Iwaju o se lo, eyin o se pada si. You cannot go forward, you cannot go back. That is the precise condition of the young Nigerian healthcare professional in 2026.
I have been working on a report about Nigerian healthcare workers. I will not lie to you — I did not expect it to be as bad as it is. And I say this as someone who has lived it. The numbers and conditions are worse. The remuneration is an insult, the working condition is a sentence, and the system extracts the best of you and offers almost nothing in return.
To make it worse, every nation is tightening its borders, pulling up the drawbridge, and (understandably) prioritising their own. The UK. The USA. Canada. Then you open your phone, and social media does the rest — a curated Twitter Feed of despair, of healthcare workers complaining about unpaid salaries; no gloves in the ER, no progression. So much anger,so much projection, so much doom. In all honesty, this is probably the wrongest time to be starting your journey.
And yet. I want to make an argument for Hope (Or Faith. Of Belief).
Not irrational hope. Not the prosperity-gospel kind that tells you God has a Lamborghini with your name on it if you just believe hard enough. I mean hope in the oldest, simplest sense of the word — the kind that Hebrews 11:1 is actually describing when it says faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
These are not soft words. The writer is making an epistemological claim — that hope is not just describing the absence of evidence. It is the evidence. It is the only available mental material from which you build action when reality has not yet caught up to what you believe is possible.
Without it, you cannot move. Not really. You can go through the motions — submit the applications, show up to the shifts, do the work — but without the animating belief that something better is on the other side, those actions are hollow. They lack substance. They lack the push that makes them real. Hope is not the reward for a good situation. It is the prerequisite for changing a bad one.
The best illustration I know does not come from theology (to be honest, I am not very religious). It comes from a child.
When a father walks into a room, a child who loves him does not think. The hands go up. Two small arms, lifted, reaching — an instinctive, pre-rational act of total faith. There is no calculation. No risk assessment. No internal monologue weighing the probability of being picked up against the emotional (or financial, in our case) cost of being ignored. The child lifts because the child believes, at a fundamental, cellular level, that they will be picked up and held.
If that belief were absent, the hands would stay down. And maybe the father would still pick the child up. Maybe. But the reaching, the act itself, the declaration of want and trust — that would not exist. The action flows from the belief. Always.
We were all that child once. We lifted our hands without hesitation. Somewhere between then and now — between the first rejection email and the fifth, between working locums, expensive exams, prioritisation bills, visa bans; between the salary that hasn’t moved and the cost of living that will not stop — we learned to keep our hands down. We called it “managing our expectations”. But what we really did was lose the thing that makes action possible in the first place.
I am not asking you to be naive. I am not asking you to not modify your plans in tandem with the existing realities. I am not asking you to pretend things are fine, because they are not fine, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. I am asking you to understand what you are giving up when you give up hope. You are losing the substance from which a better future can be built. You are preemptively dismantling the only mental architecture available to you. Because once you stop believing things can be different, they cannot be different — not because life has decided, but because you have.
No matter what country you are trying to get to. No matter what borders are closing. No matter what social media projects about the feasibility of your dreams. You must not lose this. Once you lose hope, you are already dead in the only way that matters — the kind of death that happens while you’re still walking around.
Things are hard. I will not insult you by telling you otherwise. But the child does not lift its hands because the situation is favorable. The child lifts its hands because it believes, fundamentally, irrevocably, that it will be held.
Be the child. Lift your hands.
All things are possible to those who believe.
O.C.
Originally published on Medium ↗