Japa, or to flee or to run: Nigerian youth and the urgency of departure

Jing Jing Liu

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Liu, Jing Jing. 2023. Japa, or to flee or to run: Nigerian youth and the urgency of departure. MoLab Inventory of Mobilities and Socioeconomic Changes. Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’. Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.48509/MoLab.6432

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‘Japa’,[1] a Yoruba term for ‘to run’ or ‘to flee’, has become synonymous with the idea of leaving Nigeria. Since seizing the popular imagination in 2020, it has been typically used to describe the desperation of middle-class youth to leave the country.[2] With japa, it is fleeing which is important – the destination is secondary. This use of the term traces back to Naira Marley’s 2018 song of the same name.[3] Although Marley sings about running from the police, and not about migration per se (the video suggests he is in the UK or Europe), the point is clear: anywhere will do, he just has to get away, and quickly. As Marley sings in the chorus: japa to Canada, America, or Africa.

When I asked Michael, a journalist in his 20s who works in Lagos, why japa had come to be the term for international migration, he corrected me, insisting that “japa doesn’t mean to migrate; it means to run for your life.” Pressed for clarification, Michael wryly explained that although “it [has long been] the Nigerian dream to leave Nigeria,” a different feeling had taken hold today: “There wasn’t the desperation…when I was growing up. People around me, they speak about leaving, [but] it wasn’t that they need to run, that my life is in danger, shit I need to leave.” Today, desperation is at the heart of talk about migration. As Aisha, a student in her 20s in Ibadan further clarified: “[Japa] means I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore. I am running away. I can’t cope.”

How did migration become so urgent? Casting migration as an act of ‘fleeing’ implies its necessity for survival. Why has this imagery, more readily associated with refugees or asylum seekers facing physical danger, been adopted by the Nigerian middle class to express their desires to leave? Why are they no longer capable of coping? What dangers are they running from? Speaking with Nigerian youth who have left or are planning to leave the country as education migrants, this entry traces the contours of the urgency that animates japa today.

Education as a way out

The country’s public universities have been hit by nine extended strikes in the past 13 years.[4] Indeed, the sense of urgency has been compounded by such delays. For these former and current students, japa is deemed the only means of recouping time stolen, or avoiding time being wasted in the future. Aisha, who was in the sixth year of a four-year degree, was more infuriated and demoralised than excited about resuming studies in November of 2022 after an eight-month strike at the University of Ibadan.[5] She had already been affected by a nine-month strike in 2020 and believed that another strike was inevitable. The delays had already been torturous – and for her, and others like her, they harden the resolve to leave. In this context, she envied the first-year students whose parents had pulled them out of her university and sent them to a private university in Nigeria or to study abroad.

The strikes, and their accompanying interruptions, also reveal rifts and disjunctures in the broadly self-identified category of the middle class and the kinds of education a family can afford, or at least consider for their children. Moreover, who becomes delayed and who can slip through the series of disruptions unscathed intensifies the arbitrariness of timing. Aisha reflected on the emotional toll of her situation: “The number of times I get really depressed because I see my mates in private school, or abroad, and they are done. And I am still stuck here.” Seeing further labour action as likely, Aisha was planning to japa. “I cannot do graduate school in Nigeria. A master’s program in Nigeria should just be one or one and a half years. I have a close friend and he is in his second or third year of his masters. You are supposed to be done with this long ago.”

While graduate school was the primary motivator for Aisha to japa, she confessed that the pursuit of education was not usually the end goal for other youth planning to leave: “Many think the best way out is academia, even if they don’t have passion for it.” David, an engineer in his 30s who studied and who works in the UK, outlined the pragmatics of his japa journey: “It wasn’t about getting into an ivy or a top five university. I just wanted to leave the country and get a job. It was more of a route to leave the country – look forward and never backward.” David’s case further illustrates how education is more than a means of short-term escape – it also becomes a way to find employment abroad. This route is especially attractive, as unemployment rates among new graduates in Nigeria are continually reaching new heights.[6]

Nigerians typically view education as the ‘easiest’ path to migration. And in recent years, the number of Nigerian students enrolled in universities abroad has skyrocketed. Although they charge the highest university fees, the UK, Canada and the US are widely considered the top-tier destinations. The UK government reported that the number of Nigerians granted study visas has increased by over 500 percent in the past two years.[7] Today, the post-Brexit labour market trains to fill skilled and low-skilled positions and has resorted to skimming from the talent pools of its former colonies like Nigeria, India and Pakistan.[8]

Other Nigerians who japa opt for alternatives in what they consider to be second-tier, non-English-speaking countries like Germany, Finland and Norway. In those countries, fees are lower, and international students are permitted to work part time. Still others move to other destinations like China and Northern Cyprus,[9] which are easier to access in terms of visa and university entry requirements, but where international students are not legally entitled to work. Any work undertaken is strictly paid under-the-table. These second-tier countries act as stepping-stones to the top-tier. What emerges then is a ‘tier-itorialisation’ of geopolitical entities, whereby trajectories of global mobility in turn naturalise a particular valuation and partitioning of the world.

