A 40-Year-Old Japa Story

Desperate to ebb the outflow of Nigeria’s best and brightest, the head of state, General Muhammadu Buhari launched a PR campaign urging citizens to stay back. Perhaps the most memorable element of the campaign was a TV commercial in which Andrew, played by a young Enebeli Elebuwa, expressed his disgruntlement at the state of the country and resolved to leave. ‘Men, I’m checking out. No good roads, no light, no water. Men, you can’t even get a bottle of soft drink!’ Andrew lamented in inchoate Ebonics at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport.

He was then grabbed by the hand by someone in the crowd and encouraged not to ‘check out’, because the hardships Nigeria faced would ‘soon be a thing of the past’. And just like that, Andrew let go of his pessimism and joined the crowd of believers in Nigeria’s soon-coming renewed greatness.

The following year, singer, Veno Marioghae, released a song, titled ‘Nigeria Go Survive’, that built on the commercial’s message. She passionately sang, ‘Andrew no check out. Stay and build your country…If Andrew do him work o and me I do my own o, Nigeria go survive. If our leaders do dem best o, Andrew go stay to help o, Nigeria go survive.’ The groovy disco song graced dancefloors and radio stations nationwide, whilst still driving home its salient points. Though Marioghae released the song independently, she received major patronage from the government for years as her song supplemented their campaign.

Nonetheless, it is hard to determine if the campaign had any real impact beyond sensationalism and turning Elebuwa (now late) and Marioghae into household names. By 1990, there were 45,747 Nigerian immigrants in the US alone and thousands more spread across the UK and Canada. These figures may seem insignificant considering that at the time, Nigeria’s population was about 100 million; however, when set against the much smaller labour force population of about 32 million, they were certainly cause for alarm.

Today, four decades later, there is a new generation of Andrews who are ‘checking out’ more than ever but have found a more succinct term for it: ‘Japa’, which means ‘flee’ in Yoruba. Between June 2022 and June 2023 alone, 141,000 Nigerians migrated to the UK, making Nigeria the second non-EU country—after India—with the largest immigration flow to the UK. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of ‘worker’ visas issued to Nigerians quintupled, shooting up from 1,933 to 9,944. In the first half of 2023 alone, 10,180 Nigerians became permanent residents of Canada and Nigerians earned the title of the fastest-growing international student population.

Worse still, most of those who remain in Nigeria are already planning to leave. A 2022 survey by the African Polling Institute revealed that 69 per cent of Nigerians would relocate if given the chance, compared to only 39 per cent in 2019. Additionally, a 2023 survey by Nigerian fintech company, PiggyVest, revealed that ‘relocating to a different country’ was the third highest savings goal for Nigerians and highest savings goal for Nigerians in the Gen Z demographic.

Not too long before Andrew felt the need to check out, Nigeria was a sort of economic utopia in West Africa. Nigeria had struck liquid gold in 1958 but it wasn’t until 1970—after a devastating 30-month civil war—that the country experienced an oil boom. By 1976, the ‘Giant of Africa’ had become the world’s seventh largest oil producer and attained an unprecedented level of prosperity—albeit mostly enjoyed by the country’s elite. During this time, Nigeria enjoyed a reverse brain drain, whereby many of those who had emigrated in previous years returned and brought with them their wealth of skills.

Additionally, nationals of West African states such as Gambia, Sierra Leone and (especially) Ghana flocked to Nigeria to escape the acute economic hardships in their own countries. It is almost inconceivable that the Nigeria of the 70s was the Promised Land to West African migrants—what the trio of the US, the UK and Canada represent to Nigerians now—but that was indeed the case. Nigerian recruiters would journey to Ghana to bring people over to fill vacancies in the construction and service industries. At the time, many Nigerians were unwilling to do such work, but Ghanaians leapt at the opportunity as it afforded them the ability to earn a good living and even make enough money to remit home. Concurrently, several Ghanaians—as well as Indians—occupied teaching positions in Nigerian public secondary schools and universities, and were paid handsomely.

By 1982, however, the oil boom years had given way to a slump that stripped Nigeria of its utopian status. Oil prices plummeted and Nigeria’s economy, which had grown too dependent on oil, was plunged into a crisis; oil export revenues had dropped from $23.4 billion in 1980 to about $10 billion in 1982, and outstanding public debt had risen from $1 billion in 1978 to $12.3 billion in 1982. To worsen matters, the military regime’s profligate spending, ill-conceived policies and gross corruption had depleted the wealth Nigeria acquired during the oil boom era. Nigeria soon became no better than the countries it had rescued migrants from in the previous decade. Leaders began to look for whom to blame and the lot fell on the African migrants, giving rise to xenophobic sentiments. The propaganda being spread was that they—especially the Ghanaians—were to blame for taking jobs away from Nigerians and other economic woes. This led to the infamous ‘Ghana Must Go’ incident of 1983, where the Nigerian government forced about one million Ghanaians to leave Nigeria. (14 years earlier, over 100,000 Nigerians had suffered the same fate in Ghana as a result of the ‘Aliens Compliance Order’ issued by the then–Ghanaian prime minister, Kofi Busia. Thus, proponents of Nigeria’s expulsion order saw it as a way of simply returning the favour.)

At the time, the government had begun to adopt austerity measures aimed at reducing the economy’s internal and external deficits. They made large cuts on investment expenditure, consequently putting an abrupt end to numerous projects, and also reduced current expenditure by a smaller extent. While these measures were successful in achieving their primary aim, they also induced a severe recession. A 1984 report by the Washington Post noted:

In June 1986, General Ibrahim Babangida, who had succeeded Buhari as head of state the previous year, decided to launch a Structural Adjustment Program me (SAP) that was supposed to improve upon the former austerity measures by allowing more wiggle room, i.e., adjustments. The SAP was designed to tackle fiscal imbalances, increase local production capacity, and reduce dependence on oil exports and consumer and producer goods imports, amongst other things. One of the main strategic elements of the SAP was a Second-tier Foreign Exchange Market which featured rather interesting regular forex auctions.

The SAP was not unique to Nigeria as it was mandated by the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) in order to secure loans or lower interest rates on existing loans. For Nigeria, the benefits of the SAP were a stand-by arrangement of $830 million from the IMF and a Trade Policy and Export Development Loan of $452 million from the World Bank. The institutions would later come under fire for the accompanying socioeconomic problems the programmes often brought to the developing countries that adopted them.