Public servants in Nigeria are often known to be the antithesis of what they project to the citizens they claim to serve.
Only in Nigeria, for instance, would an anti-corruption agency nurture the stench of being the ultimate cesspool of corrupt practices.
The sad saga continues. Recently, the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), one Isah Jere, was quoted as cautioning the urge to migrate to foreign countries, especially in the West (a phenomenon known in local Nigerian circles as “japa”), because a lot of the would-be migrants travel “without knowing what they are going to do or where they are going exactly”.
No one should extol the virtues of illegal migration or even the larger issue of not adequately planning before one takes a “leap”.
But Mr. Jere missed or ignored the larger point of his own admonition: the barely-educated and skilled professionals, young and not-so-young, that are fleeing Nigeria do so because the conditions in their own country have been jarringly distressing for as long as they can remember. Those conditions, in turn, do not afford the “japa crowd” the luxury to properly plan an “escape”, so to speak, from the circumstances that force them to flee.
Paradoxically, if the country had been run well enough to make such a luxury (of planning) exist in the first place, there would be no place in the dictionary of the vernacular in Nigeria for a word like “japa”, or its synonyms.