“That is not what anybody should wish for.”

She looked at me the way you look at someone who just said they would like to manage cancer with herbs. Then she lowered her voice, as if what I had said could get us both arrested. I had only told her I was not planning to leave Nigeria.

Most of my guys in medical school have the whole plan mapped out: write the USMLE in fourth year and complete the process by final year. The enthusiasm in their voices leaves me dazzled many times. I have not yet decided whether to call it ambition or evacuation.

Sunday mornings should have taught me that lesson enough. I watch a different kind of passion glare at me in churches across this country. The excitement is palpable. The pastor lifts his hand: “This shall be your portion too. Before this year ends, God will take you out of this country. You will send dollars to your family.”

Sometimes, I look at the faces moving towards the altar and wonder if they already see themselves walking on clouds. The applause alone is frenzied, and the “Amen” that follows can make anyone with slight hearing loss become completely deaf.

A foreigner once asked a Nigerian celebrating a visa online a simple question: Why should anyone be so excited about a visa? The Nigerian probably had no short answer, because how do you explain a passport that the world treats as probable cause?

Here is the honest answer: getting a visa in Nigeria is a vote of no confidence. The individual raises his hands, turns to his community and, like Pilate, washes them clean the moment the stamp lands in the embassy. The funny thing is that this is like thanking God for setting your restroom ablaze because you had left it to stink for so long. Now, you get the chance to build a new one all over again, somewhere else.

You leave a community. You leave a culture, including a version of yourself that will never make it past the airport.

Travel agencies and japa consultants multiply. Diaspora committees are spread across government, and they try to tell a different story with some local content here and there. But when ninety per cent of your meals consist of sugar, you cannot rebuke diabetes mellitus.

The Nigeria we dream of looks different.

It is a place that recognises the capacity of the hundreds of thousands of brilliant, hardworking youths living within its borders. It is an influencer talking nonstop about the innovative solutions to world problems emerging from Nigerian soil. It is tourist sites in cities like Maiduguri being showcased without first having to explain that the city is not simply a home for terrorists. It is a place where nobody has to think twice before writing “Nigerian” on official documents, regardless of the organisation involved.

The objection is clear: achieving this will take hundreds of years, and the current government must first be removed.

But that is a lie we keep lending interest to.

There is corruption in every country in the world. We are like little children who eat their mother's food, then go and tell the neighbours it was too salty. We scream about the sad parts and go mute when we see progress of some sort, such as the absence of ASUU strikes on the scale we used to experience.

The only green pasture we see is America, even when the flag of our own country is painted green. Is it colour blindness?

USMLE: United States Medical Licensing Examination.

ASUU: Academic Staff Union of Universities.