Northern youths seek relief in Middle East, North Africa
Make fortunes from travel agency, tailoring, others ‘We also face dire situation in Qatar’
A year later, he returned home with “accomplished wealth,” after which he bought a plot of land and built a house in Kano. He now plans to migrate to Qatar, where he hopes to find a more lucrative job
Nigeria’s economic crisis has plunged millions of its citizens into poverty. The situation is dire in the northern region, where insecurity, poor infrastructure and low human capacity development have worsened living conditions. In this report, Daily Trust Saturday captured a migration trend among northern youths who leave the shores of Nigeria in search of better living conditions in the Middle East and North Africa.
Hassan Dantsoho, a graduate of the Yusuf Maitama Sule University in Kano State plans to relocate to Kuwait, one of the world’s oil-rich countries in the Middle East. Five years after his graduation from the university, Dantshoho remains unemployed but anticipates a better life across Nigeria’s borders.
With a well mapped out plan and an anticipated N40million in fortunes within two years, the 30-year-old is optimistic that by the end of February 2024 he would bid farewell to his family in Kano, North West Nigeria, for a new life in Kuwait.
“My plan is to start a travel agency when I make it to Kuwait,” he told this reporter in December 2023.
“I will then focus on health personnel and other skilled and unskilled persons in Nigeria who want to migrate.
“If you take plumbing for example, the
Arab do not delve into such menial jobs, but if you take our people to Kuwait they will do it and earn at least N600,000 as monthly income,” Dantsoho said.
Dantsoho is already building a network and scouting for big companies in Kuwait that require employees from Nigeria, especially from the medical field.
“As a doctor in Kuwait you can earn a salary of at least N6million a month. So, with that you won’t need to return to Nigeria; instead, you can invest by building a hospital in the country,” he said.
Faced with unemployment at home, Dantsoho is one of many Nigerians from the northern region whose dream for a better life is pushing to seek better opportunities in foreign lands, such as Kuwait, Qatar, Algeria and other Middle East and North African countries.
Records show a growing migration trend in Nigeria, with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) tracking about 243, 121 persons who migrated from Nigeria to different countries in 2022.
The record, which is based on migrants’ health assessment, shows that 196,695 Nigerians migrated to the United Kingdom, while 40,706 persons migrated to Canada and 2,428 persons to the United States of America in the same year. It also captured 3,280 persons who migrated to Austria, while 12 persons migrated to unspecified destinations.
The data shows an increase of 127.5 per cent in 2022, which is twice the 102,503 migrant assessments conducted in 2021, especially across the UK, Canada, USA and Austria.
The growing migration trend is similar to findings of a 2023 research by the Migration Control.Info, which revealed that the number of Nigerians living outside the country had almost tripled between 1990 and June 2020. The figure rose from 447,411 to 1,670,455, with majority of Nigerians in the diaspora from the country’s South-South, North-Central and South-West geo-political zones.
However, this report by Daily Trust
Saturday captures another largely undocumented migration pattern among many youths from the northern region in search of better opportunities travel to the Middle East and North Africa.
‘I came back home smiling after my first voyage’
From the narrow streets and alleys of Madigawa in the metropolitan city of Kano State, where tradition and modernity intersect, a 27-year-old Hassan Abdulsalam, a tailor found his way across Nigeria’s borders to Algeria in 2021.
A year later, he returned home with “accomplished wealth,” after which he bought a plot of land and built a house in Kano. He now plans to migrate to Qatar, where he hopes to find a more lucrative job.
“I travelled through Niger Republic and didn’t pay money to anyone,” he told this reporter with a smug, while pedaling a manual sewing machine with keen concentration.