I Didn't Japa. Here's What Staying Taught Me

The year my closest friend group reduced from seven to two, I stopped attending send-forth parties for a while. Not out of bitterness, but out of a quiet exhaustion that I did not have words for yet. Every few weeks another friend announced a study visa, a spousal sponsorship, a relative abroad who had finally agreed to help with a UK nursing application, and I would smile, contribute to the gift, cry a little in the car afterward, and go back to a life in Lagos that increasingly felt like the one everyone else had decided to escape.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an essay arguing that staying is nobler than leaving, or that the japa generation has made some moral error the rest of us avoided. The people leaving are mostly right to leave. The naira has lost a staggering amount of its value in a few short years, salaries have not kept pace with inflation, and the basic promise that hard work plus education equals a stable life has been broken often enough that believing in it now requires a kind of faith I no longer blame anyone for losing. I stayed for reasons that are specific to me, not because I think staying is a virtue everyone should aspire to.

What the Staying Actually Costs

What nobody warns you about is the particular loneliness of being the one left behind in your own country. Your social circle does not shrink gently, it empties in waves, and each wave leaves you slightly less willing to invest in new friendships because you have started, without meaning to, treating every new connection as temporary. You learn to say goodbye well, which is a skill, but not one you wanted to become this good at by thirty.

There is also a strange financial vertigo that comes from watching your friends abroad earn in a currency that makes your own salary look like a rounding error, while you are still paying the same Nigerian prices for fuel, food and rent that have themselves tripled in the same period. The comparison is unfair and I know it, their new lives come with their own invisible costs, the isolation, the weather, the jobs beneath their qualifications that many of them take and rarely post about. But knowing a comparison is unfair does not stop you from making it at 2am when a bill is due.

Staying did not make me more patriotic. It made me more honest about what this country actually demands from the people who remain in it.

And yet staying taught me things I am not sure I would have learned otherwise. It taught me that community here, when you find the right pocket of it, is denser and more load-bearing than almost anywhere else, because everyone involved knows exactly how hard the ground is and shows up for each other accordingly. It taught me that there is a particular satisfaction in building something, a business, a byline, a reputation, in a market this difficult, precisely because the difficulty filters out anyone not genuinely committed to it.

I also learned to stop treating my decision to stay as a referendum on anyone else's decision to leave. For a while I resented the implicit judgment I felt radiating from certain japa conversations, the sense that staying meant either lacking the resources to leave or lacking the imagination to want to. Some of that resentment was projection. Most people leaving are simply trying to build a stable life, the same thing I am trying to build here, using the tools available to them.

What I would say to anyone choosing to stay, deliberately and with open eyes, is that you will need to rebuild your sense of community more actively than people who leave together in cohorts often have to. You will need to get comfortable being the friend who stays, the one who attends every send-forth and hosts none of her own, and you will need to find meaning that does not depend on everyone around you making the same choice you did.

I do not know if I will stay forever. Circumstances change, and I have learned not to make permanent vows about a country whose policies can upend a five-year plan overnight. But for now, staying has taught me that a life built on difficult ground is still a life, still capable of friendship, ambition and genuine joy, and that the people who left did not take all of that with them when they went.