When a Nigerian-American user recently asked others in a Reddit community if they were considering relocating to Nigeria because of Donald Trump, the feedback was swift and caustic. The question, which had been intended to spark a conversation, revealed a deep divide over migration, identity and belonging. While some users offered candid advice about navigating the journey home, cautioning about the hefty financial costs involved and the challenges of Nigeria’s infrastructure, a large majority responded with ridicule. Many struggled to understand the desire to abandon a seemingly prosperous life in America for Nigeria because of Trump’s anti-immigration blitz. One user alluded to the country’s intermittent electricity, writing casually, “It’s like you forget the pain when nepa [referring to Nigeria’s former electricity provider] take light before you can charge your phone.” Another, questioning the user’s sanity and insinuating that they were being controlled by evil forces emanating from their ancestral village, commented, “Your village people were working hard on you. Imagine having U.S. residency or citizenship and running away to suffer.” The criticism ramped up further down the thread, as another commenter labeled the user “a spoiled, westernised fool,” adding, “You have no idea how good you have it in America. Unless you are an ‘illegal migrant’ like all the Mexicans and Venezuelans rioting over there.”
This blowback is a rough barometer of attitudes to reverse migration, a trend that is increasingly visible across social media. A growing number of Nigerians are starting to make the move back home after spending many years abroad, in what is now colloquially referred to as “japada” (“return home” in Yoruba). Although relatively new as a term of social commentary, the word plays on “japa,” a more popular slang word that describes the mass emigration of Nigerians to foreign countries in a quest for better living conditions. Now, as a slice of those who previously emigrated to countries like the U.K., the United States and Canada turn toward home, many have adopted japada as a tongue-in-cheek reference for this emerging countermovement, highlighting the cyclical nature of human existence. Each day on social media sees returnees unpack their complex relocation experiences — from the long, arduous trips to the struggles of readapting to the local culture after years of being away. Along with a growing awareness that the grass is not always greener abroad, many cite emotional disconnection, pervasive racism and mental distress as reasons for reversing course. However, as these returnees renegotiate their place in Nigeria, they often face a reception marked by skepticism and outright judgment, souring their homecoming experience.
The notion of return migration elicits a range of reactions among Nigerians, reflecting a complex interplay of hope, disillusionment, pessimism and patriotism. Last September, a Nigerian orthopedic surgeon named Julius Oni, who had lived in the U.S. for more than two dozen years, went viral after he shared on Instagram that he was relocating to the country with his family. “I know some of you might call me delusional or even crazy … I’m just a man full of conviction,” he said in a clip that even attracted comments from several Nigerian celebrities. Garbed in navy blue surgical scrubs, the bespectacled surgeon explained that he had sold his property and taken an extended leave from his position at Johns Hopkins Hospital to embark on a noble mission of rendering high-quality orthopedic therapy to those back home. (In another Instagram post, shared on July 2, Oni announced that he’d officially resigned from the American hospital.) The video struck a chord, not least with Nigerians in the diaspora, some of whom expressed their desire to move back to their homeland in the future.
Nevertheless, many users couldn’t hide their disbelief as they plied the surgeon with warm blessings and a flood of heart emojis. From shame to criticism, returnees typically have to come to grips with a complex mix of reactions from Nigerians at home, who not only question their relocation but also attribute it to personal failure, if not to the influence of supernatural forces. Across YouTube and TikTok, where many typically share vlogs comparing their daily experiences in Nigeria to their lives abroad, they are scorned and dismissed as being too desperate to justify their decisions. The reception from the diaspora community can be just as harsh. Typically, returnees are deemed “hypocrites,” who are relocating after having secured Western citizenship, or pigeonholed as those who “couldn’t make it,” as one Nigerian caregiver based in Glasgow put it. “Coming to the U.K., you’ll at least be able to make money and send it back home,” he told me.
Analysts suggest that the prevailing negative perceptions of reverse migration are a direct consequence of widespread narratives that glorify migration to the West as a ticket to abundant riches and a soft life. Because immigrants routinely share sleek pictures on social media portraying very comfortable lifestyles in their new climes, “Society now believes that once you go abroad, you’ll be successful,” Divine Chukwuemeka, a migration researcher, said in an interview with New Lines. “Quite a number of Nigerians leave the country on the strength of what they see on social media, and so people just assume that you’re a failure for returning back to the country.” In truth, not all returns have been voluntary. Between 2020 and 2022, more than 13,000 Nigerians — especially those stranded in transit countries like Libya and Niger — had no choice but to seek the assistance of the International Organization for Migration in returning home. And while there are no official statistics, the number of Nigerians who return to the country voluntarily pales in comparison to the multitudes who leave each year.
