I remember the last time I saw her before she left. We had been friends since secondary school. We were at a gathering at someone’s house, and she was there but you could tell her mind was elsewhere. Three months later she was in Calgary, working a job she was overqualified for, sending money home every month, telling everyone she was fine. And she was fine, or she had made her peace with it. It is obviously not the same but it is what you do.
She was not the first and she was not the last. And if you grew up where I grew up, you know exactly what I mean, because there is a particular rhythm to how people disappear from your life when you come from certain parts of the world. People just start leaving, one after another, and you don’t always notice it happening until you look around one day and realize that half the people you grew up with are now living in countries they never planned to stay in permanently, sending money back home every month, trying to hold two worlds together at the same time.
People will tell you they left for better opportunities, and that is true, but it is not the whole truth, because opportunity does not just exist, it gets built or it gets taken apart, and what got taken apart in a lot of African countries over decades is the basic stuff that makes a normal life possible. Functioning hospitals. Universities that are not shutting down every other year because the government will not pay lecturers what they are owed. A currency that holds its value long enough for you to save anything. Roads where you are not calculating your odds every time you travel at night. A country where you can send your child to school without that fear sitting in the back of your mind all day. When those things are gone or permanently unreliable, leaving is not really a choice in the way people like to frame it. It becomes the only thing that makes sense.
And it is not just Nigeria, because the moment you start talking to other people in the diaspora, you realize the story is basically the same everywhere. Someone from Ghana, someone from Zimbabwe, someone from Senegal, the countries are different, the specific details are different, but you keep hearing the same thing underneath it all, someone who was skilled, who tried, who kept running into the same walls, and eventually got tired of what staying was costing them.
Between 2023 and 2024 alone, 43,221 doctors, nurses, pharmacists and medical laboratory scientists left Nigeria, and when you see a number that large you stop thinking about statistics and start thinking about what it actually means, because these are people who studied in Nigerian institutions, who trained in Nigerian hospitals, and who then left for the UK or Canada or Australia where they now spend their careers keeping someone else’s healthcare system running, and the countries receiving them are not surprised by any of this, which is why they make the licensing process relatively straightforward.
And yet the people who leave are always the ones who get blamed for it, as if the leaving was the problem and not the conditions that made leaving feel like the only option. A doctor who spent years in a hospital with no equipment and no reliable salary did not wake up one day and decide to stop caring. The engineers, the teachers, the accountants filling out visa applications did not break anything. They watched something get broken and eventually accepted they could not fix it alone. And the loudest voices making this argument are usually the same people who have long since made sure their own children will never have to make that choice.
And yet the people who leave are always the ones who get blamed for it, as if the leaving was the problem and not the conditions that made leaving feel like the only option. A doctor who spent years in a hospital with no equipment and no reliable salary did not wake up one day and decide to stop caring. The engineers, the teachers, the accountants filling out visa applications did not break anything. They watched something get broken and eventually accepted they could not fix it alone. And the loudest voices making this argument are usually the same people who have quietly made sure their own children will never have to make that choice.
And the truth that nobody in the diaspora really wants to say out loud is that leaving does not solve the problem. The country you left is still there, still running on the same logic, still losing its doctors and engineers and teachers. And the money you send home every month, the billions flowing back to African countries from the diaspora every year, is filling gaps that governments should be filling. You left because the system was broken. But your remittances are part of what allows that same broken system to keep going without anyone being forced to fix it.
So when people ask why we leave, the honest answer is that we leave because at some point you run out of reasons to stay, and that is not a failure of love or loyalty or patriotism, it is just the truth. And most of us are still carrying our countries with us wherever we go, in the money we send back, in the way we get defensive when someone says something ignorant about where we come from, in the pride and the frustration that exist at the same time. If that is not love then nothing is, but love is never going to be enough to fix something that was broken long before any of us had a say in it.
