Osmosis
Science, desire, and a generation's great displacement.
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When NEPA brought light that evening, the last flicker of Dami’s hope burned out.
In front of her was a familiar scene as she walked home: people out on the street and balconies—sitting, walking, talking—and some light in the sky to feel like a day but not enough to pierce the gathering darkness burying the faces and buildings below.
One moment, there hadn’t been electricity for a whole week, and the next, just as her house came within view, NEPA brought light. The next instant, alarm bells and sirens started going off in people’s homes—loud enough to drown out the noise of generators so people knew to switch power to NEPA. Then came the people going berserk, screaming UP NEPA, on the streets and in their homes in one loud but dense roar.
Dami was 27, lived with her parents, and had been screaming UP NEPA her entire life. That year, 2017, if you asked ten people living in Nigeria, a little less than five would tell you they had access to electricity.
This fact was part of a larger reality setting in for Dami. The electricity that was restored was temporary. She knew with certainty that power would be out at best in a few hours or days. She’d organised her entire life around this unpredictable flicker: what to refrigerate, what to wear, when to charge her devices what times she woke up or went to bed. Beyond power, even more was happening around her. Whenever she landed a job, it didn’t pay well or consistently. When she started seeking writing opportunities abroad, she couldn’t be eligible for her income – PayPal didn’t exist in Nigeria. Other times, she’d try to seek out opportunities and have to fill out her country information and Nigeria wouldn’t even be an option. As the months passed, the opportunities became fewer and hope dimmer.
Her life in Nigeria—no matter how much potential it had—would constantly suffer interruption in many forms, leaving her teetering on the edge of frustration.
“Why must it be so hard to do basic things,” Dami asked herself.
The more she considered her future—doing work that gave her joy, starting a family—the more she knew she didn’t want to create that future in Nigeria. As she arrived home, she texted her brother, who lived in the UK, and they started researching a path out of Nigeria together.
I wrote a commercial for the first time in 2015. Dami was the friend who coached me through the fundamentals of writing ads and made sure I pulled it off on time to meet my three-day deadline. Dami had only a few years of experience, but she’d put in the hours writing ads at a small agency for several media: print, radio, TV, and the growing Nigerian Internet.
When Dami decided to leave Nigeria, her frustrations were familiar. I’d heard it in small talk at events and big decision conversations with friends, and I’d felt it in my own life. We had frustrations; then someone would reach a tipping point, go through the tumultuous process, pack or sell everything they owned, and leave the country, hoping for the best.
Sometime in the middle of 2020, while spending lockdown alone with all the books I was reading, all the podcasts I was listening to, and all the work I was struggling to do, I arrived at a deeper understanding of what this clear and growing discontent we all felt meant.
Rewind. All the way back to Integrated Science class. JSS 3. 2004.
I sat in a class with thirty-four other boys, listening in awe to a teacher, less for what he was saying and more for his technique. The teacher was the only one of our twelve who never used any notes, just straight from his head.
“What is osmosis?” he asked as he chalked the topic on the top of the blackboard. “Osmosis is the movement of molecules,” he continued before anyone could respond, “from a region of lower concentration to a higher concentration through a semi-permeable membrane.”
The teacher started illustrating on the board: he drew a two-dimensional bowl, one line down the board, to the right and back up. Then, he drew a line connecting the two tips. He added two squiggly spheres he called potatoes.
When potatoes are placed in salt water, he explained, they become limp because the water inside them moves out to the more concentrated salt water solution.
“Now,” the teacher asked, “who can tell me the stages of Osmosis?” No one answered.
Osmosis is a biological process that mirrors a specific human desire. In the middle of 2020, I realised that just as water seeks a higher concentration, we, too, are drawn by natural law to seek out places where our greatest aspirations can flourish. We yearn for a world that resonates deeply with our ambitions and values. The world is our water bowl, and we’re the water trapped in a drifting potato.
In the first stage of osmosis, a concentration gradient is established: “The water is saltier on the other side of this potato.”
Our world is only as big as the information accessible to us. A century ago in Nigeria, your world mirrored the breadth of your interactions. Expansion came from a teacher, a page of The Daily Times, a traveller who sailed back from Liverpool, or a pilgrim who just made the tumultuous desert trip from Hajj in Makkah. Our world expanded further as TV entered homes and global travel became more accessible. And, of course, the internet. Each click, a country, each swipe, a new scene to yearn for.
By whatever means the world comes to us, one truth is constant: the moment the size of our reality stretches to accommodate new possibilities, something shifts.
This is the defining displacement of our generation—the constant conflict of first-world aspirations within a third-world reality. We’re engaging with pieces of a world vastly better than our own—stable systems, smoothly run societies, more opportunities and most of all, hope.