In a response to friends’ queries about why she abandoned her nursing career in the U.S. for Nigeria, one returnee spoke passionately about sacrificing family relationships and fulfillment for significant economic incentives. “Look at what the Western world is doing to us. All of our families are scattered everywhere. Six children in a family haven’t seen each other in three years because everybody is looking for a better life,” she said in a clip that went mainstream. Except for a few that echoed her concerns, the comments that followed were largely cynical. Many users expressed incredulity at her claim of being a registered nurse. “Trump sent her back. She’s not being honest,” read one comment. “There is a difference between a caregiver and a registered nurse,” another scoffed.
For returnees, this climate of cynicism and misjudgment compounds the psychological toll of a complex reintegration process, preventing many from openly discussing their relocation. During the course of my reporting, I encountered a great deal of stonewalling from returnees, most of whom I sourced online, as well as from close contacts. Many declined my request for an interview, while some never responded to my calls and emails after initially agreeing to speak with me. “Sometimes it’s a yardstick to measure failure, so [returnees] don’t want to talk about it. In my case, the people I called refused to talk to me. They were like, ‘This is sensitive talk,’” Chukwuemeka explained to me, relating her own difficulties with interviewing returnees.
If returnees experience criticism online, the reaction is often no different from friends and family, who also struggle to understand the rationale for coming back to a country that many citizens are desperately dreaming of escaping. “One of my brothers basically called me and said, ‘You need psychiatric help,’” remembered Emeka Chuks-Nnadi, who closed his hotel and tourism agency in Barcelona to launch a swimming initiative in Nigeria.
Dark and clean-shaven, with an athletic physique, Chuks-Nnadi left Nigeria in 2001 for graduate studies in Europe, moving first to Rotterdam and later settling in Barcelona. “After my second master’s, I decided to stay and build my little empire. We made the most luxurious parties and events in Barcelona,” he told me one gray Sunday morning in June. Following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Chuks-Nnadi was forced to shutter his business as the lockdown devastated the global economy. Like most people, he couldn’t shake off a nagging sense of frustration from being “imprisoned” at home. The next July, just after the lockdown was eased in Spain, he booked a flight to Nigeria for a five-month vacation. It wasn’t his first trip home since he left, but it was the one that would finally hook him. He recalled his routine back then, living in an upscale neighbourhood close to a popular part of the Lagos waterfront. “Basically, I’d go every other day from where I was staying to swim at the Oniru Beach.” Delighted at his newfound freedom, he’d walk the sands and roll in the waves, swimming for long hours. “And every time I’d come out of the water, I’d have a bunch of little kids rally around and clap for me.” During the last days of his vacation, one of the kids begged him to teach them how to swim. He happily obliged. But the manager of the beach wouldn’t permit the training because “he didn’t want the kids mingling with the clients, you know,” Chuks-Nnadi said. Back in Barcelona, as Chuks-Nnadi thought long and hard about the pushback from the beach management, a calling he had long put off seemed to gnaw at him.
In the spring of 2022, he packed his bags in his Barcelona apartment and took the decisive flight back home to launch an initiative to teach people with disabilities how to swim. “The desire to come back to Nigeria was already there before,” Chuks-Nnadi said, adding that he always wanted to work with people with disabilities. His return, however, sparked mixed reactions from his family. While his mother gave her blessings, his brother wouldn’t hear of it. “He was like, ‘What you’re doing is the most stupid thing I’ve heard’ … I even lost friends because of that decision,” recalled Chuks-Nnadi, now dubbed Swim Guru.
“Both my family and my friends said it was village people,” said Kelly Njoku, who returned from the U.K. in 2023, referring to the idea that she was swayed by spiteful spirits. Njoku, a single parent, had moved to the U.K. as a graduate student in 2018. “I’d go to my library in my school at night with my work uniform in my bag just because you might get called up for an emergency,” she recalled. She became a full-time health care worker soon after graduation, which only piled on the agony. Mostly tending to an elderly group of patients, she felt a mounting frustration. “It was all work, back-to-back, standing for long hours, budgeting groceries. There was hardly any time to do meaningful things except work and pay bills. I hardly had time for my daughter.” But family members, always ready with an urgent request for money, couldn’t relate to her struggles. In 2023, Njoku returned home to launch a career in filmmaking — a decision that left both her intimate friends and family bewildered. “My mum cried like I had never seen before. She thought I had gone mad, that her enemies had succeeded in ruining her. Immediately she contacted her pastor for prayers,” she related, laughing at the memory. “I was prepared for that reaction, so it didn’t move me much.”
