‘Japaring’ from Nigeria (or anywhere else) is NOT the answer; the ‘CURSE’ is much thicker than ‘simple’ migration
Dr. Alu fumed.
She was consumed with fire and brimstone; her forehead wriggled with layers of frustration, all begging for attention and to be noticed.
She was clearly incensed and made no effort to hide it.
Panting from one end of the office to the next, she looked at the two final-year students who had come to submit a chapter of their final year Long Essay — a condition precedent for the award of an undergraduate degree.
“In your entire class, only two persons contributed to the burial of my father. Only two persons! And, you want me to take a look at your essays? Get out of my office! Go and do the needful!”
She was now almost shouting, incapable of keeping her utter frustration under control; thick perspiration forming from her brow and dripping freely to the floor, even though the split unit air conditioner on the wall read a comfortable 16 degrees.
“Get out!”
The two young ladies who were before her were frightened and traumatized.
Like challenged ducks, they scurried away and out of the office as they murmured their ‘sorry ma’, in the fashion of forced mea culpas.
The next day in class, Dr. Alu spent the entire two hours allotted for the lecture insulting the students and telling them how fantastically stupid they were!
How could they not contribute to the burial of her father when she was teaching them and also doubled as their course advisor?
As she ranted up and down the length and breadth of the classroom, berating the undergraduate lads for not doing the ‘right thing’, the students looked at one another in utter disbelief, wondering when dreams started being collated — and in broad daylight too.
They could not imagine that this was actually happening in one of the most known (and respected) private universities in Nigeria…
“Corporals!” “Sergeants!” Bellowed the Inspector — a pot-bellied man with a thick tummy and a face that screamed cluelessness.
The four men who were addressed stiffened at attention and all chorused.
“Yes sir!”
Inspector Okafor started the drill.
“Stop every vehicle coming this way. Make sure they ‘drop’.
“Yes sir!”
The subordinates, without much thought or deference, immediately dragged out logs and old tires, forming a solid, impenetrable barricade on the freeway.
Just as they rounded up, the first vehicle approached.
“Where to?”
That was Sergeant Osaro — now in charge of operations since his immediate boss, the Inspector, was harassing a lass coming back from school, still in her uniform and clearly not sixteen yet.
“We’re coming from Enugu — and are headed to Jos.”
Sergeant Osaro frowned; that was not the response he was expecting and the driver ought to have known.
Leaning carefully like a calculated fool about to do something stupid, he gazed into the vehicle, cursorily glancing at the passengers as if he could tell, by ‘eye gauge’ who was a criminal and who was a responsible citizen.
“‘Park well’ — all of you, come down!” He barked.
The passengers of the eighteen-seater bus — men, women, and children focused their anger squarely on the driver and urged him, in no polite manner to do the ‘needful’.
With the other three uniformed men closing in on the bus and dangerously clutching their government-issued assault riffles, Osita, the driver knew he was out of options; his hand withdrew and clasped that of the sergeant, who was the last to arrive at the newly forming scene.
“Move it!” The sergeant shouted in coded confirmation. “Move it!”
That was how the stop-and-search for that eighteen-seater started and ended that fateful Friday mid-morning….
RC Ngozi looked particularly nonchalant on this Monday morning; chewing gum and looking carelessly fierce, she did not look like anyone in the mood to attend to the public, especially in a government institution.
“So, you’re the one that went to pay for your driver’s license online, abi?”
Stunned, the applicant before her, a young man in his twenties, looked confused, wondering where and what his crimes were.
“Madam, that was the instruction on YOUR website,” He was losing patience and it was beginning to show. “I was supposed to fill out the form online, pay and then, proceed to this office for capture!”
“So, ‘commonsense’ did NOT tell you to first ask from this office if that process was correct?” And, then, as an afterthought, she added, barely audibly, “This one think say na abroad im be.”
“Pardon?”
The reply was sharp and deep: “I wasn’t talking to YOU!”
Exasperated and clearly running out of options, the man made a last attempt at getting a coherent answer; one that actually made sense.
“So, madam, when should I check back for the capture?”
“Next week; the network has been bad all through this week.”
As soon as the man turned his back to leave, RC Ngozi hissed, and added, “You’ll get your capture done online!”
The man, already out of the office, walked slowly away, prepared to check again the coming week, while all the time wondering what it truly took to have a steady, reliable ‘network’.
Terhemen, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter approached the Immigration office for their passports; bitten by the *japa bug, they were interested in seeing what Canada offered.
The cold be damned! They had agreed.
The process for the issuance of a passport was clear — and was spelled out on the official website of The Nigerian Immigration Service.
Terhemen made certain that he adhered to every instruction there, downloading the necessary forms, getting qualified guarantors to fill them for both himself and members of his family, and importantly, paying the money directly to the government purse, online with his debit card.
Right at the gate of the Immigration Authority, Terhemen was accosted by a young, dark, clean-shaven man, who had the pants of Immigration officers on and a similarly designed tee.
Without his top, it was a challenge to place his rank or name.
“How can I help you?” The man asked.
“We’re here to get our passports processed. Where’s the right office?” Terhemen answered, on behalf of his family.
“You’re welcome, sir. Madam, welcome. This way, please. By the way, my name is Officer Chinedu.”
