Before you guys in diaspora or wannabe diasporans start saying I am a bad belle, just hear me out. What about if this whole idea of making our resource rich geographical location less attractive by compromising our politics so that we are forced to migrate and work abroad is a calculated attempt to rebrand the enslavement of our people? For the sake of clarity, japa is a term that has been added to the lexicon of Nigerian English in recent times to refer to the trending practice of selling out all one has in one’s native land to relocate to a foreign land with hope of thriving better there. The choice destinations have remained the Unites States of America, Europe, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Interestingly these destination points were the same points African slaves were forcefully moved to during the slave trade era to make them work their backs off on the colonialists’ plantation farms and elsewhere.
Colonialism refers to a process by which a foreign power annexes and creates dependencies whose economic, political and cultural systems are restructured and made to serve the foreign power’s interests.
The Portuguese came to Elmina on the coast of Ghana in 1471. The Bond of 1844 between some Ghanaian Fante states and the British marked the beginning of colonial rule in Ghana. And by the year 1900, every territory in West Africa with the exception of Liberia had become a colony of one European power or the other.
Think about it, using the Nigerian situation as a case in point, we have seen how it has continued to seem impossible to entrench a stable political system that would see our people really enjoy the dividends of their resource rich land. Let’s go back to when it all started. When the colonial masters came into Africa, it was not in search of people to civilize. I know that is the narrative we have been sold in recent times. The whole idea of colonisation was inspired by the fact that the colonial masters were desperate to find resources for their starving teeming population. Reading the works of Charles Dickens which described Britain at the eve of colonilisation would present the picture of the level of lack epidemics and disease due to deficiencies that plagued them which forced them to cast all their resources on voyagers who would go into the rich tropics and coerce the aborigines to part with their vast resources, which resources were then transported to their countries and used to salvage their people. This is the true definition and true reason behind colonalisation. Coupled with the fact that the British took on the Industrial Revolution and the need for free labour on their plantations which the native Americans had refused to work on for them.
In the book, Why Nations Fail…, I found out that the Spaniards had colonised the rich parts of the Americas and left the less precious stones studded lands for the British who were late arrivers in the exploration and colonialisation business. The British could not get the american natives to work on the lands they grabbed from them. They had to work on the lands themselves and started coming up with policies and constitutions to define how they cohabited. Yet they found out the Africans were more malleable to being used as free labour. Africans save for some like the Igbo tribe who continued to resist the domination of any other tribe and will continue to resist. Who else has heard of the Igbo Landing? That is proof to my assertion. That place where it was historically recorded that some Igbo slaves who had just been docked on US soil turned back to the sea and drowned themselves instead of being merchandised.
Slavery had to stop at some point. Even Africans started resisting like the native americans had and the Igbo tribe did. And slave trade stopped. I read somewhere that it was the same company that owned the slave ships that moved slaves from Nigeria that rebranded to Shell which now controls the oil and gas exploration and exportation in Nigeria. You get the point now.
Yet today, it seems like a status symbol to be able to sell one’s inheritances, buy a one way ticket and move your whole family to Europe. All the resources have been moved abroad. If you doubt it visit the Queen’s crown, and all the museums abroad. Human resources are now being lured away from their motherlands to foreign lands to work menial jobs just like in the days of slavery. A bros from Igboland who was working one job and earning 100,000 monthly in Nigeria is proud to have sold his father’s land to now works 3 jobs in the UK. He picks dead flowers from 7am to 10 am; Drives as a chauffeur from 12noon to 4pm; Works as security in a bank from 6pm to 1am. He is proud he is making 2 million naira equivalent monthly when the minimum wage in Nigeria is 30,000 naira. You get the picture?
By the way, note that after we gained independence in 1960, our colonial masters kept on interfering in our electoral and politico economic process so much so that it is there in our O’level economics text book that it was the IMF that advises Nigerian government to devalue her currency from time to time as one of the conditions to lend her money.
Nigeria with her over 200 million population and the youth demographic making up more than 45 per cent of the population is induced politically to be a consumption country. The education system is compromised and the skilled ones among us are lured away to foreign lands rather than stay back and insist on a reversal of our fate at home. If those living them feel so good why are they leading the revolutions erupting st home.
So could Japa be modern slavery? It is the same thing as asking would you like to be a happy slave or a crying Freeman?
