By Omokejimi Samuel Abayomi
Editor-in-Chief, Ikosi Isheri FocusTV
Lagos Community News Review
It starts with a whisper in the neighborhood — someone knows someone who “made it” to Europe. Not through visas or schools, but through the sea.
They call it japa now, but in the dark corners of Lagos, it is not just about leaving; it is about surviving.
Last month, I met Azeez, 19, standing by the rusted iron gate of a mechanic workshop in Ketu. His hands were black with grease, his mind elsewhere.
“My uncle is sending me,” he said flatly. “Libya, then boat. God willing, Italy.”
His words carried no excitement — only calculation, like someone deciding whether to run into a burning house or stay in a collapsing one.
Azeez is not uneducated. He finished secondary school, even took a diploma course in electrical installation. But after two years of searching for work, Lagos offered him nothing but casual labor and debts he could not pay.
“I watch my mother cry at night,” he said, lowering his voice. “She pretends it’s from the smoke of the stove. But I know. She’s tired. We all are.”
The stories he hears from returnees are carefully edited — the nights under open desert sky, the freezing water, the beatings, the disappearances — these are footnotes to the promise of a European street paved, if not with gold, at least with survival.
In Ajegunle, I sat in a cramped room with six boys, all under 23, each saving for the same one-way journey. None of them have passports yet. None of them have contacts abroad. All of them have already told their mothers “not to cry when they leave.”
What they do not say out loud is that some will never come back.
According to IOM data, thousands of Nigerians attempt irregular migration every year, many through Libya’s deadly routes. Some make it. Many vanish. Their names become prayers in homes that will never know the truth.
I ask Azeez if he knows the risks. He nods.
“I don’t fear dying,” he said. “I fear dying here — slowly, for nothing.”
His answer is not just a personal tragedy. It is a national alarm.
Every boat that leaves the North African coast with a Nigerian inside it is an indictment — a record of broken promises, failed systems, and wasted youth.
As journalists, we are trained to inform. But stories like this demand more. They demand pressure on governments to create pathways for safe migration, to build local industries that absorb talent, to fix the education-to-employment gap that is driving desperation faster than reform.
Azeez is still in Lagos as I write this. His uncle’s contact in Tripoli has stopped answering calls. For now, that pause may have saved his life.
But for how long? How long before another door opens, another dangerous offer arrives, another mother prays into her scarf while her child risks the sea?
Migration is not a crime. But when leaving home feels like the only way to live, we must admit — the crisis is not at the border; it’s at home.
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