Two Nigerian leaders shared their stance on japa over the same weekend, but their thoughts diverged. One was former Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, who, at the convocation ceremonies of Elizade University, Ondo State, urged youths to resist the temptation of pursuing greener pastures outside Nigeria. Leaders do not run away, he said. Former Anambra Governor Peter Obi, on the other hand, while visiting Peter University and School of Nursing Sciences in Anambra state, encouraged those who had the means to japa saying they could always return when Nigeria improves.

Let us start with Fashola who reportedly said that though things have always been hard, oil magnates like Folorunso Alakija and Tunde Afolabi flourished, nevertheless. He is correct that there is no time in history that humans have not experienced hardship. We frequently look back at the “good old days,” but what we express is mostly nostalgia for a world that never really was. From listening to Fela and older generations of musicians, one learns that there was no time Nigerians have not faced the problems of “water, light, food, house… yeeparipa o!”

Forget about the nonsense APC apologists trot about when they need to justify this present hardship, Nigerians have never really had it good. The current clowns in power claim that the difficulties of the present are consequences of the excess of the past. To bolster their ahistorical arguments, they call up ridiculous instances such as subsidized social service as proof that we have always had it easy and that we are now a broke country because we squandered our patrimony. It is on that basis that they preach a gospel of suffer-now-enjoy-later. Thanks to Fashola for reminding his peers that whatever abundance existed in the past was unfairly distributed. There has always been suffering, which is why some of us reject the political agenda that asks us to endure for a better tomorrow. We have always suffered; we deserve a reprieve, not more suffering.

But the historical perspective is also where even Fashola failed to reflect enough on his argument. If Victor Olaiya’s song about hardship as the order of the day still has currency 40-plus years later, to what end is staying back in Nigeria and merely enduring? Fashola is one of the leaders who did not run away from the warfront called Nigeria. He served in various capacities until 2024, but what has he changed for Nigerians? For a minister under a leader who turned the face of Nigerians to the midnight sun, what did Fashola do other than regularly appear on television to justify the inhuman administration?

The same Fashola should not have the boldness to criticize those fleeing the crime scene of Muhammadu Buhari’s grossly inept government for “running away.” Why should a younger generation fritter away the time of their life trying to repair what he and his boss damaged? You have not even owned up to your failures nor been held accountable for the corruption and serial abuse of public trust under your watch, but here you are on a moral high table telling us that things are as bad as they have always been, and people should keep striving.

There are matters on which Fashola should never have a mouth to talk, and Japa is one of them. Instead of blaming people who are “running away,” he should shift his perspective to see people as being “driven away.” Nobody, says the poet Warsan Shire, runs away from home unless home is the mouth of a shark or the barrel of a gun. Each exiting youth is a body of evidence, a living proof of the imprudent management of national resources.

Leaders like Fashola should redirect their focus from those leaving to leaders like himself and what they have failed to do over the years. Mounting a campaign against Japa with the same mouth you consistently used to justify bad governance makes Fashola look like a phoney. If you were born in 1999—the same year Fashola started serving in Lagos—you would be among a generation of very young Nigerians who have grown old enough to reproduce but have no memories of a country that has ever functioned to pass on to your children. Any patriot, no matter the level of fanaticism, who witnessed Nigeria while Fashola was the minister of power and now must live with the frequent national grid collapses under Adebayo Adelabu will eventually get to a point where they will wonder if there is not more to life than “on-ing” and “off-ing” generator until they grow grey hair.

The responsibility of nation-building should be placed on the leaders and not those who left because they could no longer see a future for themselves in a country that eats its children. Fashola is a smart guy, and I am sure he already knows that. If he is evading the matter where it truly lies, it is because he cannot bring himself to confront the brutal truth of how he and his fellow travellers in leadership failed Nigeria. Once upon a time, Fashola was the poster boy for good governance in not just the southwest but the whole of Nigeria. He went to work for Buhari’s government, the government that was supposed to “change” the course of our destiny and set us on the right path. What happened? Abuja completely demystified Fashola, revealing him as a mere blowhard. He went there as a tribune of our hope but returned as an emblem of dreams deferred.

Obi was at least more practical in his approach to the thorny issue of japa. He said those who have the means to leave should take their chances; when Nigeria gets it right, they can always return. To that, I should add that there is a lot to suggest that Nigeria is not even trying to improve. Look at the present crop of our leaders and truthfully consider if their actions in government indicate that they have any sustained interest in making things better. These are people merely marking time and racking up the resources with which they will contest the next election in their respective home states. Nigeria does not exist for them as anything more than a feeding trough.

Rather than improve, Nigeria is waiting for those who left home to become something so that their designated appointee, Abike Dabiri, can pursue them all over the diaspora to pin their supposed “Nigerianness” on them. Look at all the fuss people have been making over Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservative Party who happens to have a Nigerian heritage. Badenoch is an example of one person who left the country and, having succeeded in her career path, Nigeria wants to claim her by fire by force. She has, so far, not played their game and in the past week, a brigade of hurt Nigerian men have been having a meltdown over her snobbish attitude to Nigeria.

But imagine for a moment that Badenoch had taken Fashola’s advice and remained home. The highest she would probably have ever ascended as a female politician would be Minister of Women Affairs or even Minister of State, positions she would attain after bowing before a dozen godfathers who would keep her on their leash. Someone like that would have had to face the national assembly for confirmation of her ministerial appointment, and a bunch of horny lawmakers would be openly leering at her as if she was an assemblage of meat part to be consumed with their eyes. I can bet that for the young women looking at her as a model of what is possible for them out there, Fashola’s admonition goes through one ear and comes out of the other.