When this difference in reality is established, a gap exists between clarity and the audacity to act on it. The gap is sometimes a leash, tethering us to our current reality, resisting the momentum for osmosis to happen.
For starters, moving to another country is expensive, with costs ranging from proof-of-funds to certifications, applications, flight tickets, and finally, the money to ease settling into a new country. Only a small fraction of Nigerians will ever be able to take action or follow through. The gap is also filled with a mix of emotions. There’s the fear of grappling with identity, loneliness from being so far away from loved ones, the guilt of leaving them behind, and the unknown.
One way this gap manifests is optimism, the idea that incredible things are possible despite the bleakness. The nature of optimism is that it’s stupid until it’s visionary. The optimist finds a purpose, feeds it, and when confronted with bleakness, says:
“This work matters; these small bricks will build the future.”
Their optimism is an act of resistance confronted with harsh Nigerian realities. Some truths don’t change: optimism doesn’t immediately improve spending power, make the highways safer, or make the job market more friendly. Nigeria continues to bite for the time being.
So, how do you survive with your aspirations intact in a society that mocks their existence? You build a bubble.
In Nigeria, there are 200 million governments. We’re the custodians of our welfare. Without public utilities, we power our homes and provide our water. We hire our private security or privatise public security; about two in every three policemen in Nigeria are attached to VIPs who can afford it. When we’re lucky, we find communities—people who see the world as we do and with whom we can forget the nature of our reality. It’s in the spaces where people affirm our aspirations, whether they’re corners of the internet or offline in offices and events.
But the things to control—water, security, power—never end. For example, replacing public power with solar power can cost up to ₦22 million. Private security is expensive. The basic comforts of a dignified life that we pay for are, in fact, luxury.
There’s a small message in everything: the sound of the generator at close range, the news that an entire village disappeared overnight, and the tension as you drive up to a trailer carrying a container.
Everything says the same thing: “Something is broken. Everything is broken.” Our panic is prophecy because the nature of bubbles, no matter how much we fortify them, is that they must burst.
One day, someone in your family, maybe your aunty, would go to a hospital to complain about a pain in her chest. The overworked doctor in an understaffed hospital would prescribe painkillers for what would be discovered two years later as stage four cancer. One evening while watching TV, you’ll receive news that your in-law has been plucked off a highway in broad daylight by kidnappers, and his life will be snuffed out unless you pay a healthy ransom.
You’re safe behind your private security, but one day, you’re at a checkpoint with a policeman who insists that what you know to be white is, in fact, red. When you’ve had enough, you protest with young people like you to demand change.
Everything you’ve learned from building your systems—logistics, security, communication, support—ensures you’re prepared, but it won’t be enough. Tuesday night, October 2020, the Nigerian army will show up in Lagos and open fire at tired protesters, then pretend it didn’t happen. It won’t be the first time they’d massacred Nigerians or protesters; they just happened to have their biggest audience.
A hedonometer measuring the degree of happiness or sadness showed that Bloody Tuesday was one of the saddest days of 2020. That night, something shifted in many people.
Several months ago, a former colleague arrived at my house a few minutes before midnight. He was doing the final rounds before leaving the country. For my stop, he showed up with an extensive collection of twenty-year-old magazines he believed should be digitised. He also shared stories about the tumultuous process of finding a country, any country in the West, with a clear path to citizenship for him and his family. Bloody Tuesday was his tipping point; he called up another friend that night.
“We can’t continue in this country,” he said to his friend, who agreed. It took them almost three years, but now, they live outside Nigeria on two continents over 7,000 kilometres apart. They used to live less than an hour from each other.
When hope is diminished and opportunity means little, we begin the draining journey through the semi-permeable border.
Back in the classroom, the teacher drew two arrows pointing out the potato and into the rest of the bowl. “Now,” he said, as he added finishing touches to his crooked arrows, “the molecules of water start moving out and into the more concentrated solution”
Japa is in full swing.
As a child, seeing people off the airport always felt bittersweet; a loved one leaving meant I couldn’t see them again but also a toy or a shirt was coming back to me in my future.
As an adult, the first friend I saw off at the airport left in 2019, a decade after he first got paid to write software. Farouq’s final straw broke over three months and multiple stress points. First, he felt like he’d hit his technical ceiling locally when companies couldn’t afford to pay him enough for his depth of experience. He’d contemplated an offer in the UK for a while, and just a few hours before the offer closed, he applied. He left with his family in three months.
Murtala Muhammed Airport departures had an electric sense of urgency. If you had a flight ticket, it was easy to get in. Everyone else had to prove why they deserved to see their family one last time:
“I’m her mother.”
“He’s my husband. See our wedding ring.”
“I’m his brother.”
I managed to get in with a lie and one of my friend’s suitcases in hand. Everything felt hurried: getting in, the security checks. I watched him in the distance as he checked in, turned a left corner, and turned around to sneak in a final goodbye.