Both men shook hands and Officer Chinedu led the Terhemens to a large office, with plush carpeting, an air conditioner that was running colder than it should with a fat, pot-bellied man, sitting behind a large, mahogany desk — his pot belly too large to be hidden by the desk or the fact that he was sitting down.
“Please sit down,” Officer Chinedu offered. “Do you care for a drink?”
Terhemen was confused — and so was his wife. He did not understand when government officials started being nice when carrying out their jobs.
“No, thank you,” he chorused with his wife, as if on cue.
The fat-bellied man paused from the newspaper he was pretending to be reading for the first time and glanced at them as if to ‘size them up’; he continued reading — or pretending to, after a few seconds.
“The passports will cost you N50,000 per person,” Officer Chinedu started. “However, because you are three in number and look responsible, I’ll do it for you for N45,000 per person.”
Without a word, Terhemen handed over the brown envelope he was carrying to Officer Chinedu, not understanding when the capture of passports had turned into negotiation material.
“What this?” Officer Chinedu was already frowning.
“Those are our documents; we’ve paid for everything online and done the paperwork. Everything you need is in that envelope.”
Without opening the envelope, Officer Chinedu casually put it on the table next to the chair he was sitting on and stood up, moving to the pot-bellied man.
He whispered something to the man’s ear and the two Immigration Officers conversed for a few seconds, with the older, senior-looking officer dismissing the junior-looking Chinedu with a summary wave of the hand.
Officer Chinedu stood up and proceeded to address the Terhemens…
“…I’m sorry, we don’t have passport booklets at the moment. I’m so sorry.”
“When do we check back?” Terhemen asked, eager to know when ‘the issue’ might be resolved.
“No idea. Check back in six months or check the next command, outside the state.” He was already on the way out to the gate where the Terhemens met him when they called in, initially.
As Terhemen cranked his trusty ’06 Toyota Corolla and the old 1ZZ motor roared to life, he looked at his wife and said, with calm.
“Call me a bastard if I ever come back to this country after I leave!”
His wife looked out of the window and said nothing…she knew her man; she also knew what that threat meant.
JAPA: The Common Denominator
Dr. Alu, Inspector Okafor, RC Ngozi, and Officer Chinedu all have four things in common:
- An unwritten/unspoken agreement that Nigeria is thoroughly messed up.
- They all also want to leave, to ‘saner climes‘ as a result of the above.
- A great share to blame for what they believe is their primary reason for seeking to leave, in the first place.
- Finally, an unshakeable belief that their challenges are caused by politicians.
But, there’s a great flaw with this uniformity of thought and strange consistency…
The GREAT Flaw With This Manner of Thinking
Dr. Alu and the others chronicled in this story patently believe that their woes are politicians-caused; politicians they willfully elect and support, year after year.
What they fail to understand is that, besides the fact that the politicians they patently blame for making the country challenging for everyone are drawn from the lot of the masses, these politicians are CONSISTENTLY supported and voted into power, tenure after tenure, by the same complaining masses, especially if the concerned parties seem to believe that their private lots will be bettered by such actions, crazy and unpatriotic as it might seem.
To cap up, the actions of most Nigerians tell a curious tale: one they aren’t ready to listen to…by their day-to-day lives, they aren’t any better than the politicians they passionately condemn.
A good, practical example is the internet fraud most Nigerians openly tolerate or make excuses for.
Why Japa Doesn’t Cut It
There is something fundamentally wrong with the Nigerian DNA and the reality of living in Nigeria, as it presently is.
Unfortunately, the disease is so strong that it does not allow anyone who is cursed with it to see just how much it has eaten deep into him/her.
Instead, such a ‘patient’ is likely to see everything wrong with others and become a self-expert at complaints, forgetting a cardinal and hard truth: it is from the collective base that the elected few come out; it is from the abundance of the mess such an elected few grow from, exhibiting the distasteful acts, everyone agrees that japa is the only solution to.
Ironies have a classic way of weaving themselves into perpetuity if not critically thought out and addressed. There is still time for Nigeria and Nigerians to get it right.
However, like the movie Portal Into the Realm of the Dead, that window is closing fast and will soon only be but a memory.
A sad, horror movie that japa, with all its self arrogated glory, could not, will not, and cannot fix!
Wrap Up
Migration to Western Europe and North America isn’t a challenge: if you somehow prefer the colder climate and love the foreign culture, this shouldn’t be a story, worthy of anyone penning.
So is desiring to stay in the West long enough to become a citizen.
What remains a challenge is the unresolved outlook that creates this false need, in the first place.
Before anyone thinks of migrating — or japaring — be them Nigerian, Indian, Pakistani, or whatever nationality for that matter, the first and most important thing is to look inwards and fix the politician in them, causing the seemingly little mess, making an entire country chaotic and unliveable.
Once this is done, it won’t take magic for the politicians that are often blamed to understand the rules of the game have changed, and with this realization, the clarity that Western Europe and North America aren’t heavens-on-earth (worthy of counting as ultimate achievement when a visa to migrate to them is granted) but rather are simply regular countries (or continents if you please) that have got their acts right — or nearly so.
*’Japa’, for the uninitiated, is a term that means migration, often, permanently, to Western Europe and North America (usually) with the migrants intending to become citizens there.
Crazy as it appears, this remains the ultimate purpose of most young folks, couples, and families — all thanks to terrible deplorable living and working conditions in Nigeria.
The term has varied equivalent forms across the developing world where migration is seen as the only way to a better life.
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