel will reopen his old bedroom as a co-working space for local tech startups. Perhaps Nigeria will invest in a future that gives people a reason to stay, not just a means to leave. Until then, the suitcase remains half-packed, the visa application opens on the browser, and the heart is torn in two — between what is and what should have been.

Dakuku Peterside, a public sector turnaround expert, public policy analyst and leadership coach, is the author of the forthcoming book, “Leading in a Storm”, a book on crisis leadership.