If Njoku had anticipated her mother’s reaction, the reception from other family members threw her off balance. Her explanation of returning to the country to become a filmmaker seemed to them like something of a hoax. “They kept insisting on why,” she recalled. “Why must I even have a reason for returning back home? One family relative went about gossiping that I was deported for drug trafficking. I had become a pariah all of a sudden. I felt so humiliated at everything.” A cloud of suspicion hovered over her. Her sisters advised her to consider other countries with a better work-life balance. People eyed her with suspicion the more frequently they saw her. Meanwhile, her mother, convinced that her daughter had fallen under a spell, continued to bounce around churches. “It was from one fasting and praying to another. She was just carrying my pictures around different prayer houses,” recalled Njoku, who was forced to secure her own apartment to escape from the ensuing family drama.
Unlike Njoku, Frances (who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity) didn’t face any such skepticism or judgment from family after she returned from Bahrain in 2024. But the responses from her old friends and colleagues were “unbelievable.” A picture she shared on Facebook of her family back in Nigeria was greeted largely with pity from friends. “It was really funny. It felt as if I was, maybe, a victim of unfortunate circumstances. Some were advising me to keep praying to God to give my family another visa,” she recounted. What they didn’t know was that her 4-year-old son had been grappling with a speech disability, prompting the family to make the move back home to encourage their kids to socialize with peers. “It was mostly homeschooling [in Bahrain] because we were stuck indoors for about two years.” But many people didn’t think this was a valid reason. “Old classmates speculated that we returned simply because we ran out of money and found life in Bahrain hard,” she continued. Embarrassed, Frances and her husband became particularly careful about sharing details of their personal lives on social media. “To protect our sanity and for the sake of the children, too, we just focused on WhatsApp, since our contacts are mostly family and close friends that knew the reason for our coming back.”
The idea of relocating to Nigeria from the West today can seem like an act of self-sabotage. The country is confronting its worst economic downturn in a generation. President Bola Tinubu’s removal of a long-standing petroleum subsidy more than two years ago caused transportation and food prices to go through the roof, sparking a cost-of-living crisis. While Nigerians now pay twice as much for electricity and internet subscriptions as they did a year ago, the services remain patchy and slow. Most small businesses survive on fuel-powered generators. And banditry is rife. As recently as June 13, around 200 villagers in a small farming community in the country’s breadbasket were murdered by men suspected to be nomadic pastoralists. On social media nowadays, it isn’t uncommon to find public appeals from Nigerians seeking donations to help pay a ransom — usually millions of naira — for their abducted family. Amid all of this, the sinking naira has dealt perhaps the most severe blow, pushing inflation in the country to 22% and eroding the incomes of most citizens. Last year, prompted by a series of strikes, the government raised the monthly minimum wage from 30,000 to 70,000 naira (roughly $20 to $47). Still, the new wage falls short of the price for a 110-pound bag of rice, a national staple, which is around 80,000 naira.
Last year, echoing similar protests by Kenyans and Ugandans in their countries, disenchanted Nigerians voiced their grievances over the high rates of economic deprivation. The wave of protests was met with a heavy crackdown as gun-toting police officers filled major cities across the country. At the same time, a record 52,000 Nigerians emigrated to the U.K. alone last year, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics. Although most arrivals were linked to work and study, a great many may have been driven by the desire for a better standard of living. A 2022 survey by the African Polling Institute indicated that 7 out of 10 young Nigerians would migrate if given the opportunity. In the discussion thread on Reddit, one user likened emigration to Nigeria from America as jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. “The USA under Trump is still infinitely better than Nigeria under T-Pain,” another user added, using a moniker for Tinubu that plays on his hard-line economic policies. This reflects a generally bleak perspective among Nigerians, who consider the odds against immigrants in Trump’s America as a lesser evil.
