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His answer is blunt. “Irregular migration is not just about unemployment, It is about trust. When people do not trust leadership, they begin to solve problems by unconventional methods, even if that means risking their lives to seek greener pastures elsewhere.” Across Sub-Saharan Africa, Onyema argues, young people are not merely chasing jobs. They are fleeing systems they believe no longer care whether they live or die.
“What we have in many African countries is absent, irresponsible leadership. Leaders pay lip service to real problems, and the consequence is the social decay we are witnessing.” Leadership failure is not abstract, it is practical and visible. He criticizes policymaking driven by political compensation rather than competence, where appointments are used to reward loyalty instead of solving problems. The erosion of trust in leadership, he argues, fuels desperation. When leadership feels distant or dishonest, citizens stop waiting for reform and begin improvising escape routes, legal or otherwise.
Onyema’s sharpest critique is reserved for education and youth empowerment. Through the Black Ancestral Native Communities Foundation, he helped launch SAFE (Students Against False Expectations), targeting young people aged 12 to 16. The goal is early intervention: countering social media fantasies, restoring interest in learning, and helping young people see value in their immediate environment. He advocates a shift to what he calls, “hands-on, practical, non-classroom intellectual engagement education,” a system that prizes competence, creativity, and problem-solving over rote memorization.
“We must stop pretending that success in English or mathematics is the only measure of mental capacity. Some people are builders, creators, repairers, innovators. Our system humiliates them, and then we wonder why they want to leave.” That same logic underpins his scathing view of popular youth empowerment schemes. Motorcycles, wheelbarrows, token grants – he sees them as hollow gestures. “They don’t give their own children these things, why give them to other people’s children and call it empowerment?”
Youth, he argues, are not a monolith. Some need opportunity, others rehabilitation, others fairness. Treating them all the same guarantees failure. “Sustainable empowerment requires vocational testing and personalized training. It requires justice. Nigeria’s problem is not lack of ideas, it is lack of fair play.”
If one issue visibly angers Onyema, it is corruption within immigration services. He recounts being debited multiple times for a visa-on-arrival payment for a client that never reflected, only to still face demands for bribes. “Foreigners breeze through. Nigerians queue endlessly in their own country.” Such humiliation is central to why people lose faith. His prescription is strict: transparency, surveillance, enforcement, and consequences. He points to Rwanda’s small but efficient airports as proof that functionality is a choice.
Beyond reform, Onyema is reimagining migration itself. His proposed Pathways Institute for Migration Alternatives is a technical, skills-first university designed not to stop migration but to make it safe, orderly, and lawful. Drawing on labour-demand research across more than 70 countries, the model would train and certify Nigerians locally before legal migration into high-demand sectors.
“We are trying to reverse the value chain. Instead of exporting desperation, we export certified competence.”
He proposes a national early warning system embedded in schools to teach migration literacy early, what migration is, what it is not, and which paths are legitimate. With representatives across multiple African countries, and stories like that of a Gambian teenager he met in Rome who survived a brutal Mediterranean journey, Onyema sees migration as a continental wound.
“Africa’s interest is shared,” he says. “We must serve the continent, not just one country.” In a landscape crowded with noise, Dr Chibuzor Onyema offers something rarer: a refusal to lie to young people, and a belief that curbing irregular migration begins with integrity and political will, not the skullduggery we pass off as governance today.
