AFRICA is the least developed or "most backward" continent. It also suffers from a massive brain drain, losing tens of thousands of its highly trained professionals and other educated people to the industrialized nations of the West every year.
This has seriously affected development in what is also the poorest continent, ravaged by disease, and blinded by ignorance, with the vast majority of its people still being illiterate decades after independence.
But it not hard to understand why Africans are leaving their countries in such massive numbers whenever they get the opportunity to do so. Again, like almost everything else that bedevils this continent, it has to do with bad leadership which includes collusion with external forces – by many of our leaders and bureaucrats - to exploit Africa.
Those who emigrate are not traitors or people who just don't care about our countries. Most of them want to help develop our countries. They want to help our people. But they can't because of intolerable conditions in Africa.
Many educated Africans leave our countries because of lack of opportunities to use their talents to the maximum; because of repression, and lack of incentives. Their contribution to society is not appreciated by the leaders who don't even care to pay them well, let alone guarantee them the freedom they need to do what they are supposed to do.
These problems were once highlighted in a dramatic way at a conference in Switzerland in June 1999 in a confrontation between President Jerry Rawlings of Ghana and Professor Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan who has been teaching in the United States since the early 1970s.
Mazrui is one of Africa's most prominent academic and public intellectuals and probably the most renowned in Western countries. As Professor Francis Njubi, himself an immigrant from Kenya teaching at San Diego State University in California, stated in his paper, "African Intellectuals in the Belly of the Beast: Migration, Identity and the Politics of Exile":
"According to the United States Bureau of census, migrants born in Africa have the highest level of educational attainment in the United States when compared to other migrant groups like Asians, Europeans and Latin Americans.
Census figures for 1997 show that 48.9 percent (almost 50 percent) of African immigrants in the 25-year-and-over age bracket have a bachelor's degree or higher compared to Europeans, 28.7 percent, Asians, 44.6 percent, and Latin Americans, 5.6 percent....
The (African) immigrants also endure alienation fro their countries of origin. Academic exiles are likely to be victims of government repression even before leaving their home countries. Many are pushed out of their countries after political disturbances at university campuses. Others are exiled because their political perspectives do not correspond with the dominant ideological dispensation of the time.
Yet, these same forces that kept them from achieving their full potential at home demonize them for leaving instead of contributing to national development.
These tensions between intellectuals and politicians have boiled over frequently in the postcolonial world, most recently in a shouting match between Ghana's President Jerry Rawlings and eminent Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui during a conference in Davos, Switzerland, in June 1999.
The Ghanaian president was extremely upset because medical doctors trained in Ghana at great expense were leaving for the West as soon as they completed their studies. He argued that it was not enough for the professionals to repay their student loans because it took at least 7 years to train another doctor, leaving thousands of patients without medical care.
Professor Mazrui's position, however, was that politicians like Jerry Rawlings were to blame for the exodus of professionals and academics from the continent. Mazrui himself had gone into exile in the early 1970s after being expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin and being denied a position at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, the country where he was born (and raised). Mazrui, therefore, argues that African politicians are partly to blame for the exodus because of the political and economic crises they create and the lack of recognition of the contributions of African intellectuals.
Even today, Mazrui is bitter about the fact that Kenyan broadcasting systems refused to air his television documentary "The Africans: A Triple Heritage" which was produced by the BBC. The series is the only one on Africa by an African.
According to Mazrui, "I sometimes feel a bit bitter about the fact that my own country has refused to televise the series, despite its fairly innocuous and barely radical political content, and I am convinced that ignoring it in Kenya was a case of the authorities having a grudge with the singer rather than the song."1
On another occasion, Professor Mazrui also said that after he fled Uganda during Amin's reign of terror, he returned to Kenya where he was told by the vice-chancellor of the University of Nairobi that the school authorities - the Kenyan government, really, including President Jomo Kenyatta himself - would be willing to hire him to teach there only if he would be "a good boy." Known for his criticism of African leaders and governments, it was obvious that he was not prepared to become one.
Years later, he was asked in an interview with Philippe Wamba - a young journalist who grew up in Tanzania and died in a tragic car accident in Kenya in 2002 - if he thought of himself as being in exile in the United States where he had been teaching for 30 years:
"Well, yes,...you have to, I mean, in the sense that it's not been possible to get a job in my country. I mean, I don't think the regime would lock me up, although they could have decided that they would. Fortunately, they decided that it was prudent not to do that.
But when I left Makerere University in Uganda, the natural thing to do for me would have been to go to Kenya. I couldn't work in Uganda because of Idi Amin, so the next stop should have been Kenya. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Do you know what happened? Kenya at that time only had the University of Nairobi, so the natural thing would have been to go to the University of Nairobi.
So the vice-chancellor at the time, the equivalent of the president of the university (in the United States), he took me to lunch, and said, "You know, we would have hired you if we were sure you would be a good boy." So, I told him, "Look, I'm always a good boy, I don't know what you mean." He said, "Oh, you know."
And really what he was referring to was when I lived in Uganda, under Obote number one [Prime Minister, later President Milton Obote's first term, from 1962 to 1970; he became president in 1966], whenever I was unhappy about the direction the country was taking, I would say so publicly. And then, Obote number one being what it was, sometimes the president would answer me, you see.
