UcheChukwu Agbo: What Is the Nigerian Dream Beyond Relocating Abroad?

I am writing this from Dallas, which should probably disqualify me from writing it at all.

Last December, I sat at a send-off in Abakaliki. Jollof, a cooler of malt, an aunty crying in a way that was about ninety per cent joy. The pastor prayed for journey mercies. In the middle of it, I realised that if you removed every mention of Canada and put heaven in its place, nobody would have noticed. It was a funeral. A very happy funeral. We were burying a young man into a better life.

We call it japa. Nigerians have always given funny names to funerals.

Every airport photograph in this country is a celebration and an indictment at the same time. Every “congratulations bro” in the comments carries a question underneath it that everybody can hear. When will it be my turn? We have arranged our affairs so that escape looks like achievement, because staying has begun to look like a failure of nerve. We raise the child to love the country, then applaud him for successfully leaving it.

The dream has a foreign address now. It wears a winter jacket. Ask a young Nigerian where he sees himself in five years, and he will answer you with geography. Canada is a career plan. Britain is a prayer point. America is the answer to a question nobody wants to put to Nigeria directly.

None of this is hatred of home. Nobody hates the soil where his father is buried, or the language his mother used the first time she called him precious. What the young resent is smaller and more daily than hatred. It is the humiliation of belonging to a country that does not behave as though they belong to it. It is the bereavement of giving to a country that demands more than it gives.

Consider what citizenship costs in Nigeria. You buy your own light. You sink your own borehole. You settle the vigilante at the end of…