Japa is Not Betrayal, It is a Verdict: And Nigeria, You Are the One on Trial

My Thoughts Have No Filter By Abdul’Azeez Bello

WhatsApp [0805 113 0075] | omobolajibello@gmail.com

Before You Call Them Traitors, Tell Me What You Built for Them to Stay For

Every time Nigerians announce they are leaving, the same tired theatre plays out on social media.

Half the comments say congratulations. Half say shame on you. And somewhere in between, someone dusts off that one word they love to throw like a stone: Betrayal.

As if the young nurse who spent five years in a Nigerian training institution, worked double shifts in a public hospital that runs out of gloves on a Tuesday, and earns a salary that cannot cover a month’s rent in Lagos has somehow failed the nation by deciding she wants to eat properly and sleep safely.

As if the engineer who graduated with a first class and spent two years sending job applications into a void so deep it had its own ecosystem has betrayed something sacred by accepting an offer from a Canadian firm that actually called back.

Let me say this once, slowly, for the people in the back.

Japa is not betrayal. Japa is a verdict. And Nigeria, you are the one sitting in the dock.

The Numbers Are Not Lying. Only the Government Is.

Let us talk about what is actually happening because the facts are worse than the feelings.

About 16,000 Nigerian nurses migrated to the UK in 2025 alone, pushing the total number of departures to around 57,000 over the past five years. Fifty seven thousand nurses. In five years. From one country. To one destination. And that is only the UK.

Nigeria now has just 2.9 doctors per 10,000 people, a fraction of the World Health Organization’s recommended 17 per 10,000. Data from the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria showed that there are only 6,137 specialists in Nigeria, out of which only 3,475 work across hospitals, while 1,105 left the country between 2021 and 2025.

Read that again. Nigeria has 3,475 specialists for over 220 million people. The entire specialist doctor population of this country could fit inside a mid-size Nigerian stadium with seats to spare. And they are still leaving.

According to Afrobarometer, 56 percent of Nigerians have considered leaving the country, representing a 20 percentage point increase from 36 percent in 2017.

This Is What Japa Sounds Like on the Street.

I need to pull this off the data page and put it back in the kitchen where it actually lives.

Japa is not a trend. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not young Nigerians who want to eat jollof rice with a foreign accent and post snow pictures in December.

Japa is a father in Enugu telling his daughter that if the UK visa comes through she should take it and not look back. It is a mother in Kano quietly selling gold to raise the processing fees because she knows what staying has cost her own generation. It is a twenty eight year old doctor in Ibadan calculating on a piece of paper whether his monthly salary can cover fuel, food and rent at the same time. The answer is no. It has not been yes in years.

Faced with rising living costs, limited job opportunities and economic uncertainty at home, and even insecurity, thousands of Nigerian professionals are increasingly looking abroad for better paying jobs, career progression and improved quality of life.

That is not ambition without patriotism. That is a rational human being doing basic mathematics in a country where the numbers have stopped adding up.

Meanwhile Ten Countries Are Actively Recruiting Your People and You Are Busy Writing Memos

Here is the part that should keep every Nigerian government official awake at night. It does not appear to.

Using official government immigration portals, embassy recruitment notices and national visa programmes published during the 2026 recruitment cycle, ten countries are  providing some of the strongest employment pathways for skilled Nigerian workers. Ten countries. With official programmes. Specifically designed to attract Nigerian professionals.

Germany wants your engineers. Canada wants your nurses. Australia wants your tech workers. The UK has essentially built an entire NHS recruitment pipeline into Nigerian teaching hospitals.

And what is Nigeria’s response to this international competition for its own citizens? A memo. A committee. A speech at a conference about the importance of retaining talent. And occasionally, a threat to withhold licences from professionals who dare to leave.

That is like a husband who never comes home, never pays bills, never fixes anything in the house, and then threatens to padlock the front door when his wife says she is leaving. The audacity does not even have a name at this point.

Nigeria Trains Them. The World Employs Them. And We Call the World Smart.

Let me make this embarrassingly simple.

Nigeria invests years and significant public resources training doctors, nurses, engineers and teachers. Nigeria then fails spectacularly to create conditions where those professionals can work with dignity, be paid fairly and access the basic tools their jobs require. Another country then swoops in, offers competitive salaries, functional systems and a predictable future, and those same professionals leave.