It was Farouq’s first time leaving Nigeria, his first time on a plane and the last time he’s set foot in Nigeria. Every few months since then, I’ve had a last brunch, a last hangout, or a last excursion to the airport. For everyone japa-ing, there’s the bitterness of leaving a familiar world behind but the optimism of going to a new world with hope and opportunity.
It was the same with Farouq; it was also the same with Dami.
After that night in 2017, Dami began the slow and tumultuous process of making a new home in a new country. She took any gig that paid and saved all her earnings. She, a writer of essays, papers, advertising and screen, took an English test. She got married—her wedding was our last hangout—and started a new life in Canada. All in eighteen months.
I counted all the people who left after Dami. Friends, people I’d liked enough to hang out with at least over and over. I stopped counting at twenty-six. One Whatsapp group has twelve guys trying to catch up as we got busier and the stakes at our Lagos jobs climbed. Only five of us still live in Nigeria. We’re all forming new rituals across continents over WhatsApp and Google Meet. Every other month, they’ll send photos of the kids, and we’ll also say, “Oh wow, she has grown so much. She used to be so tiny.” Always over Whatsapp, never them in your arms.
Every time there’s a departure—when someone dies, a colleague resigns, or a friend japas—the left-behind ask themselves, “Why am I here?” Whether the answers soothe or trouble them, the left-behind will have their loneliness to manage.
Japa feels like a slow-burning refugee crisis. It’s migration driven by desperation. The fatalities are vastly different in scale to a humanitarian disaster as hope dies a slow, flickering death, but the human cost is real. In 2006, almost 2,600 Nigerians arrived in Canada as permanent residents. In the next decade, over 33,000 Nigerians became permanent residents. In 2022 alone, over 22,000 Nigerians landed in Canada as permanent residents.
Nigerians have migrated for decades. Every year, thousands of young Nigerians scatter across America, Europe, and the Middle East, but the current drain scale is unprecedented by all indications.
This wouldn’t seem like much of a problem. What are a few tens of thousands of people leaving every year when there are over 100 million of us? But it’s not just any tens of thousands—it’s people with skills critical for an emerging economy. Of the twenty-six people in my life who’ve left in the past five years, three are health workers, seven are designers and engineers, three are in finance, and eight are creatives. Most of them were at major inflexion points in their careers.
Their destination countries—the US, UK and Canada as leading destinations—have immigration policies that say, "Come to me,” but with a catch: “Come to me, the best of you who are tired and weary, I’ll give you rest.”
2004.
I was at the back of the class, struggling to stay engaged, as were most other boys. The teacher was pacing the class, cane in hand. I don’t remember his eyes because he was such a prolific flogger. You held a gaze for too long, and then what? What if he asked you a question, and you didn’t know the answer?
“The reason osmosis happens,” the teacher explained near the end of his 35-minute class, “is because equilibrium has to occur. The concentration has to become the same on both sides of the membrane.” The same concentration, within or outside the potato.
I think a lot about what equilibrium means. It’s not an absence of movement; it’s a system in flux, an even movement back and forth. in this case. Sometimes, I think about it as people who’ve left for one reason or another returning home.
In January 2020, I had a conversation with an engineer who went from interning at Tesla to returning to Nigeria.
“I work in the off-grid industry providing electricity to the unelectrified,” he said. ”You can only do that in Africa, and Nigeria has one of the largest unelectrified populations in the world.” He sounded the optimist at the beginning of osmosis again. A force that holds people back had, in a sense, brought him back home.
Perhaps equilibrium could also mean maintaining a sense of connection with home, whether it be the balancing act of shuffling between two countries over months, years, or a lifetime. But one way it manifests is perhaps in how people, no matter what, choose to maintain some form of connection with home. It could be a bag of shirts and toys, a car, or a few dollars here and there. They add up.
We, the people, are Nigeria’s second biggest export after oil. We leave weary, seeking to become more in the world and return refined ideas and, quite significantly, hard currency. In 2022, Nigerians sent home almost $21 billion, compared to the Nigerian government’s leading source of income, crude oil, generating $45.6 billion.
Our artists sell out the most monumental venues across the Americas and Europe at unprecedented scales, performing to thousands of audiences and singing back to them word for word. There are large non-Nigerian audiences, too, but the Nigerian horde in most of those halls is undeniable.
Whenever I see a well-made Hollywood movie, I sit through the credits, looking for a Nigerian name. I do a small yay when I find one, wondering if they left sometime in the last decade or if it was their parents who left a generation ago.
It’s bittersweet to seek out other places to reach your full potential, but any sweetness is welcome when you leave home because, as the poet Warsan Shire describes it, “home is the mouth of a shark.”