#EndSARS and politics of mobilisation

The government’s growing disregard for youth aspirations for education has been further compounded by its use of violence. While leaving the country had long been a simmering desire amongst youth, the urgency to do so has become increasingly acute in recent years. A decade of perceived political decline reached its nadir with the shock of the Lekki massacre on 20 October 2020. In Lekki, Nigerian Army officers opened fire on unarmed civilian protestors, most of whom were youth. Across the country, protests erupted to denounce the brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian Police Force founded in 1992 and charged with combating a spate of armed robberies and kidnappings. Since then, the unit had degenerated into an instrument for extrajudicial violence. For many youth, the Lekki massacre laid bare the unbearableness of being in Nigeria. Powered by social media, and especially Twitter, the #EndSARS protests signified a political flash point that galvanised the festering personal discontent of the past decade.

For some, the massacre was a tipping point. As Chioma, a woman in her 30s currently preparing her documents to japa, fumed, “We saw the leadership for what it is.”[10] Another woman, who has since moved to Belgium, recounted her trauma, “I suddenly couldn’t stand the state. Every day I woke up, I wanted to scream. It was like being in Nigeria was making my skin crawl.”[11] The protests appeared to signal something else significant: that individual dissatisfaction with life in Nigeria was insufficient to end one’s tolerance – that is, the ability ‘to cope’. Before the massacre, there was no shortage of complaints about life in Nigeria.[12] These complaints were frequently coupled with personal stories of unfulfilled dreams of leaving, of failed university applications, of rejected visa applications. Undeniably, a readiness to leave lay dormant in the psychic recess and physical constitution of a Nigerian middle-class subjectivity.[13] This ‘readiness’ was to be found as a stubborn discomfort, as something latent, something just under the skin. Until, of course, it found expression and made the “skin crawl.” Not necessarily causal but certainly contextual, it was in the aftermath of #EndSARS and the urgency of japa that loose desires were marshalled, half-hearted inquiries revived, dusty applications dug-out, and vague plans became concrete attempts to flee. “A lot of people were remaking plans after 2020,” Chioma said, reflecting on the friends who had left, “most youth lost faith.”

It is worth reiterating that migration has always been a part of the Nigerian imaginary – from rural to urban journeys, travel along regional trade networks, and education migration to the colonial metropole. A dearth of local prospects and a desire for individual prosperity motivated these trajectories. Today, these reasons merge with a palpable sense of national despair, something which is not new either. In 1984, the fictitious television character “Andrew” was “derided as being unpatriotic” for yearning to leave Nigeria, as he was “tired of no water, no light and no good roads”.[14] Contrast this evaluation with citizens departing today; they are no longer derided for leaving, but rather, eminent Nigerian figures plead for them to remain.[15]

Economic discontent

Faith then has not solely been eroded by what the government has done, but also by what it has not done – it has not salvaged the economy, has not reined in inflation (between eight and 17 percent per year since 2010), has not tempered the rising cost of living, has not quelled panic over the fact that a 9-5 salary is no longer enough to take care of oneself and one’s extended family.[16] The sense of urgency surges when one’s Nigerian income becomes inadequate to live in Nigeria – not for lack of effort, but for lack of effect. Japa stresses the inability to survive in an environment in which one’s own personal efforts are constantly undermined by political and economic effects. This urgency has, no doubt, been hastened by the alarming depreciation of the currency – the naira. In December 2015, the naira was trading at N230/1USD on the parallel market, where most people are effectively forced to convert currency.[17] By October 2022, it was trading at N800/1USD – a 248 per cent depreciation in value in seven years.[18] The situation has worsened further over the past two years, with new lows being reached every few months. In this context, the affective potency of this ‘unprecedented’ has become symbol of the country’s decline. Meanwhile, on the official market which few can access, the naira traded at N443/$1 in October 2022, further underscoring a quantitative incongruence that magnifies the qualitative disparity in Nigeria itself.[19]

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.