The Director of the TETfund Center of Excellence for Diaspora Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan (UI), Prof. Senayon Olaoluwa, in this interview with MUYIWA ADEYEMI, among others, blamed lack of ingenuity and adoption of foreign economic policies. policies as the root cause of the challenges facing Nigeria.

As an expert in the study of the diaspora, don’t you think that the harsh economic policies of the government are the main reason why Nigerians, especially the youth, leave the country?
The first thing I would like us to establish is the fact that since the beginning of human society, social systems have always been organized in duality to the point that it is not possible for everyone who constitutes a society, community, village, town , or city to be 100 percent at home.

There has to be a portion, a specific percentage that must be away from home. Those who are not at home are those described as in the diaspora. Now, how can we establish that further? If you take a look at various folk tales from Africa, Europe and America, you will discover that those folk tales that are vestiges of older ways of conceptualizing phenomena make it clear in certain aspects that not all inhabitants of a homeland are situated in that homeland. or not everyone who is from a certain country is always at home.

So the diaspora itself, as it is a buzzword since the beginning of the 21st century, has always been there. The initial attempt was to restrict it to the description of, say, the Jewish and Armenian experiences, but no. It has always been in all cultures.

Even the smallest village will have some members outside of that village. The other thing you’ll notice is that we’ve always associated not being home with abundance. People who live outside their homeland are always assumed to be more prosperous. So, growing up, we always thought that our uncles in Lagos were better off than our parents in the village, which might not necessarily be the case, and whenever they showed up, there was a way to welcome them.

There’s a theory I’m working on right now that I call “Diaspora of the Everyday.” When we finish analyzing that concept and ask ourselves, do we really live at home or in the diaspora? You will discover that everyone lives more in the diaspora than at home.

What do you mean?
In short, as a father and husband, you are expected to go out to work every day. Imagine that you are not on vacation, you are not sick, and you stay home and decide to stop working. What do you think will be the next response in your family? Everyone will see it as abnormal. Even your neighbors will ask you questions. So, why do you participate in the everyday diaspora? Because we have associated abundance with it.

But now what we are experiencing is unprecedented in that negative sense because it comes with a certain nuance of desperation. Despair to the point that people, who are doing well here without knowing it, will end up leaving. And the way japa has been conceived and practiced is such that it is no longer a journey.

When we talk about japa, it actually means escape, which means that the homeland is now considered a dangerous place. When you escape such dangers, you don’t want to go back. So japa is now a journey of escape without any immediate thought of return.

And that’s what makes it particularly worrying. Now, you said, could we link it to the economic policy of the Nigerian State and the difficulties?
The answer is a resounding yes, because political governance is like parenting in a normal context. Father and mother are expected to care for their children. When they refuse to do so, the home becomes unbearable for the children.

Some children were recently interviewed. They liked to rummage through the trash. Young children between eight and 12 years old. They were already talking like adults. One of them said: ‘I lived with my uncle, he never took care of me. So one day I left and this is what I’m doing.’ Another said: ‘My dad married another woman and they didn’t bother to take care of me.’ I would love to go to school. I left school, but this is what I’m doing now.’

So the moment we start looking at political governance from that angle, we discover that the political class has failed Nigerians and that is the nuance of japa. It means escape and you can only escape from what you consider dangerous, harmful and potentially murderous. And that is what we are experiencing.

Would you say that Nigeria has strong foreign policies to protect its citizens in foreign lands because the experiences of many of them, even in other African countries, are appalling?
That is, treat them with dignity. I like to use the words protection and dignity. Then it brings me back to the theory I’m working on, the theory of the diaspora of the everyday. In that theory, let’s say that the father is expected to attend to the needs of the children, participating in the diaspora of everyday life, when he refuses to do so, when he refuses to live up to their expectations, that creates a mess for him. indignity.

But the thing doesn’t end there. That indignity extends to his family. You don’t abandon your children and then expect those children to be treated well on the streets. Who are those kids trying to eat out of the dumpster? Who are these children trying to enter our complex without authorization? Who is your father? How will we get them out of here? Then they tell you, that lazy person who does nothing, or that man who has all the money but can’t take care of his children.

This is the case of Nigeria. That man who has all the money, but doesn’t take care of the children. Who will respect the children? Nobody. And that is the challenge we find ourselves in now. Someone told me about a PhD who works in the federal ministry and who is already deputy director of japa in the United Kingdom and is now a cleaner.

