The phenomenon has a name in Nigeria. Japa. It is Yoruba slang for running away fast, and it describes the movement of hundreds of thousands of Nigerians out of the country every year in search of stability, income, and basic dignity. Among the people leaving in the largest numbers are Nigeria’s most educated workers: doctors, engineers, academics, and increasingly the technology workers that the government insists are the country’s future.
Between 2020 and 2025, Nigeria produced some of the fastest-growing tech talent in Africa. Universities turned out software engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers at scale. The outsourcing industry created pathways for Nigerians to earn foreign currency while staying in the country. Startups raised hundreds of millions in venture capital. Lagos was consistently described as one of Africa’s most exciting tech hubs.
And then those workers left. They went to the UK, Canada, and the United States. The engineers who stayed negotiated remote contracts with European and American companies, physically present in Nigeria but economically operating somewhere else entirely. Nigeria’s government treats this as a mystery. It is not a mystery.
The push factors are not subtle. Inflation running above 30 percent erased the real wages of workers earning in naira. Power cuts lasting twelve hours a day made it nearly impossible to run a home office reliably. Roads destroyed cars. Hospitals could not be trusted with serious illness. Security conditions made moving around major cities unpredictable. A currency that lost more than 70 percent of its value against the dollar in two years finished the argument for anyone still on the fence.
A Nigerian software engineer now working in San Francisco described the situation plainly: “The reality of talent in Nigeria now is that you have to leave to reach your full potential.” That single sentence is a comprehensive policy failure compressed into fourteen words.
The government’s response has been to announce training programs. The 3 Million Technical Talent initiative commits to training Nigerians in digital skills, and the ambition behind it is real. But training workers in skills and then placing them in an economy that gives them every rational reason to leave is not a workforce strategy. It is a publicly funded subsidy for the global tech industry, paid for by Nigerian taxpayers who will see very little of the return.
There is now a second pressure compounding the first. The global AI wave has begun eliminating the junior-level outsourcing work that provided entry points for young Nigerian engineers into the international economy. Basic coding tasks, customer service automation, and simple data processing, work that was routed to Lagos and Port Harcourt five years ago, is increasingly being handled by AI tools that cost a fraction of what a human worker does. Nigeria’s outsourcing industry, already under pressure from currency instability and infrastructure failures, is now facing an existential challenge from the same AI wave the government is celebrating in its strategy documents.
The government does not have a clear response to this. Its AI strategy mentions upskilling. It mentions innovation hubs. It does not address what happens to the hundreds of thousands of workers employed in an outsourcing industry that AI is actively displacing, or how a country with a 33 percent youth unemployment rate navigates a technology transition that eliminates the entry-level positions that were providing a first rung on the ladder.
Nigeria produces talent at scale. It has done this consistently, and the talent it produces is genuinely competitive on a global stage. The problem is that it produces talent for export, because the conditions that make export the rational choice have not changed in any meaningful way under successive governments. Japa is not a cultural phenomenon or a failure of patriotism. It is a rational economic response to an environment that punishes people for staying.
The government that created those conditions is the same government now describing brain drain as a national crisis. The solution is not a diaspora engagement policy or a skills training program. The solution is making Nigeria worth staying in. That requires things that are much harder than announcing an AI strategy: stable currency, reliable electricity, functional public institutions, and a legal environment that does not treat private enterprise as a resource to be extracted rather than a partner to be cultivated.
Until those conditions change, Nigeria will keep training engineers for other countries. And those other countries will keep being grateful.