In Yoruba, "japa" means to run away, to escape in a hurry. Nigerians have turned the word into a name for something bigger: the decision to leave the country for school, for work, or for a life that seems to promise more. Nurses go, engineers go, students go, and sometimes a whole family goes together. Most of the talk about japa is about visas, exchange rates and salaries. Far less is said about the house the person walked out of, and the people still sitting inside it.

Every family that has sent someone abroad knows the feeling of an empty chair. At Christmas the seat stays vacant. At a funeral the son who should help carry the coffin watches from a screen in another time zone. The daughter who should stand beside her mother after surgery sends money instead. The money is real help, and many homes would struggle without it, but money cannot kneel to greet an elder or sit with the old people in the evening. Some duties can only be done by a person who is present.

Our culture has always taught that children look after their parents in old age, and that was never only about food and medicine. It was about company, about having someone close by when an old person is sick or afraid. Today many parents live in large houses with a phone, a helper and a child overseas. They tell the neighbours about the good job and the foreign car. They do not always say how quiet the compound has become.

The same thing is happening to our traditions, because most of them need people in the room. A naming ceremony needs relatives, a burial needs the family together, and a festival needs young people to dance, carry and organise. When the young leave, the old are left to hold everything up, and they grow tired. Families have found ways to cope. A naming prayer is said by an aunt on a video call, and a funeral is streamed for relatives abroad. This helps, but it is a thin help. A person watching on a phone misses what happens around the edges of an event: the food, the jokes, the small advice given quietly in a corner.

Those who leave also change, as anyone would. Some come home with a new accent and a new way of speaking to elders. Others stay away so long that the mother tongue turns rusty in the mouth, and their children, born abroad, may never learn it. This is no crime, because people adjust to the place where they live. But when a whole generation of young adults adjusts at the same time, a culture slowly loses the people who carry it.

It would be unfair to say that only loss comes from leaving. Many who went abroad are now the pillars of their extended families. They pay school fees, build houses and settle hospital bills. Some also carry Nigerian life into foreign cities, with Ankara at weddings, jollof rice at office parties, and Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa associations that keep the old songs and greetings alive. A few come back after some years with skills and savings and start something at home. Not everyone who goes is gone for good.

Still, a tradition does not die on the day someone boards a plane. It dies later, quietly, when both sides stop making the effort to hold on. The parent at home can learn to use the video call and keep a fixed time for it. The child abroad can visit during festival season and not only at Christmas, and can teach the grandchildren a few words of the home language, even if the lessons are slow and the accent is poor. A parent at home wants a voice and a visit, and a transfer alert does not replace either.

A country can lose many of its people and still keep its culture, but only if those who leave and those who stay keep reaching toward each other. So the question for every Nigerian family is a simple one. When we run toward something better, what are we promising to carry with us?

@ 2026 Precious Funmilayo Ajayi/Talkafricang.com