There was a time I walked into meetings where people stood up to greet me. My days revolved around budgets, operational reports, network performance, and strategy sessions. My phone never stopped ringing because someone, somewhere, needed my approval.
Now I was waiting for a scanner to assign me pallets to move.
Life has a strange sense of humour.
People often ask whether I regret leaving Nigeria.
The answer is never as simple as yes or no.
To understand why, I have to take you back to the life I left behind.
I was forty-two when I resigned from my job.
Not because I was unhappy.
Not because I had been dismissed.
And certainly not because I wasn’t earning well.
By Nigerian standards, my family was comfortable.
I had spent more than sixteen years working in the telecommunications industry. I started at the bottom, learned every aspect of operations I could, accepted transfers most people avoided, and slowly climbed into senior management. By the time I turned forty, I was overseeing operations across several regions.
It had taken years to get there.
The salary was good.
The bonuses were decent.
The respect that came with the position opened doors almost everywhere.
Friends often asked me to mentor younger professionals. Relatives proudly introduced me at family gatherings as the one who had “made it.” Whenever people sought career advice, they somehow believed I had all the answers.
The truth was different.
Behind the confidence people saw was a man who had started worrying about the future.
Not tomorrow.
Not next year.
Twenty years from now.
My wife noticed the change before anyone else.
One evening, after dinner, she looked at me across the dining table and asked, “You’ve been unusually quiet these days. Is everything alright at work?”
“Work is fine.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
I didn’t answer immediately.
How do you explain a feeling that even you don’t fully understand?
Eventually I said, “Do you ever think about where we’ll be when the children finish school?”
She looked at me for a few seconds.
“Of course.”
“I mean really think about it.”
She leaned back in her chair.
“What brought this on?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just beginning to see things differently.”
The conversation ended there, but it didn’t leave my mind.
Over the following months, I found myself paying more attention to stories from friends who had relocated abroad. One former colleague had moved to Calgary. Another lived in Ottawa. A cousin had recently settled in Ontario.
None of them claimed life was easy.
In fact, most admitted it was harder than they expected.
Yet there was one thing they all mentioned.
Stability.
That word kept appearing in every conversation.
Not wealth.
Not luxury.
Stability.
One Saturday afternoon, while the children were watching television, I told my wife I wanted us to seriously explore relocating.
She stared at me as though I had announced I was joining the military.
“You mean travel for work?”
“No.”
“You mean permanently?”
I nodded.
For several seconds she didn’t speak.
Finally, she laughed softly.
“I honestly thought you’d retire from your company.”
“So did I.”
“What changed?”
I took a deep breath.
“I’ve spent years building a career. But I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve spent enough time building our future.”
That conversation marked the beginning of almost a year of research.
Every evening, after the children had gone to bed, our dining table became an immigration office.
We read government websites.
We watched webinars hosted by immigration lawyers.
We joined online forums where Nigerians living in Canada shared their experiences.
Some stories were encouraging.
Others were frightening.
One man had been unemployed for almost a year.
Another regretted moving altogether.
A woman wrote about leaving a banking career in Lagos only to spend eighteen months working night shifts in a factory before finding professional employment.
The stories didn’t discourage us.
They helped us understand what we were signing up for.
We weren’t chasing an illusion.
We were preparing for a complete reset.
After weighing different options, the study route appeared to be the most practical for our family.
My wife had completed her university education years earlier and met the admission requirements for a postgraduate certificate at a public college in Ontario.
The financial commitment was enormous.
International tuition alone made us pause more than once.
There were evenings when we almost abandoned the idea.
“What if we spend everything and the visa isn’t approved?” my wife asked one night.
“It could happen.”
“What if we get there and nothing works out?”
“It could happen.”
She looked at me and smiled.
“You’re not doing a very good job convincing me.”
I laughed.
“I don’t want to convince you with promises. I want us to make this decision knowing exactly what we’re risking.”
That honesty became the foundation of our journey.
We weren’t expecting miracles.
We were hoping for opportunities.
The months that followed were exhausting.
There were admission documents to gather, tuition deposits to make, financial records to organize, medical examinations to complete, and biometrics appointments to attend.
Every step seemed to produce another checklist.
We sold one of our cars to raise additional funds.
I postponed several personal projects because every available naira was being redirected toward our relocation plan.
There were days I wondered if I had become reckless.
Then the admission letter arrived.
A few weeks later, her study permit was approved.
I still remember sitting beside her on the living room sofa as we read the approval letter together.
Neither of us shouted.
Neither of us jumped around the room.
We simply looked at each other in silence.
The dream we had talked about for almost a year had suddenly become real.
Because of our finances and the timing of her programme, we agreed that she would travel first.
It wasn’t the plan we wanted.
It was the plan we could afford.
She would settle in, begin school, secure accommodation, understand how everything worked, and then I would apply to join her with our three children once my own work permit application was approved.
The night before she left, none of us slept much.
Our youngest son kept asking whether Mummy would be back before his next birthday.
My wife smiled every time he asked.
“Very soon.”
But after he fell asleep, she cried.
So did I.
The next morning, I stood at the departure hall watching the woman I had shared my life with for over fourteen years disappear beyond immigration.
For the first time since our marriage, we didn’t know exactly when we’d see each other again.
People often imagine that the hardest part of relocating is arriving in a new country.
For me, the hardest part began the moment I drove home from the airport alone.
The house suddenly felt much bigger.
Much quieter.
Every room reminded me that half of my family was now thousands of kilometres away.
During the day, I buried myself in work.
At night, we lived through video calls.
She would tell me about navigating buses in Ontario, attending orientation at college, buying winter clothes for the first time, and struggling to understand unfamiliar accents.
I would tell her about work, the children, and the endless countdown until we could finally become a family under one roof again.
Seven months can feel like a lifetime when measured one video call at a time.
Story continues in the next episode
