A new survey of 4,500 young people aged 18-24 in Africa found that 52 percent would like to immigrate to other countries in the next few years. Economic difficulties and educational opportunities were cited as the main reasons for this. The BBC talked to five young people from Africa’s two largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, and listened to their thoughts on why they don’t feel safe in their country and the limited job opportunities. Young people in Ghana, on the other hand, painted a very different picture.
“A terrifying level of insecurity in Nigeria”. With these words, 18-year-old Ayoade Oni from Lagos explains why she wanted to move from Nigeria.
He says he was abducted by daylight last year.
After she got out of a phone repair shop, a gang had her on the street and tried to rob her of her belongings. While resisting and trying to walk away quickly, people came out of a shop and invited him inside.
But this is a trap.
“Just at that moment, a bus stopped on the road and its driver said that these people were kidnapping people and told him to get in the vehicle. It saved my life,” he says.
Nigeria has been experiencing a huge increase in the number of kidnappers for ransom lately.
According to a Lagos-based think tank, gangs raise millions of dollars each year this way.
“I can’t go out at night, my family won’t even let me,” says Oni.
He has to return home by 18.30 at the latest every day.
Oni cites other reasons for wanting to leave the country as high unemployment, poor health system, low living conditions and insufficient job opportunities.
He doesn’t think he’ll be able to find a job easily after graduating from computer science, either.
“Many graduates compete for very few jobs, and people are often hired on the spur of the moment or on a bribe,” he says.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever want to return to his country if he can leave Nigeria and settle in his heartland, Canada.
He says most of his friends agree, “At least 90 percent, if not all,” he says.
The 2022 African Youth Survey conducted in 15 African countries by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation in South Africa also supports Oni’s observation.
The most pessimistic youth in the countries surveyed are in Nigeria: 95 percent of young people think their country is going in the wrong direction.
“The world needs to wake up and invest in Africa so that young Africans don’t feel compelled to go abroad to fulfill their dreams,” said Ivor Ichikowitz, the person behind the survey.
“This is more than a brain drain. Africans aged 18-24 say, ‘We’re going to improve our lives and if we can’t do that here, we’ll go to other countries,'” he said.
Ichikowitz says it is worrying that so many young Africans want to go abroad, which could lead to a migration crisis.
In the last survey conducted before the pandemic, most respondents said they wanted to stay in their country.
South Africa, Europe and the USA are the places where African youth most want to migrate. But the situation is different for young people in South Africa: They too are not satisfied with their home country and want to immigrate to Europe and the USA.
Ichikowitz estimates that 42 percent of the world’s youth population will be in Africa by 2030, emphasizing that it is therefore in the interest of the entire world to “constructively engage” with Africa.
Young people in Africa who are most satisfied with the course of their country live in Rwanda and Ghana.
56 percent of Ghanaians are satisfied with the situation.
“I can do well in Ghana. While we don’t have strong institutions and systems, their absence means it’s easier for an intelligent person to climb the social ladder,” said Julius Kwame Anthony, 24-year-old President of the National Union of Students in Ghana.
“The idea of moving abroad sounds good, but there is nothing promised to you there.”
Ernest Larmie, a 33-year-old businessman, has a similar feeling, arguing that moving to another country will improve the country you are visiting instead of your own:
“If this is my home, I need to be able to solve my problems here so that the next generation will benefit from it, too.”
‘Women are not safe’
But for some, their trauma is too great for them to choose to stay in their country to develop their community.
A young South African woman, who asked us to keep her name private, says she wants to emigrate because of both the high crime rate in her country and the difficulties she faced in finding a job after graduating from university last year.
She explains that she was raped on her way home from university in 2019 and hasn’t felt safe since:
“I feel like the whole system is working against young women.
“We are struggling not only to walk freely on the streets, but also to find work.”
Before the pandemic, rape and sexual violence crimes were among the crimes that increased the most in the country in 2019 compared to the previous year.
Another young South African woman, Mapula Maake, 23, agrees that employment conditions in South Africa are bad, and says that this is why she wanted to move abroad:
“Immigrating abroad may be the only logical solution, rather than this labor-saturated market.”
In March, the unemployment rate in the country broke a record with 35.3 percent.
Maake describes this as a “national crisis” and stresses that the government should intervene.
Thomas Naadi and Nobuhle Simelane also contributed to this article.