Every Nigerian engineer working in Silicon Valley is one less engineer building Nigeria’s crumbling infrastructure. Every doctor in London is one less hand in Nigeria’s overstretched hospitals. Every tech whiz in Berlin is one less innovator fuelling Nigeria’s startup ecosystem. The irony is that Nigerians are building hospitals, coding systems and designing cities abroad while their homeland languishes in deficits.

We call those receiving countries smart for attracting global talent. We call the Nigerians who respond to that attraction traitors. Someone explain that logic to me because I have been staring at it for years and it still does not make sense.

But What About the Remittances? Oya Come and Explain This One Too.

Fair question. I will not dodge it.

Data from the Central Bank of Nigeria showed that diaspora remittances reached 4.22 billion dollars between January and October 2024 through official channels alone. And projections suggest that figure could rise significantly through 2025 as the exodus continues.

The nurse in Manchester is sending money home every month. The engineer in Toronto is paying his younger siblings’ school fees from abroad. The software developer in Berlin is funding a family business in Enugu. These so called traitors are quietly running a parallel economy that is keeping millions of Nigerian households from complete collapse.

But remittances do not replace lost expertise. Dollars, pounds and euros sent home cannot substitute for doctors, engineers, academics and innovators who never left in the first place. The government celebrates remittance figures like they are an achievement. They are not an achievement. They are a confession.

The Government’s Big Idea Was to Lock the Door

When the scale of the exodus became impossible to ignore, Nigeria’s response was creative. By which I mean deeply, impressively wrong.

The proposal to require doctors to practise in Nigeria for five years before receiving a licence to work abroad came and went in a wave of national ridicule. The attempt to withhold nurses licences unless they stayed home for two years was met with the contempt it deserved.

Because here is what those policies communicated to every young professional still considering their options: we know this system is broken and instead of fixing it we would prefer to trap you inside it.

You do not retain talent by building walls. You retain talent by building a country worth staying in. Every government that has not understood that basic truth has simply accelerated the very exodus it claims to be trying to stop.

The Way Forward

Japa does not have to be permanent. But ending it starts with honesty.

Pay professionals what their work is actually worth.

Health inflation in Nigeria rose to 28.62 percent in February 2026. Healthcare workers are watching their real wages shrink in real time while the cost of living rises around them. Competitive pay is not a luxury. It is the minimum required to compete with countries that are actively recruiting your people with official government programmes.

Fix the environment, not just the salary.

Poor remuneration, inadequate infrastructure and supplies, limited opportunities for career growth and rising insecurity including reports of health workers being abducted from their homes are the push factors driving the exodus. Fix the push factors. The pull factors abroad will always exist. Your job is to make staying a real and competitive option.

Stop threatening professionals and start incentivising them.

Housing support, research grants, career development pathways, tax relief for professionals in critical sectors. Make staying a genuine option not just a sacrifice dressed up as patriotism and guilt tripped into young people who owe this country nothing it has not already taken from them.

Build structured diaspora partnerships.

A growing number of digital migrants, professionals who work remotely for international clients while remaining in Nigeria, are challenging the traditional narrative of talent loss. Nigeria must invest in the infrastructure, internet access, payment systems and legal frameworks that allow Nigerians to earn globally without leaving locally. This is a real opportunity that is currently being wasted.

Build a country worth coming back to.

The ultimate goal is not to stop people from leaving. It is to create a Nigeria so functional, so fair and so full of real opportunity that the choice to stay is not a sacrifice. That Nigeria is possible. What has always been missing is not money, not expertise and not even the technology. What has been missing is the will to choose the citizen over the contract.

The Verdict

Japa is not betrayal. Let me say it one final time for the people still confused.

The young doctor boarding a flight to Edinburgh did not fail Nigeria. Nigeria failed him first. The nurse clutching her UK visa at Murtala Muhammed Airport is not a traitor. She is a human being who decided her dignity worth more than her suffering.

From primary healthcare centres to teaching hospitals, doctors, nurses and specialists are leaving in droves. And the people responsible for creating the conditions where leaving became the most rational choice available are still in their offices, still collecting their allowances and still giving speeches about national unity and the need for sacrifice.

The accused in this story is not the one who left. The accused is the system that made leaving feel like relief.

Fix the country. Earn the return.

Until then, do not dare call it betrayal.

Abdul’Azeez Bello is just a Nigerian who decided to write what he sees. Through My Thoughts Have No Filter, he says out loud what many think but never get to say. No big grammar. No hidden agenda. Just plain truth.