When Nigerians abroad indicate an intention to travel back home, their relatives and friends in Nigeria paint a picture of an impoverished, inflation-ridden hellscape controlled by an aging, corrupt elite. Sometimes, though, family members can blow these socioeconomic woes out of proportion for “selfish aims,” Njoku said. “It’s so sad, but most times they don’t want you to come back because they want you to keep sending money to them, so they will exaggerate the suffering at home and make it seem like they’re living in hell.” In 2024, Nigeria received $20.93 billion from personal remittances, a figure that accounts for a significant share of the country’s foreign exchange flow, surpassing even foreign direct investment. Relatives can also relish the feeling of status that comes from being associated with someone living overseas, Njoku pointed out. “They want to be able to brag that they have someone abroad that can solve their problems.”
Ten years after she left for Canada as an international student, Feyisope Macaulay returned to Nigeria with her family in December 2024, a move that she described as an “emotional decision.” Severe postpartum complications, coupled with the difficulty of combining work and child care, had taken a toll on her, changing her perspective. “In that moment, I had a mindset shift — to treat myself as a human being and not as a project,” she explained in a polished vlog shared on her YouTube channel in early February. “Living away from home for so long, I have felt the weight of distance, the miles between me and my homeland, my extended family, my traditions. And that is something that I want my children to have,” she went on. The video triggered an avalanche of comments from mostly African immigrants, who were charmed by its “honesty” and “beautiful storytelling.” Many praised her courage and offered her kind prayers for the journey ahead. Yet a few uncharitable comments stood out. “U will come back to Canada for sure,” one user wrote. Highlighting the corrupt system in Nigeria, another noted, “Good video however I’m sad to break it to you … you have just started. The road is long and you may not enjoy it at all.”
Indeed, readapting to the local culture after considerable time in the West may not be an enjoyable experience for returnees. Astounded at how much has changed in the years since they left, most returnees confront a slew of hurdles. Despite renting accommodation in an upscale Lagos neighbourhood, Frances and her family contended with an absence of basic amenities. “The water was always reddish-brown. We couldn’t use it for anything except for washing. Sometimes they would pour so much chlorine in the water tank just to treat it, and then the water would start smelling,” she said. When Frances complained to them, her neighbors shrugged off her concerns, suggesting that she use bottled water — an extra cost for the family. While Njoku had braced herself for the infrastructure problems, her transition was far from seamless. Locals, drawn by her genteel British drawl, appeared too desperate to exploit her. “Everyone assumes that I have come back with a container of money, and they start to inflate their prices. Or they make promises and tell me sorry when they don’t fulfill their promise because they think I’m not Nigerian enough to make trouble with them,” she said, recounting her unsavory experiences with local artisans. Being treated preferentially made her uneasy because she didn’t “know if it’s just real or if it’s because they think I have money to give them,” she added. Chuks-Nnadi knows this attitude so well. “If you’re strong enough, you could withstand it. But if you’re not, you’re going to be suffering,” he said.
Across YouTube, returnees share their varied experiences with reintegration, from failed business ventures to accommodation challenges. Documenting their reasons for returning, they share glimpses from their everyday lives. Videos include captions like “How I Shipped My Things to Nigeria” or “Avoid Moving to Lekki [a ritzy district in] Lagos Unless You Can Handle These 10 Facts.” Some even encourage the diaspora to reverse course, highlighting “the cultural, social, and professional opportunities that await,” according to the blurb of one podcast. Hosted by a mother and daughter who recently relocated, the podcast counters perceived notions about returning to Nigeria, featuring a variety of returnees who are successfully navigating the struggles with transition. But some never manage to weather the storm.
Six months into her stay, Macaulay reached a breaking point. In a 20-minute vlog titled “Returning to Canada — What I Would Do Differently,” the YouTuber announced, with a look of resignation, that she was back in Canada. In a sequel uploaded on June 21, Macaulay broke down her reasons in detail. “It started with my daughter waking up around 2 a.m. one night,” she recounted, “and vomiting for a long time … I didn’t want to risk going out at that time, but it wouldn’t stop.” The parents dashed out to a nearby hospital, where a diagnostic test indicated that their 3-year-old had come down with severe malaria and a bacterial infection in her gut. “They gave her an injection to stop the vomiting, and that was great.” But the antimalarial medication seemed to trigger a rash days later. “After a while we noticed that she was itchy … it was literally black spots all over,” Macaulay continued, describing the burst of rashes on her daughter’s skin. Doctors reckoned that the rash might be a quirky mechanism for the body to readjust to the tropical climate, but her parents were already lost in a fit of panic. “If we had stayed, she probably would have adjusted,” the YouTuber says toward the end of her 34-minute clip. “But we just were not going to wait for that to happen.” As the family drove back home that night, their minds were made up. Almost immediately, they booked a flight back to Canada.
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