Fed up with trying to build his Lagos-based software company during a recession, Femi Ashiru decided to put his dream of making it “big” on hold and try his luck back in Britain instead.
This year the well-travelled son of a Nigerian diplomat joined soaring numbers of his compatriots who have landed in Britain since Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration system was launched in 2021. He had no difficulty finding work.
“Instead of being a tech leader, I’m one of the senior developers,” said Ashiru, 43, who graduated in electrical engineering from Manchester University. “The difference is at the end of the month I have a regular paycheck.”
Nigerian migrants showed by far the biggest growth (and were second and third in absolute terms) among the top five nationalities granted skilled work visas and sponsored study visas for Britain last year. Often highly educated, the Nigerians are filling gaps left by departing Europeans and driving growing industries like technology. Many take degrees. Others are propping up the health service. Some are taking advantage of a relaxation of rules to come over as students and start families on the NHS.
Temitope Lasisi, 29, is one of the latter. She and her husband Adebowale, both engineers, moved from Lagos to Middlesbrough while she was pregnant in February 2021. She started a two-year master’s degree in electrical power and energy systems at Teesside University, and had her baby, Jamil, in May. Foreign students, who must show proof they can pay for their degree and life in Britain, were already allowed to bring their families. By paying the NHS annual surcharge, they could access healthcare, including for maternity. The difference now is that when Lasisi finishes her degree, she may be able to stay with her family in the UK if she finds a job. Consultants say Nigerians using the student visa to come over and have a baby is a growing trend.
“The UK has cultural diversity,” Lasisi said. “It has a history of being friendly to international students. That is the first reason for choosing the UK. And also it’s family-friendly, you can move in with your family as long as you have money.” She added: “I migrated to the UK because of the good healthcare system”, acknowledging that the fact she could have her baby with NHS support was a factor.
Interviews with six Nigerians who have made the move suggest there are two main reasons why they are increasingly opting for Britain over other attractive English-speaking destinations, such as the US and Canada.
Culturally, Britain is a natural fit. Those taking the seven-hour flight from Lagos are often going back to where they studied or joining friends or family. “The UK is like a second home for Nigerians like myself,” said Adewale Adetona, 33, who moved to London in December to work in marketing, including for Flutterwave, a Nigerian-founded fintech company that operates a platform for sending remittances around the world. “You meet a lot of Nigerians here every day.” The time difference is at most one hour and for much of the year non-existent.
But it is clear that the new immigration rules have also had an effect.
A quarter more work visas and 50 per cent more student visas were granted by the UK last year, after the new points-based immigration system came into force in January 2021, compared with 2019, the last year before the pandemic. The proportion of those going to applicants from outside Europe shot up. Now only one in ten migrant workers comes from the EU; only 5 per cent of foreign students do. Nigerians made up the sharpest increase in arrivals. The number of visas granted to Nigerians excluding visitors grew from just over 19,000 in 2019 to more than 59,000 last year, with more than 28,000 arriving in the first quarter of 2022.
The points-based immigration system has opened up half of all jobs in Britain to foreign workers, by lowering salary and skill thresholds for migrants. Health and care workers, electricians, chefs and those in many other professions now qualify for skilled-worker visas. The new health and care worker visa, launched in August 2020 before the rest of the skilled-worker system, has been cited as a big reason for the spike in Nigerian arrivals. And the system overturns the decision by Theresa May’s government to stop foreign students staying in the UK when they finish their degrees.
A rise in Nigerian enrolments helped the UK attract 600,000 international students for the first time in the 2020-21 academic year.
If they get visa sponsorship from a job, they can stay, or they can apply for a two-year postgraduate visa, an option taken by Chika Dilli, 34, a lawyer who finished a legal master’s at Nottingham Trent University last year. “I’ve got two years and you’re able to work with it,” she said. “You can do almost any kind of work apart from being a sports professional! So I’m able to work for two years until I decide if I want to get a proper skilled-worker visa.”
