08-22-2019, 11:49 AM
[color=var(--atc)]Canada is ‘stealing’ our young people!
August 21, 2019
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[url=https://punchng.com/canada-is-stealing-our-young-people/]
Yes, Canada is not just taking our young people, they are taking the fattest of our crops, the best, the brightest, and the brainiest!
One of them is my friend, Olufemi, (not real name). He graduated top of his class and best in the entire university! Nine years after graduation, he got married to his equally cerebral lawyer wife, and they both had fairly paying jobs that admitted them into the struggling middle class in Nigeria. A year after marriage, Olufemi, disillusioned by the state of his family’s finances, the situation in the country and the underutilisation of his skills, and intellect at his place of work, sold all his assets and relocated his young family to Canada!
Femi’s story is not unique, almost every young Nigerian professional who is not in the process of immigrating to Canada, knows a friend, family or colleague who has relocated or is in the process of relocating. The situation is alarming, almost like the biblical “rapture”: you come to work one day, you see your colleagues, you resume the next day, and they are gone!
I recently had a conversation with a millennial working in one of the big four audit firms; the conversation bordered on the number of young professionals leaving the country for Canada. He informed me that their firm had started a WhatsApp group for ex-staff members that had immigrated to Canada; as of the time of having that discussion about 70 Nigerian immigrants had joined the group. A similar conversation with another tax consultant also working in one of the “big four” revealed the same trend. According to him, almost all his colleagues in their audit department had immigrated to Canada or some part of Europe!
Why Canada, you may ask? Well, Canada has an immigration process carefully designed to attract highly skilled young professionals. It requires you to be of a certain age bracket (the younger you are, the more points you gain) to take a “Test of English”, send your academic transcripts, have certain amount in your bank account and Voila! you get a Canadian Permanent Residence.
The process, while seamless, is expensive for the average Nigerian, and is also a clear indication of the class of people they want: comfortable, highly educated, extremely skilled, young professionals, hence the people who go through this process are not poor by Nigerian standard.
As a young professional in this country, you begin to wonder if there is something wrong with you if you have not commenced your own immigration process. When you see your friends and colleagues resign from their jobs, sell their property, and leave the country; when you watch them upload pictures of their new countries of residence on social media and ‘brag’ about how the system works; when they inform you gleefully of how they have “secured” the future of their children, and invite you to join them, you wonder if, perhaps, you are not missing out on life opportunities for your own children!
Sir, the young people leaving the country are not unpatriotic, the reality is that Nigeria has not been kind to her youths! Furthermore, this brain drain did not start with young people nor did it start in this generation. When political and religious leaders send their children outside the country to be educated or when they seek heath care outside the shores of their country, they send a clear and uncontroverted message to our young people that they do not believe in the future of their country! Young people are therefore simply taking a cue from her leaders, yet, this mass immigration in recent times is nothing like what happened in the past: it is massive, and it is alarming! Young bright people immigrating to a foreign land is the most telling evidence of a failed leadership!
What state of affairs of a country would make its young people leave e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.ng: family, friends, some measure of certainty and in some cases extremely good jobs for a foreign country, full of uncertainties and oftentimes for less than inspiring jobs?[/color]