Six centuries ago, a German-built ship sailed under the English crown. It was called the Jesus of Lubeck. Once a merchant vessel, it was bought by Henry VIII, later passed to Elizabeth I, and leased to the notorious John Hawkins. Hawkins turned it into a vessel of terror. Along the West African coast, he raided villages, seized men, women, and children, and packed them into the dark belly of the ship. They were chained, beaten, and transported across the Atlantic. Many died at sea. The survivors were sold in the Caribbean, their bodies exchanged for gold, sugar, and rum. A tragic trade in which the greed of men exchanged human lives for trifling commercial goods, reducing dignity to profit and flesh to currency.

That was then. The age of despicable voyagers. The age of sails. The age of the lash. The age when human beings were reduced to mere cargo and profit. Today, the ship no longer exists, but its ghost has returned in a different form. Not of wood and rope, but of longing and despair. In Abuja, Lagos, and across the vast swathes of our country, young men and women dream about the West. They turn up at the commercial holdings processing visa applications for embassies. They clutch documents and bank slips. They whisper prayers over their proof-of-funds documents against the imagined “village people”. Their hope is not freedom on the soil of the homeland, but a visa to leave it. What was once a vessel of hope has now become a source of hopelessness. As journalist Olufemi Soneye observed in a widely circulated op-ed last week, “These visas are lifelines for education, family reunions, medical care, and critical business. To have them withdrawn without explanation is to leave lives hanging in confusion and despair”. 

Recall, as the media reported last week, that the American embassy in Abuja has quietly begun cancelling visas. It is a policy of silence. But even rejection does not make light of desperation. The hunger to leave has become stronger than the fear of refusal. The ship, the Jesus of Lubeck, has returned; this time not with chains, but with visa stamps. Peter Akah, the conscientious campaigner for electoral reforms, captured this reality in a viral video. He asked a haunting question, which I paraphrase loosely here: if the Jesus of Lubeck returned today for its third voyage, would our citizens climb aboard? His straw poll, intended to be playful, produced a tragic answer. Yes. Nigerians would rush to fill it. They would surrender themselves willingly. They would leave behind land, family, and memory, just for a chance to escape.

Why has it come to this? Why would the descendants of those who once resisted capture now beg to be carried away? The answers lie in the state of the nation. There is poverty in the land. Haunting, grinding, searing, and relentless poverty. Millions go to bed hungry. Graduates roam the streets without jobs. Parents sell land to fund their children’s travel dreams. For many, survival has replaced hope. There is insecurity. Kidnappers patrol the highways. Bandits sack villages. Terrorists hold territories. Blood spills daily in towns and cities. Funerals have become routine. Life is cheap, and death comes cheaply. There is corruption. Politicians steal billions while citizens drown in debt. Luxury cars parade in convoys while children study under trees. The gap between the ruler and the ruled is obscene. The rich live in palaces. The poor wade through flooded homes. And there is failed governance. Elections are rigged. Votes are stolen. Leaders betray their people. Institutions decay. 

The country drifts endlessly without a compass or a captain. Those who should build the nation instead of looting it. Those who should protect the nation instead plunder it.

All of this drives the new hunger. A hunger not for chains, but for visas. Not for servitude, but for escape. In airports, young Nigerians say goodbye to their families with heavy hearts but hopeful eyes. They know exile is not freedom. They know life abroad is hard. They know that behind the glamour are men and women scrubbing floors with law degrees and driving cabs with master’s degrees. They know the loneliness, the racism, the struggle. Still, they go. Because anything is better than whatever is on offer here.

The irony is bitter. Our ancestors resisted the raiders. They fought to stay on their land. They prayed never to see the belly of the slave ship. But their descendants now long for a ship, even if only a symbolic one, to take them away. Some smuggle themselves into the wheel wells of planes to escape the dreary times. Remember Daniel Ohikhena, the boy who snuck up in the wheel well of a plane he thought was flying from Benin City to the United States of America. He was lucky to survive the crash when the plane landed in Lagos. He was lucky. The unnamed Kenyan stowaway whose remains were recovered from the garden of a home in London wasn’t lucky. He fell to his death when the Kenya Airways plane was descending into London a few years ago. 

The Jesus of Lubeck has returned, not as timber, but as tragedy. This return is visible everywhere. It is in the endless queues at embassies. It is in the empty villages where the young have left. It is in the daily news of boats capsizing in the Mediterranean. The African boat people. It is in the viral videos of men like Peter Akah, whose message resonates because everyone knows it is true. The tragedy must be humanised. Behind every visa application lies a story. A young graduate sells his father’s land to pay an agent. A nurse resigns from a hospital that lacks access to medication. A teacher abandons classrooms because salaries have not been paid in months. A mother prays her children may find in Canada or America what they cannot find here. These people are not greedy. They are not lazy. They are desperate.

Every week, flights are full. Every week, new communities of Nigerians spring up in London, Toronto, Houston, and Berlin. They carry Nigeria with them, but they also carry pain. They leave because rulers have stripped their country of promise. They leave because leaders themselves send their children abroad, treat their illnesses abroad, bank their money abroad, and holiday abroad. Those who preach patriotism are the first to abandon the homeland. So the youth follow. They may not live as kings abroad, but they prefer to serve with dignity rather than suffer in despair. They would rather clean foreign streets than watch their futures rot in their own backyard. This is the new Middle Passage. It is not built on wooden ships. It is built on failed policies. It is built on corruption and insecurity. It is built on the broken promise of a nation that has betrayed its children.

The Jesus of Lubeck has sailed back into our dreams, though its sails no longer flap in the wind and its hull no longer creaks on the waves. This time, it floats unseen, yet its pull is undeniable in the everyday reality of our fellow citizens. Our country, rudderless and adrift, remains caught in the tides of dreams and hope of the good life in the West. As long as our rulers choose plunder over leadership, as long as greed is enthroned where service should reign, that ghost ship will never sink in citizens’ dreams. It will linger on the horizon of their collective despair, drawing the desperate into its invisible hold. What was once a vessel of chains has now been remade into a vessel of hope and escape. 

Like the Good Shepherd with outstretched hands, it beckons the burdened and weary, whispering of refuge far beyond the horizon of dreams. But, truth be told, it is a beckoning to salvation; it is exile dressed as hope. Those who will step aboard will not find the slow unravelling of belonging and the erosion of home. Not freedom. Do we blame our fellow citizens who dream of the ship that no longer clanks with the sound of shackles but hums to those who believe escape is the only future left? Does it matter that they will go willingly, clutching dreams instead of chains, boarding not because they are seized, but because they are abandoned by the very country that should have carried them? In this reversal of history, it is not John Hawkins who is dragging them away; it is their rulers driving them to the shore, where the phantom ship awaits. 

Centuries ago, our forebears wailed as their brothers and sisters were dragged across oceans against their will. Today, their descendants do not resist the ship’s call; they willingly seek passage. They queue outside embassies, not with shackles on their wrists, but with documents in their hands, pleading for a seat in the belly of exile. Where once sorrow came with capture, now it comes with consent. This is the bitter irony of our age: that freedom has birthed a new kind of bondage. We call it opportunity, migration, or the pursuit of greener pastures. Yet, beneath these names lies the same this: the indictment of a country that has failed its citizens. That is the tragedy. That is the sad story of our times. 

The ship has returned because we never truly dismantled the chains that brought it here in the first place. And so, one question remains: how long will we stand ashore, watching our own climb aboard?

Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja