After many Nigerians sold their property and sources of livelihood to pursue bigger dreams in foreign lands, such dreams are gradually turning to nightmares, as some factors, including foreign policies in the host countries, are sending them back home with little or nothing, writes JULIANA UCHE-OKOBI.
Raji Sodipe did not plan to come back to Nigeria, at least not soon. He had built a car wash business in South Africa from just soap, buckets, a rented stretch of tarmac and years of rising early every morning from bed. He had a dream as he left the shores of Nigeria some 20 years back, to raise a family, build a better future for his posterity and render financial help to those he left behind at home. That was the same promise and dream that pulled hundreds of Nigerians abroad: the belief that leaving Nigeria was the surest route to a better life. But, for Sodipe, a mob in South Africa, his host country, decided otherwise. His business was burnt down in a recent wave of xenophobic violence, and with it went the years he had spent trying to live his dream.
Sodipe is not an outlier. He is the image of a trend now called ‘japada’, a Yoruba term literally translated as “to return,” and, increasingly, it is not disillusionment or homesickness that is driving it. The root cause is policy, layered on top of a push factor that never really went away: there was nothing for these young Nigerians to come back to in the first place.
Before ‘japada’ there was ‘japa’, meaning ‘to move out’ or ‘escape’. But before then, there was a labour market that could not absorb its own graduates and youth population.
Emmanuel Uzoechi left Nigeria for South Africa in 2017, the year he graduated, not chasing luxury but seeking a paycheck that did not exist at home.
“My brother, who was already in South Africa, invited me to join him and run his spare parts business. I immediately grabbed the offer because there was not even any job for me here in Nigeria and I sincerely thought that I had seen an opportunity to pursue my dreams,” Uzoechi recalled.
Uzoechi’s statement explains the japa wave more than any migration statistic could have done. He did not leave Nigeria because he wanted to explore a foreign land. Instead, he faced a scenario whereby a graduate with nowhere to plant himself at home took the first ground that offered a foothold for greener pastures.
And for a generation entering the Nigerian labour market, with one of the world’s highest youth unemployment rates, “greener pastures” was never really about greed. It was about the absence of any pasture at home. Ironically, as unfolding events have shown, the hopes held by many young Nigerians in search of a better life out there may not come true after all.
What is dashing those hopes now is the discovery that the countries this generation moved to can change the terms of the deal with little warning and less mercy.
For instance, South Africa gave its undocumented immigrants a hard deadline to leave by June 30, or be removed. For Nigerians who had spent a decade or more building businesses there, the deadline arrived on top of a security crisis already targeting them, that was the xenophobic attacks on foreign-owned businesses that flared with grim regularity. Uzoechi and his brother did not even make it to the deadline.
“South Africans stormed our shops one morning and looted everything we had. It was a sad experience. We came back home with nothing even before the end of the June deadline,” he told our reporter.
Some of those who ventured to stay till the end now have some scars that vividly tell their stories. Friday Uzo, one of those evacuated by the federal government, escaped with knife wounds on both hands as physical proof of how narrow the window was between staying and surviving. He has said the attack cost him everything he had laboured for over the years.
While South Africa could be said to be ‘brutal’ in its own way of sending Nigerian nationals packing, it is not the only country showing Nigerians the door. The United Kingdom has made the exit smoother in the other direction. The UK and Nigeria recently signed a formal agreement to streamline deportations, targeting Nigerians who have overstayed their visa, failed asylum seekers and migrants with criminal records. Under the agreement, Nigerian authorities are now accepting UK-issued documents to confirm identities faster, cutting the bureaucratic delay that used to buy people more time.
On its part, Qatar has closed a different door long before people even arrive: unaccompanied Nigerian men can no longer get tourist or transit visas at all, a blanket policy responding to a pattern of overstays, one that punishes an entire demographic for the decisions of some. The aforementioned cases are certainly not the greener pastures the japa generation was lured into. Instead, it is a case of hope dashed after individuals had spent everything they owned to secure a better future for themselves and their unborn generations.
The financial wreckage of japada is severe on the affected returnee Nigerians and their families. Most migrants sold everything they had to fund the move, including land, cars and, sometimes, the family house, treating it as an investment that would pay for itself many times over once they settled down abroad.
Gabriel Odunaya, told our reporter that he expended over N50 million to relocate his family to the UK. He sold two cars and a landed property to realise his dream in January 2026. But when the return comes early and unplanned, driven by a foreign government’s deadline rather than a considered decision, there is usually nothing left to sell a second time and no cushion to land on.
For Uzoechi, the hardest cost has not been material, it is relational. He returned to lean on the same family and friends who, for years, had leaned on him and his brother for support sent home from South Africa. That flow of money has now reversed entirely.
“I am ashamed, sometimes, to be getting handouts from people whom I was helping before; I feel like I have become a liability to my family,” Uzoechi lamented.
However, some support has arrived to soften that landing, though unevenly. The Imo State government gave South African returnees from its indigenous population N1 million each to restart their lives. Some telecommunications companies have offered N100,000 grants to affected families. The Nigerians in Diaspora Commission and the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons have enrolled returnees into skills training and livelihood programmes, and the International Organization for Migration has provided travel assistance and small business start-up support for the most vulnerable. But these are gestures against a debt most families incurred believing they were making a permanent exit, not a temporary one.
As analysts have noted, the cost of migrants’ unplanned return to the country is not confined to individual households. It drains a revenue line the Nigerian economy has come to depend on. Diaspora remittances are no longer a side story to Nigeria’s foreign exchange position. They are gradually becoming a strong backbone to the country’s foreign exchange inflows. In 2025, for instance, Nigeria raked in $21.8 billion in remittances, and the Central Bank of Nigeria has spent 2026 pushing formal, bank-tracked inflows toward a target of $1 billion a month, up from roughly $600 million currently. This tends to show that the CBN is treating the diaspora as a more reliable dollar source than oil in periods of market stress.
Uzoechi’s years in South Africa and the money he and his brother sent home before the shops were looted were a small thread in that larger flow, which the ‘japada’ phenomenon seems to have scuttled. Every returnee who comes home empty-handed instead of wiring money back is a reversal on both ends of the transaction, a source of dollars turned into a domestic dependent overnight.
That reversal lands hardest on the families who had restructured their finances around it. Households like Uzoechi’s, who had grown used to remittance income covering school fees, rent or a parent’s upkeep, now look elsewhere for financial assistance at the exact moment the returnee they once relied on needs support instead. If the economic impacts on families affected are viewed through a larger lens, it would not just be individual belts tightening but a small, uncounted contraction in the household spending that remittances used to fund and a quiet loss to the foreign exchange reserves the CBN has been trying to build up specifically to cushion the naira. These are the economic consequences of the ‘japada.’
There is a strain on state and family finances too. The one-off grants from Imo State and telecom companies are not designed to replace years of lost income or a destroyed business. They are only stopgaps, and stopgaps multiplied across a thousand-plus returnees add up to a reintegration bill nobody fully budgeted for, whether at the family, state or federal level.
On the flip side, however, observers argue that the return of Nigerian migrants, though unplanned, could still be a blessing in disguise. They believe that, if returnees could get absorbed productively into the system, they would still deploy whatever skills, savings discipline and small-business experiences they had picked up abroad into their businesses here in Nigeria. With taxable businesses offering employment opportunities to Nigerians and with money generated spent locally rather than sending dollars in from outside, the returnees, they argue, are still contributing to the country’s economy. But that upside depends entirely on whether the same structural gaps that pushed people out in the first place, such as the lack of jobs and capital access at home, have narrowed at all in the years they were away. For Uzoechi, arriving into a Nigerian job market with no more room for him than it had before he left, the early evidence is not encouraging.
Apart from getting reintegrated into the system and restarting life afresh, the hardest part of japada is the psychological reversal. People who left with the full conviction that they were escaping Nigeria’s limitations are coming back to find that the countries they escaped to have their own sharper limitations in the form of policies that could end a life’s work in a single announcement, and enforcement that does not distinguish between someone who overstayed by choice and someone who built a business in good faith for a decade.
In addition to that is a stigma many returnees say cuts as deep as the financial loss. Friends and families who once celebrated their departure now read the return as failure, as if losing a business to a xenophobic mob or a visa policy is a proof that the affected individual could not make it abroad, rather than proof of how little control migrants actually have over the countries that host them.
It is worthy of note that ‘japada’ does not in any way suggest that Nigerians are giving up on the idea of a better life abroad. It is actually about a generation that left because there was no pasture at home to begin with, only to find the pasture abroad could be fenced off overnight by policies they had no say in.
With Uzoechi rebuilding from a spare-parts shop that no longer exists, Sodipe standing where his car wash used to be and Uzo carrying knife wounds home from a country he had hoped to grow old in, none of them are cautionary tales about ambition. They are evidence of how fragile the hosting side of migration has become, and how little that fragility, or the joblessness that sent them looking for it, has been fixed in the years since they left. Should the government make efforts to create more jobs for citizens, especially the younger ones, Nigerians will stay and do their businesses in Nigeria.
“People leave this country because of bad government policies and lack of job opportunities. If the government should create jobs for the citizens today and provide an enabling environment for businesses, Nigerians will stay in their country. It is better to do your business here than in foreign countries where you do not know what could happen the next minute,” Uzoechi said.
