Ultimately, it's because Ben Franklin had only two choices to define which way the terminals of a voltaic pile would be defined, and he picked the way that ended up being wrong in terms of the flow of charge. Current is defined as the flow of positive charge, and that's what Franklin thought was moving in the metal wires he was playing with. He was wrong -- it was the negative charges moving, in the direction opposite to the direction his imagined positive charge moved
Once you get used to the convention, though, it's not hard to think about. A stream of negative charges moving to the left is equivalent from an electromagnetic perspective as a stream of equivalent positive charges moving to the right.