A few weeks ago, I was trapped in the airport's departure lounge in Accra; my flight back to Lagos had been delayed for two hours. While I was there, a loved one was dealing with a crisis: she’d received a job offer from Germany. It came in the middle of her crisis; she’d done impactful work for most of the past decade, working as a creative. But she’d also hit a ceiling; there were no longer enough opportunities for her locally. The job in Germany offered a better salary compared to her Nigerian income.
There were buts. As a creative where the work you produce is largely tied to the context and environment you produce it, it meant that she’d have to leave a lot of it behind. She would move to a country where she barely knew anyone, live in temporary accommodation for six months, and begin to build a new life in a cold country. She’d spend a few years, and when she qualifies for citizenship, there’s a possibility she might revoke her Nigerian citizenship. A life in Germany would most likely offer her a much larger life. But at what cost?
As I paced the lobby, I wondered about my fate. I live in Nigeria. I understand inertia in my personal life. I work on Archivi.ng, a product that demands to be nurtured from zero to one from here. I write on Vistanium, where most stories attempt to capture the Nigerian condition from the ground.
It’s work that matters to me and the world, I believe. But I know optimism is not enough. Nigeria is on the offensive, and I need to maintain a bubble. I always have measures to make a living here more bearable. Worrying less about power. I use multiple internet providers to reduce downtime. I make new friends I know will leave, just as the old ones did. I save in dollars when the naira falls, then in naira when it puts up a fight. I step on my throttle when I drive past a trailer. I try to de-escalate every time I’m at a checkpoint. I’m in the gap between clarity and action.
I know all the other tipping points have missed me for now, and I wonder what it’ll be. Will it be when the money in my hand is worth less than toilet paper? Or when I lose another loved one?
Does it even matter what it will be? Because what kills a hundred-year-old, heart failure or natural law?
It feels like sand in my palms; the harder I squeeze, the more sand seeps out.
Dami has lived in Canada for over four years now. Everything she’d hoped and prayed for—light and safety—was now abundant. It didn’t come all at once; there was the struggle with adjusting, culture shock, missing the familiar, and landing opportunities that made her happy. The one thing that was in abundance from the first day was hope.
Some things still linger. She turns off the lights, not just to save power but because she still struggles to grasp having it in abundance. She still catches herself heading home, wondering if there’s light. “That feeling of not having the basic stuff you should have,” Dami’s voice note said, “it follows you.”
“I miss home every day so much,” she told me in a voice note over WhatsApp one Monday in March. “Then I remembered things aren’t any better than when I left. There are things I want my children to experience about Nigeria that they never will, and that’s sad.” They’ll build new traditions and experiences over Zoom, WhatsApp, and holiday visits back home every few years.
Maybe this, too, is a form of equilibrium: missing her home country but feeling truly at home in her new home in Canada because, in the end, Dami is happy.
It Took A Village (and a lot of time) To Bring This Together
I’m not sure when the idea for this essay first came, but I know it was in 2020 after reading The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, an exploration of consumption habits in contemporary America. Understandably, it was quite American in its lens. But it made me ask what that looked like in Nigeria and what the motions of this demographic might be. That question set in motion everything this essay has become. So, shout out to Elizabeth Currid-Halkett for writing.
This approach to the essay is a third attempt. The first one felt like a commentary on Elizabeth’s book, trying to explore the idea of a Nigerian Aspirational Class. Derin and Afolabi read it in 2020: it wasn’t working. So I abandoned it. The second approach was closer to this, centring the journey and phenomenon, but it felt hollow. But it was this third one that turned out to be the charm.
I was supposed to work on another essay based on Ope’s recommendation. But two things happened as I paced the airport lobby: the idea for the cover image, a remake of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, came to mind. I immediately sent a voice note to Mariam. Mariam and I, what we have is telepathic, so she responded with this cover art. There was nothing to improve. Shout out to Mariam.
The second thing I realised was that I was trying to write about this experience without writing myself into it. When I added my perspective, it started to make sense.
This version then went through a series of rounds of editing. Afolabi interrogated the argument, Solomon interrogated the copy, and Ruka interrogated the structure; Sonia and ChatGPT did a final sweep for typos. They made this bearable. If Ruka had asked me to make one more adjustment, I might have burst into tears. I’m tired.
I spoke to many people to put this together; thank you to all of you, especially Zainab, Eruke, and most of all, Dami and Farouq.
It took so long to get this published, and the only reason this exists for you to read is because of Vistanium’s members. Their membership is what pays for this writing and allows it to exist. If you believe it deserves to exist, then become a member here.
Well written. Welldone.
Every single article is a hit. Back to back.
Love how this one uses osmosis to capture the motions and longings that arise from chasing your dreams where they are likelier without begging/struggling for the basic necessities of life.