Canada Is ‘Stealing’ Our Young People! – TheNigerialawyer

Yes, Canada is not just taking our young people, they are taking
the fattest of our crops, the best, the brightest, and the
brainiest!

One of them is my friend, Olufemi, (not real name). He graduated
top of his class and best in the entire university! Nine years
after graduation, he got married to his equally cerebral lawyer
wife, and they both had fairly paying jobs that admitted them into
the struggling middle class in Nigeria. A year after marriage,
Olufemi, disillusioned by the state of his family’s finances, the
situation in the country and the underutilisation of his skills,
and intellect at his place of work, sold all his assets and
relocated his young family to Canada!

Femi’s story is not unique, almost every young Nigerian
professional who is not in the process of immigrating to Canada,
knows a friend, family or colleague who has relocated or is in the
process of relocating. The situation is alarming, almost like the
biblical “rapture”: you come to work one day, you see your
colleagues, you resume the next day, and they are gone!

I recently had a conversation with a millennial working in one
of the big four audit firms; the conversation bordered on the
number of young professionals leaving the country for Canada. He
informed me that their firm had started a WhatsApp group for
ex-staff members that had immigrated to Canada; as of the time of
having that discussion about 70 Nigerian immigrants had joined the
group. A similar conversation with another tax consultant also
working in one of the “big four” revealed the same trend. According
to him, almost all his colleagues in their audit department had
immigrated to Canada or some part of Europe!

Why Canada, you may ask? Well, Canada has an immigration process
carefully designed to attract highly skilled young professionals.
It requires you to be of a certain age bracket (the younger you
are, the more points you gain) to take a “Test of English”, send
your academic transcripts, have certain amount in your bank account
and Voila! you get a Canadian Permanent Residence.

The process, while seamless, is expensive for the average
Nigerian, and is also a clear indication of the class of people
they want: comfortable, highly educated, extremely skilled, young
professionals, hence the people who go through this process are not
poor by Nigerian standard.

As a young professional in this country, you begin to wonder if
there is something wrong with you if you have not commenced your
own immigration process. When you see your friends and colleagues
resign from their jobs, sell their property, and leave the country;
when you watch them upload pictures of their new countries of
residence on social media and ‘brag’ about how the system works;
when they inform you gleefully of how they have “secured” the
future of their children, and invite you to join them, you wonder
if, perhaps, you are not missing out on life opportunities for your
own children!

Sir, the young people leaving the country are not unpatriotic,
the reality is that Nigeria has not been kind to her youths!
Furthermore, this brain drain did not start with young people nor
did it start in this generation. When political and religious
leaders send their children outside the country to be educated or
when they seek heath care outside the shores of their country, they
send a clear and uncontroverted message to our young people that
they do not believe in the future of their country! Young people
are therefore simply taking a cue from her leaders, yet, this mass
immigration in recent times is nothing like what happened in the
past: it is massive, and it is alarming! Young bright people
immigrating to a foreign land is the most telling evidence of a
failed leadership!

What state of affairs of a country would make its young people
leave e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.ng: family, friends, some measure of
certainty and in some cases extremely good jobs for a foreign
country, full of uncertainties and oftentimes for less than
inspiring jobs?

The current state! The reality is that the state of affairs of
this country is extremely discouraging for young people! Our
country is ridden with nepotism, insecurity, poor infrastructure,
unemployment and a lot more, underemployment! What is more
discouraging, and frightening is that nothing in the present seems
to indicate that things will get better in the future!

Our health care system needs a complete overhaul, medical
“facilities” are in dire state of disrepair. The doctor to patient
ratio in public hospitals is shockingly poor, yet our doctors and
health personnel continue to emigrate the country, because they are
overworked, overwhelmed and underpaid!

A close friend and her younger sister were recently threatened
with deportation, as she had remained in the United Kingdom, after
her student visa expired. Her British friends started a petition
online in a bid to keep her and her sister in the UK. There is a
back story to all of this drama: my friend had lost two of her
siblings who had medical conditions, mainly as a result of the poor
health care system in the country and has a younger sister with the
same medical condition who may have faced a similar fate, were it
not for the excellent and timely treatment she had received in the
UK. Unfortunately, her younger sister requires continuous health
care which is simply not available in our country.

My friend, a brilliant lawyer and patriotic Nigeria, is
compelled to appeal to the British Government to offer a right to
remain, because her younger sister’s life quite literally depends
on it!

Why do we subject our young people to this kind of humiliation?
Why do we have to beg to remain in a foreign land? How does a
developing nation recover from such massive evacuation of its human
capital? And more importantly, how do we address this issue to
reignite a sense of patriotism amongst our young people?

Quite frankly, I do not have the answers to all these
questions.

I hear that there is a common joke in Toronto, that the best
place to have a heart attack is in a taxi, because the driver is
probably an immigrant doctor. The young people leaving are some of
the smartest and the brightest, they know that adapting to a new
society is hard, yet they still go! Many of them are skilled
professionals, lawyers, doctors, architects, pharmacists, they know
that they must write and pass expensive professional exams, yet,
they still go! They hear about racism, about the cold, the lonely
nights and outright discrimination, yet, they still go! The
frustration and disappointment amongst young people are real and
palpable, but, they believe the country has little to offer so they
leave.

We must address this issue with the urgency it deserves, because
at the end of the day, Nigeria is the only country we can truly
call home! It is for this reason that many Nigerians in the
Diaspora still choose to come back home! They still build property,
start businesses and make investments in the country. They still
give their children African names and follow the local news
closely; many are even more abreast and passionate about the
happenings in the country than those of us in the country. They are
never truly gone; one “leg” in, the other out! and how can they,
their parents, friends, colleagues and relatives are still
here!

Canada’s gain is Nigeria’s loss. It is impossible to stop this
trend completely, sadly, but we can discourage it by creating a
more enabling environment for everyone. We would need to do this
gradually, perhaps, we can start with our health care, with
improved power and security of lives and property!

More importantly, young people need to sense a clear redirection
in the affairs of the country; when this is done, maybe, they will
remain in the country. But first, we must start! The sooner we
begin, the better.

Ms Imosemi, a lawyer, sent this article from
[email protected]^[1]

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