So tell me, can you imagine how they will treat her there? So are you saying there are no policies to protect it? The policies are there in principle, but no one respects the children of a rich man who does not take care of his children. This is the metaphorical illustration of what is happening to us in Nigeria. In that sense, we cannot completely blame the countries that banished Nigerians.

Let’s consider what is happening to our people in Libya, especially before we had the slave trade scandal in Libya, when Libya could see that perhaps for every 1,000 foreigners from Africa who entered that country, about 500 would be Nigerians. Why would they respect us? Why don’t they mistreat those citizens, knowing that they didn’t even come by plane? They walked through the Sahara desert and at some point, some of them drank their own urine to survive. Who will respect those citizens and their country? Don’t forget, they are actually escaping from a dangerous area because their own father, Nigeria, cannot protect them.

Look at the statistics and see how bad things are in a country where one US dollar is exchanged for almost 2,000 naira. How do you respect the citizens of that country where a teacher does not even earn 300 dollars a month, where the minimum wage is 70,000 naira, less than 35 dollars? So that’s what’s happening to us.

Until the government improves the well-being of its citizens, no foreign country will respect its people. Until the government, for example, stops being a man who says yes to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Now, more than 120 million have fallen into the cycle of poverty and the government keeps telling us: “Oh, we are doing very well.” “We are eliminating subsidies.” Now the question is: how can you build an economy from a single source of income? If we did not have oil in Nigeria, would we not survive? That is the question we should ask ourselves.

The World Bank and the IMF are supporting Nigeria’s economic policies. They even advised that it should continue for the next 15 years. Don’t you think we should blame our experts in Nigeria for not domesticating some of these foreign policies before implementing them?
A colleague of mine, Dr. Qudus Adebayo, and I were traveling when he started a conversation about political governance and authenticity. Our political governance in Nigeria lacks authenticity. Each political governance system should have its own unique identity. There must be something in our economy that must be authentic; We should not always wait for the United States, the World Bank or the IMF to tell us what to do. Whatever the World Bank tells President Tinubu, he does it and then they are happy with themselves. How can you be a father or husband and expect people to tell you how you treat your wife or children?

If that happens, it means that those who alert you have realized that there is no authenticity in your paternity, so they offer you several solutions. I have developed a model for raising Nigeria, I am not going to use someone else’s model, but that is what Nigeria is doing.

The United States tells them to eliminate subsidies and invest heavy subsidies in their agricultural sector since food is so cheap. The government has not examined that. Our government will say that we should buy fuel in the exact quantity they buy it in the US, but now oil is more expensive in Nigeria than in the US.

It is policy in the United States that there should be heavy subsidies on agriculture, what is the policy on agriculture here? People in the southwest now say that, ebi npawa, which means “we are hungry, we are hungry,” and that is what you hear every day on the streets. Can you imagine this happening in the Southwest just because the United States has asked our president to eliminate the subsidy?
The question is: is it the only gasoline that is produced from crude oil? What are the prices of all the other products? There is a theory that in Nigeria we can even have free gas thanks to other products we can make money from.

Libya is in a mess but fuel is still less than 100 naira per litre. We are talking about a country in political crisis. Then you wonder how that country is surviving; there is no authenticity in political governance, which is why we are in this mess.

If you meet President Tinubu now, what will you advise him?
Basically, I will ask you to back up and ask: are there no authentic Nigerian ways of looking at the economic situation in the country? You see, there is nothing like the global economic policies dictated by the World Bank and the IMF; Each country is supposed to be adopted in a contest. We must tame it and ask ourselves if policies reflect our realities, if not, let it fall.

Would you say that our economics professors and others are really working to adapt some of these policies to our realities?
I don’t think there is any problem with the domestication of policies, the challenge we have is that of governance. Those involved in governance are the ones who get us into this mess. Let me illustrate this with the challenge ASUU has had with the government. There have been several negotiations with ASUU and other university unions, the negotiating panels made very good recommendations but those on the panel are not the ones who implement them, the President will do that, but what has happened. What a professor in Nigeria earns today is not on par with what a master’s student earns in South Africa. But every year the government will say that we expect our universities to be world class, when there is no electricity on campus, when they do not provide funds for books, when professors and researchers apply for foreign grants. Nigeria cannot provide or obtain the funds and the government says let the funds go to the TSA. Then, for a whole year, you cannot evaluate the money you requested, which the Nigerian government cannot give you. What are we talking about? There is no authenticity in governance. The government is neither sincere nor willing to move this country forward. That is precisely the challenge we have.