Japada is possible for Nigerian Youths
The buzzword on the lips of most Nigerians young and old – The Yoruba word for permanently escaping from a bad situation.
Who wouldn’t want to leave Nigeria for good? There is a massive youth unemployment – KPMG put it about 41% excluding under unemployment which may be more than 50%, security challenges – kidnapping, ritual killings, armed robbery, mind-boggling corruption running into billions of dollars being brazenly embezzled amongst a plethora of societal ills and challenges.
Is the grass really greener on the other side? Most youths spend a fortune running into millions of naira just to japa and to get to their destinations and discover that the organized system didn’t really have any plans for them. They have to work like slaves or horses in most cases to be able to fit in; even at that there is still a glass ceiling and a nauseating sort of affirmative action where they subtly tell you via body language and anti-immigration policies that you are merely being tolerated in their system.
India in the 1980’s with visionary leadership and a high investment in STEM education made their country the global hub for IT outsourcing. Today, the CEO’s of major IT companies in the world including Microsoft – Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai – CEO, Alphabet – the holding company of Google amongst many others are of Indian descent. It is no news that most call centres in the West outsourced their call care representatives to the Asian country that is now the world’s most populous.
Nigeria is ripe to follow this lead. It is home to five Unicorns, there was the acquisition of Paystack by American company Stripe for a whopping $200,000,000 in 2020 after barely five years in business. Internet penetration is over 100 million people. The literacy level has improved greatly with lots of Ed Techs dotting the landscape. There are also incubation hubs most notably CC Hub in Yaba which is fondly referred to as the Silicon Valley of Nigeria.
Remote work made popular by the pandemic is now the future of work. Why can’t the government create a public policy to ensure that Nigerian youths easily get remote jobs for which they will be paid in foreign currencies and they could even have a reliable database of these workers and possibly tax them so that it is a win-win situation?
After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion orchestrated by the then John Kennedy Led Administration which sought to topple the government of Fidel Castro, the US slammed an embargo on sugar, which was Cuba’s main export. Fidel Castro looked inwards and ensured that education was free at all levels. He then focused on the training of and exportation of the services of their medical doctors to foreign countries. The government took a percentage of the earnings of the doctors and this surpassed the previous earnings from sugar.
As the global economy is shifting away from fossil fuels into a knowledge-driven economy, this model could help in no minuscule measure to diversify the volatile mono-economy.
It would stem the tide of japa which invariably leads to massive brain drain and japada which will see a mass return of economic exiles and the prevention of those who would have escaped would be the order of the day.
Do we have a thinking government?
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