Many Nigerians know all of this. They have become students of the immigration systems of rich countries like Britain. Twitter conversations advise “how to move to the UK legally”. Companies helping them have popped up. “Japa”, a Yoruba word meaning “run away”, has become a popular hashtag and a label of pride. Oludayo Sokunbi runs Japa Consults, which he set up in October last year responding to a surge in demand for information about how to study abroad. He said Nigerians were choosing Britain because of the offer to stay on afterwards.
Sokunbi also said that for his clients, which now number 76, the UK’s visa system was working more efficiently than others. “Most of them, to be honest, I advise they go to the UK because the UK seems to be the fastest way if you are looking for education,” he said. He said it takes about three months from initially applying to flying, a timeframe confirmed by Adetona and one other student, compared with six months for Canada. The US, which unlike Britain and Canada requires a rigorous interview, often rejects people, Sokunbi said. The UK holds interviews, but Sokunbi said they are more forgiving. He said a friend failed the first time, but was invited back for another go and after some simple coaching by Sokunbi he passed. He added that clients like how explicit the UK is about when foreign students must pay their tuition fees — it allows them to plan ahead.
The impact on Nigeria is enormous. The country is facing its largest exodus in a generation, perhaps ever. Half of young Nigerians want to leave, a World Bank survey found last June, the third highest proportion for any country surveyed, behind Sierra Leone and Liberia. Nigeria’s net migration rate is around -0.28, according to the UN, meaning about 56,000 more Nigerians are leaving than arriving per year, or about 150 a day. The chairman of Nigeria’s health commissioners forum last month suggested “the current wave of brain drain is much higher than at any other time in the country’s history”.
Nigerians are fleeing a stagnant economy, beset by 40 per cent youth unemployment and some of the highest inflation in the world, which hit 16.8 per cent annually in April. About 40 per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty. In education, university staff have been on strike 16 times since 1999, and are currently four months into the latest action.
There is also rampant insecurity, the sum of several growing crises, including widespread terrorism and kidnapping in the north, a revitalised separatist campaign in the southeast and concerns over police brutality which came to a head with the massacre of at least 12 protesters in Lagos in 2020. The number of people killed in Nigeria leapt by almost a half last year to 10,366, according to Lagos-based SBM Intelligence.
Even for many middle-class Nigerians, life at home has become unbearable.
“Nigerians have a lot of love for their country,” said a British-born Nigerian HR executive in London who asked not to be named. “A lot of people have gone back with a lot of hopes and dreams which have been quashed, because of the environment.”
Ashiru, the diplomat’s son, said: “Whatever you make devalues by half, it’s harder the next year, it happens again and after a while you think this is ridiculous. You remember you’re highly skilled, went to a British university, you look at what you’re earning and think why am I doing this exactly?”
Remittances, which have overtaken oil as the country’s number one source of foreign exchange, will continue to pump money into the economy over decades. But sectors like health are being devastated. Nigeria’s doctor-to-patient ratio is now 1 to 6,000, far short of the WHO’s recommended 1 to 600.
A senior doctor in Nigeria earns between 3 million and 6 million naira a year (£4,000 to £8,000 at commonly used black market rates), about a tenth of what they would get from the NHS.
Nigeria has been an exporter of people going back to the days of the slave trade, Cheta Nwanze, who runs SBM Intelligence, said. He said it has also seen three previous waves of emigration since independence from Britain in 1960: the first in the late 1960s kickstarted by the horrors of the civil war; the second in which professionals escaped a collapsed economy in the 1980s; and the third during which lower-class Nigerians fled the dictatorial 1990s regime of Sani Abacha en masse, moving illegally to places like Britain and Belgium.
But this one is more damaging, he said, because the neglected education system has declined to the point that it can no longer produce workers good enough to fill the gaps left by middle-class emigrants. “One of the biggest problems we face is the quality of people that we have to employ now,” he said. “They are not as good as a generation before. A lot of organisations are having to spend more in training new staff. Some of the people that are coming through are simply untrainable.”