Nonetheless, cynics, especially medical practitioners, say the worst is yet to come.
The increasing wave of emigration of Nigerians to other parts of the world provoked more public attention penultimate Thursday with the official revelation that Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) issued a total of 1,899,683 passports in 2022, the highest in a single year, and in the last seven years. The reason for the demand for passports is not difficult to fathom. The situation in situ is dire for a broad spectrum of professionals, artisans, and even those without any skills, hence the desperation to search for opportunities in other climes for survival.
Admittedly, the craving of professionals to ply their trades abroad is not new. The urge birthed the "brain drain" syndrome in academia in the 1980s. Medical doctors, nurses and students followed suit; but the exodus of those years cannot be compared to the current scale. The situation has made the phenomenon called "Japa" - in Yoruba language, which means to run, or escape - as comic an issue, as it has become a national concern.
While Nigerian universities have almost been denuded of their best brains, the health sector is being haemorrhaged by the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia and others with their perennial demand for our medical workforce - consultants, general medical practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, radiologists and other paramedics - to make up for their human resource shortages. Rising global health challenges, Brexit-induced labour migrations and early retirements, have created these opportunities. The effect of this is becoming evident. The patient-to-doctor ratio in Nigeria is now 3,500 to 1, as against the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 600 to 1. This does not give room for efficiency.
Nonetheless, cynics, especially medical practitioners, say the worst is yet to come. In a plaintive account of his case, Dr Kunle Ibisola, an erstwhile junior doctor at University College Ibadan (UCH), now working with Scotland National Health Service, told the BBC recently that he never planned to leave the country but existential realities constituted the final push factors. He said, "The main reason I left is salary, and the cost of living. Some doctors didn't get paid for six to nine months, because there was an issue with the federal payment system. Some senior colleagues couldn't afford to drive to work or send their children to school. That was an eye-opener for a lot of people."
There are thousands of Ibisolas out there who can no longer bear the ossified and choking socio-economic conditions in Nigeria. Last November, the Chief Medical Director of the University College Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan, Professor Abiodun Otegbayo, disclosed that 600 doctors resigned in one year. At least 15 of such high calibre manpower resign weekly, he stressed. About 10,296 Nigerian doctors are practising in the UK alone, says the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA). With emigration as the dream of most doctors, including those still in training, the country is in for a more corrosive hit. The only way to buck the trend is for the authorities to address challenges of poor remuneration, lack of modern facilities to work with, insecurity and underemployment that drive the mass exit.
As the environment is unfriendly to medical personnel, so it is for other professionals. A Nollywood actor, Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, who relocated to the US two years ago, has seen the gulf between her new abode and here - a difference in how societies are organised, with opportunities and social amenities available for career advancement and a better life, as against the disorder and dysfunction she left behind. She thundered: "I'm deeply frustrated at the depth and volume of the needless suffering Nigerians go through... why (is it that) people must suffer to get anything done?"
Her concerns about the lot of country folks, perhaps, speak to the present challenge of nationwide fuel scarcity. President Muhammadu Buhari, who doubles as the minister of Petroleum Resources, will have a lot of explanations to make after leaving office in May, regarding why for eight years Nigeria could not refine petroleum products but relied solely on importation. The process of importing fuel has been mired in subsidy controversies and imponderable corruption for so long. Leadership is all about problem-solving. As a test, Buhari has flunked it.
Today, fuel is being sold for N600 per litre in some parts of the country, despite being subsidised. There is no cash in banks for people to withdraw in the wake of the redesign of the naira; electricity supply has totally collapsed, stifling daily business activities and the real sector in the process. The youth unemployment rate is stratospheric; inflation is up to 21.34%; kidnapping and the endless killings of citizens by non-state actors go on, unsuccessfully challenged by the Nigerian state. This Hobbesian monstrosity evokes a crucial alarm: do human lives matter in Nigeria?
For eight months, universities went on strike and are threatening to return to the trenches as the challenges of underfunding and proper remuneration of lecturers remain unresolved. Faith in the system has irretrievably been lost, thus driving the surge in the number of Nigerians studying abroad or aspiring to. Erudera, a higher education platform, revealed in 2021 that Nigeria's 21,305 students' population in the UK ranked it the third non-EU country with the most students there. It is the same story in the US and in other jurisdictions. Nigerian undergraduates are now among the top three international student populations in several Canadian universities.
With effect from the 1st of February, many Nigerian teachers in Mathematics, Sciences, and French will take with both hands the opportunity the UK government has provided for teachers in nine countries, which include Singapore, Ghana, India, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Ukraine and Hong Kong, to apply for qualified teacher status through the Teaching Regulatory Agency, to make up for deficits in their own system. They will teach pupils between 11 and 18 years.
This is bad news for a country already gnawed by a shortage of teachers. A national personnel audit by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) in 2020, revealed a huge deficit of 277,537 teachers in the basic education sector - from the primary to junior secondary levels. Sadly, Nigeria has reduced its teachers to a gallery of disillusioned and most poorly paid professionals. This is not how to treat the mother of all professions. Some Nigerian states owe teachers between four and 18 months of salaries, as the Secretary-General of Nigeria Union of Teachers, Dr Mike Ike Ene, said during the 2022 World Teachers Day. This calls for national introspection.
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Undoubtedly, Nigeria's environment is hostile to its people because of government's actions and inertia. With the lack of jobs and absence of an enabling environment for self-help, many youths have embraced the perilous or kamikaze route of travelling across the Sahara Desert through Niger Republic and Libya to reach Italy and other European destinations to fight for their existence. Many have died in the process, just as others have been rescued by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and deported back home.
A country that pays a senior professor N427,000 per month, which budgeted N64 billion for erecting the Abuja City gate in 2013 and gave N1billion each to newly established universities as take-off grants, can hardly inspire hope or optimism for a better tomorrow. A Nigerian based in Germany, Oguchi Unachukwu, was shot dead at a military checkpoint at Imo State airport in June 2021 on his way to catch his flight back to Germany. Scores of Nigerians like Unachukwu, who visited their families, have met their untimely deaths in similar circumstances.
With brazen treasury looting, a serving lawmaker owning 40 properties acquired through unclear sources and public office holders never held to account for numerous acts of malfeasance against the state and hence fellow citizens, therefore signalling a broken society, many Nigerians now find succour in japa. Perhaps, and quite unfortunately, it is instructive that Kenya's anti-corruption campaigner, Professor PLO Lumumba's inimitable quote that, "In Japan a corrupt person kills himself. In China, they will kill him. In Europe they will jail him. In Africa, he will present himself for election," finds full flowering here.
