Fleeing Nigerians besiege foreign embassies …as economy falters…

By OBINNA EZUGWU

Fifty percent of Nigeria’s 200 million people want out of the country for a better economic future abroad, an increase of nearly 20% since 2014, a new report by World Bank has shown.

Consequently, several foreign embassies in the country are having hard time keeping with the pressure of requests by Nigerians. Our findings reveal that these include such far flung countries such as Ukraine and other eastern countries.

The figure underpins the growing hopelessness in Africa’s country, beset by rising unemployment, escalating insecurity and high inflation.

It’s a country where everything seems to be falling apart. Unemployment is at over 33.3 percent. Youth unemployment rose to 40.5 percent in Q4, 2020. Poverty rate is rising rapidly. In 2018, Nigeria, a country of roughly 200 million people, overtook India – with 1.3 billion people – to emerge poverty capital of the world, according to World Poverty Clock.
Nearly 90 million people, approximately half of the total population, are living in extreme poverty. Yet, the country faces a major population boom and is anticipated to become the third most populous country in the world by 2050, with little or no infrastructure to absorb this growth.

Faced with the grim prospect, the middle class who can afford to do so are leaving through legal means, while the less privileged are taking sea routes. There is hardly anybody who does not know someone who hard recently relocated or trying to do so.

The World Bank report titled, ‘Of Roads Less Travelled: Assessing the Potential for Migration to Provide Overseas Jobs for Nigeria’s Youth’, published on its website last week, said Nigeria is facing one of the most acute jobless crises in recent times.

The report found that about 50 percent of Nigerians are willing to leave Nigeria for a better economic future abroad, an increase of nearly 20% since 2014, and said the country ranked 3rd highest in West Africa behind Liberia (70%) and Sierra Leone (60%) of responders who would move permanently to another country.

This, it said, has been driven in part by rising unemployment among other factors. According to the report, “Between 2014 and 2020, Nigeria’s working age population grew from 102 million to 122 million, growing at an average rate of approximately 3 percent per year. “Similarly, Nigeria’s active labor force population, i.e., those willing and able to work among the working age population, grew from 73 million in 2014 to 90 million in 2018, adding 17.5 million new entrants to Nigeria’s active labor force. Since 2018, however, the active labor force population has dramatically decreased to around 70 million—lower than the level in 2014— while the number of Nigerians who are in the working-age population but not active in the labor force has increased from 29 million to 52 million between 2014 and 2020. “The expanding working-age population combined with scarce domestic employment opportunities is creating high rates of unemployment, particularly for Nigeria’s youth. Between 2010 and 2020, the unemployment rate rose five-fold, from 6.4 percent in 2010 to 33.3 percent in 2020.

“The rise in unemployment rates has been particularly acute since the 2015-2016 economic recession, and has further worsened as COVID-19 led to the worst recession in four decades in 2020.

“Unemployment rate, defined nationally as the percentage of the labor force population who could not find at least 20 hours of work in the reference period…