My daughter asked me today if I regret leaving Nigeria.
Not in those exact words. She didn’t come out and ask directly. Instead, she started talking about a friend who just moved to the UK, how everyone back home thinks this friend’s life is sorted now. Then she looked at me and said, “But it’s not really like that, is it?”
Oh, I knew that look. I’ve worn it myself.
When I was younger, I used to sit around arguing about how Nigeria could be fixed in one clean sweep if only the leaders were different. More empathetic, less corrupt and actually willing to solve problems. In my head, nothing was complicated. Bad leadership creates bad countries, good leadership creates good countries, simple as that.
I really believed that. I believed most problems came from people refusing to just do the right thing.
Then I moved, and everything I thought I understood started to look different.
My dad used to watch The Matrix like it was a documentary. I never understood why until years later, finally getting what he saw in that film. The red pill. Once you take it, you can’t go back. You start seeing things you didn’t notice before, asking questions you never thought to ask.
Migration took me from one country to another, sure. But what it really did was open my eyes to how everything actually works. Geopolitics, systems, power, history… all the stuff that shapes why some places look ‘perfect’, and others struggle.
I remember the first time I heard Germans complaining about their own government. Really complaining, the way we do back home. I was confused. Wait, this is Germany. This is supposed to be the place where everything works. But there they were, frustrated about bureaucracy, about systems that don’t make sense, about politicians who promise things and don’t deliver.
I saw people falling through gaps here too. Different gaps, but gaps nonetheless. A woman at the Ausländerbehörde trying to get her paperwork sorted for months, caught in a loop of appointments that led nowhere. I’ve heard stories of professionals who couldn’t get their credentials recognized despite years of experience. Not because of corruption, but because of rules, because of how the system is structured, because sometimes bureaucracy is just bureaucracy.
So Germany wasn’t the perfect system I’d imagined. That was the first crack in my thinking.
But the bigger crack came when I started asking different questions. Not just “why doesn’t this work perfectly here too?” but “why does it work here at all? And why doesn’t it work back home?”
That’s when I began to see the connections I’d missed before.
I used to think Nigeria’s problems were just about corrupt leaders making bad choices. Now I understand how much harder it is to govern when external forces are pulling strings, when your economy is structured to serve someone else’s needs, when the global system was never designed for you to succeed on your own terms.
I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to. Which countries hold the debt? Who controls the resources? Whose companies profit from the instability? I saw how aid comes with conditions that serve the giver more than the receiver, how some problems are allowed to persist because they benefit someone somewhere else.
My grandmother used to say the frog in the well thinks the sky is only as big as the circle above its head. I truly thought if Nigerian leaders just acted right, everything would fall into place. I didn’t see how the well itself was built, or who controlled the water.
The red pill showed me that the world isn’t divided into “good countries” and “bad countries.” It’s more like a system where some places are set up to win and others are set up to lose, and that setup didn’t happen by accident. Stability has a price, and often someone else is paying it. Resources flow in one direction, opportunities flow in another. And none of it is random.
This doesn’t mean people in wealthy countries are bad, or that individuals are sitting around plotting to keep places like Nigeria struggling. Most people are just living their lives, unaware of how their comfort connects to someone else’s struggle. That’s what the red pill does – it shows you the structures underneath. The ones most people never have to see.
I’ve stopped thinking in straight lines, stopped believing in simple answers. Now I ask why things work in one place but not another, and I’m realizing the answers are never what I thought they’d be. Why do some countries have resources but remain poor while others control those resources and thrive? Why are some problems allowed to continue because they serve someone else’s interest?
Part of me misses the innocence. Life was easier when I could point at a problem and say, “This is it. Fix this and everything will be fine.” I sounded so sure of myself back then. So confident. But I didn’t know anything.
Now I know better, and knowing better is both clarifying and heavy. Once you see how the system works, you can’t unsee it or go back to thinking everything is simple, or blame just one set of leaders when you understand the forces they’re up against, the compromises they have to make, the interests they’re dealing with. Yes, corruption exists, and some leaders are genuinely terrible. But blaming only them misses how the whole game is structured.
I told my daughter this today. Not all of it; she’s still young, and some of this takes time to process. But I told her enough. I told her that leaving doesn’t mean escaping, that there’s no perfect country waiting at the end of the journey, that the world is more complicated than anyone wants to admit. I told her that understanding how things really work doesn’t make it easier; it just makes it clearer, and sometimes clearer is harder.
She was quiet for a while. Then she said something about how her friend is probably figuring that out right now too.
I think she’s taking the red pill herself. Halfway through our conversation, I could see it in her face. That realization that the world doesn’t work the way she thought it did. She’s a young adult in her 20s, and the easy answers aren’t enough anymore.
I don’t know if that’s a gift or a burden yet, maybe both.
What I do know is this: once you see the world for what it actually is, you stop waiting for someone else to fix it. You stop holding onto fantasies about perfect systems or perfect countries. You understand that change is harder than you thought, more complicated than you imagined, and tied to forces bigger than any one person or country.
But you also focus on what you can actually do. How you treat people. How you show up. How you challenge your own assumptions. How you engage with the systems you’re part of, knowing now what they’re built on.
My dad loved The Matrix because Neo had to make a choice. Stay comfortable in the lie or face the uncomfortable truth. Most of us don’t get to choose though. Migration chooses for you. It hands you the red pill whether you want it or not, and once you swallow it, there’s no going back.
