By Funke Egbemode
Ace Actor, my multi talented friend, Yemi Sodimu, started a riot with this post some days ago:
“E wa o, dis omo meji meji that we are ‘borning’, se kii se wahala lojo iwaju for us in the south bayi?”
I will explain it in simple terms.
” Every Yoruba family now favours two children per couple. Are we ready for the trouble ahead in the South?”
Well, if you ask me, I think the consequences have arrived already. At least the first batch has. When last did you find a a Yoruba okada rider in Lagos? Some weeks ago, in Mowe, which is Ogun state, a confused Google Map forced me to look for an okada to lead me to my destination. Alas, my Northern Bro didn’t know the address and didn’t speak a word of English. The frustration was a killjoy. By the time I arrived the party venue, I was no longer in party mood. A lot is going to change in the South very soon, very quickly.
If Yemi’s post had been just about family planning and smaller families, it would have been compact enough to be wrapped with a few leaves . But the trouble ahead is not a regional one. It is a national malady. For we have all sinned. Like Chief Adeyemi.
Chief Ramos Adeyemi sits in a house that used to breathe, a house that was once a home filled with laughter, warmth and activities.
These days, it only echoes, emptily.
The man did everything right—at least, everything Nigeria told him was right. He worked hard, made money, built houses, invested strategically. He married one wife and stayed with her until she passed on a year ago. They had only two children, out of choice, not because they ran out of healthy eggs or fertile sperm. They just wanted the number of children they could give the best. Then, he did the ultimate: he exported his children to “better life.”
Tunde is now in London. Sade is in Canada. And God has been kind to them. Between divine favour and level-headed choices, they have conquered accents, mortgages, and winter.
Their widowed father is not doing so well. He now depends on an absent-minded nurse to check his blood pressure, blood sugar and make his meals. These days, he would sit in his large living room, phone in hand, staring at pictures of Tunde in a suit somewhere in London, Sade smiling beside a winter tree in Canada. They looked happy. Successful. Exactly what he had prayed for.
And yet, the house remained stubbornly silent.
Sometimes, when the evening stretched too long, he would step outside and sit under the fading sun. The neighbor’s children would run past, laughing loudly, their noise spilling into his compound like a reminder of something he once had and willingly let go. He had given his children the world but in doing so, he had quietly removed himself from it.
You are shaking your head in pity already. Look around you and take a headcount of people you know who have done this. Maybe you are like Chief Adeyemi, even. Well, he is not alone.
In fact, Adeyemi is Nigeria—rich in assets, poor in presence; full of potential, empty of people. And here is where the story stops being sentimental and starts becoming statistical.
Seriously this is not just about one Yoruba Chief having just two children, shipping them abroad and living lonely later. This is about a country slowly packing its future into suitcases. Let’s put emotions aside for a moment and face the arithmetic of our sad national choices.
In the United States today, there are between 700,000 and 1 million Nigerians—counting both immigrants and their children. In the United Kingdom, over 270,000 Nigerian-born people live and work, with the broader Nigerian community rising to about 300,000 to 350,000 when you include second-generation citizens.
Canada, the new bride of Nigerian migration, has witnessed a surge so dramatic it reads like a population transfer. From modest numbers just a decade ago, it now hosts over 100,000 Nigerians, driven by nearly 100,000 new arrivals between 2020 and 2025 alone.
Across Europe—Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland—another 300,000 to 500,000 Nigerians have quietly settled.