So the president turned my utterances into state issues. If he had just ignored them, nobody would have noticed. But he turned them into state issues. When he answered me, then people would discover, "Ali Mazrui had said that," because the president said, "Ali Mazrui said that."
So there is this notion that you couldn't have an academic who goes around making policy pronouncements, you see.
In Uganda, Obote occasionally was very irritated with me and once publicly said I should go and teach elsewhere, but I didn't pack my bags. I stayed put because this wasn't an official order, it was a speech in parliament. But in general, the image of a professor who dares to take on the president, you know, percolated to Kenya.
In the case of Kenya, the persecution of intellectuals is definitely a crisis of leadership. In some countries where you have a great deal of poverty, people may leave for economic reasons, you see. But that was not the case in Kenya, people were not leaving because they wanted bigger salaries. They were leaving because they were not getting enough elbow room to be themselves, you see. And until the 1990s there was considerable control of your movements as an academic. You needed the president's office's permission to go to a conference in Zambia....
You waste so much time dealing with the bureaucracy of doing your scholarship that it really becomes a chore. And then, when certain dignitaries may accost you and you end up being detained, which happened to the other Professor Mazrui, my nephew, El Amin Mazrui, who was locked up for thirteen months, .definitely this is a leadership issue.
Countries which can support their people economically and where it is possible for people to, of course, have very satisfying jobs, when they leave it's because the leadership is seriously wrong."2
The interview was entitled, "An American African Scholar: An Interview with Professor Ali Mazrui,” a titled that also highlighted Mazrui's dual identity as an African and as an immigrant in the United States where he has lived and taught in "self-imposed" exile as one of Africa's most prominent scholars. And because he was born and brought up in Africa, he calls himself an American African as opposed to an African American, the latter term being used to identify people of African descent born in the United States. Mazrui coined the term.
The fact that he could no longer teach in Africa, and at the same time enjoy academic freedom as he normally would, demonstrates the cruel predicament African intellectuals find themselves in and which forces them to flee to other countries. Without freedom, scholarship is dull, and stale, sapped of its vitality by the state because of bad leadership which brooks no dissent. Yet, it is vital to development, to which it contributes very little when it is no longer the vibrant and dynamic force it is supposed to be.
Most African leaders are highly sensitive to criticism because they don't want to admit mistakes, let alone be held accountable fordoing wrong. They therefore insulate themselves even from constructive criticism and good advice including innovative ideas which could be critical to national progress and the nation's well-being.
Neutralizing dissent and intellectuals who generate some of these ideas is one of the best weapons leaders use to protect themselves from criticism in order to perpetuate themselves in office as they continue to pursue policies which have proved to be counter-productive through the years. For example, when Ali Mazrui was a professor and chairman of the political science department, later dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences, at Makerere University, Dr. Milton Obote, the Ugandan president, once asked him if he knew the difference between being a political scientist and being a politician.
Obote felt that the criticism by Mazrui was unwarranted and came from someone who was no more than an academic - a political scientist - and who, not being a politician, did not know what it meant to run a country.
President Obote may have had a valid point, as someone who was in the trenches and not in the ivory tower of academia. Yet, tragically, many of these same leaders have run our countries into the ground because they don't want to listen to anybody else but themselves; forcing tens of thousands of educated Africans to flee the continent, headed West more than any other destination. And once they leave, they usually don't intend to go back.
Academic intellectuals, some of whom are among the most ardent critics of African despotic and kleptocratic regimes, are just a part of the migratory wave comprising the elite leaving Africa, or living outside Africa.
Those already living abroad include many educated Africans who have decided not to return home after getting their degrees and other professional qualifications. For example, in Harris county alone, in Texas, there are more than 10,000 Nigerians. A disproportionately large number of them live in Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States after New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago in that order. And one of the largest African newspapers, USAfrica, published outside Africa, is based in Houston. It is run by Nigerians, mostly Igbo.
And the loss is staggering. By 2005, there were more than 5 million Africans in different professions living outside Africa. Also, tens of thousands of African students who go to school in Europe, North America and other parts of the world every year don't return to Africa after they finish their studies.
About 50,000 Kenyan professionals live and work in the United States alone; that's without even counting those in the United Kingdom where, for historical reasons because of former colonial ties, they have in the past gone in larger numbers than they have anywhere else. And that's just example.
Now, add Nigerians, Ghanaians, Ugandans, Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, Zambians, Sierra Leoneans – all from former British colonies - and others who live and work in Britain, North America and other parts of the world including Australia. Also think about how many Africans from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali and other former French African colonies live and work in France alone. And why.
Then you can see why our continent is in such a mess.
The tragedy of all this is that all these people would be in Africa helping to develop our countries had it not been for the rotten leadership and intolerable conditions in most parts of the continent.
In five years alone, between 1985 and 1990, Africa lost 60,000 of its highly educated people and other professionals who left the continent in search of better life in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries. Probably the majority of them don't intend to return to Africa permanently, if at all; may be just to visit. As Philip Ochieng', one of Kenya's and Africa's most prominent journalists, stated in his article "How Africa Can Utilise its Intellectuals in 'Exile'" in The East African:
"Between 1985 and 1990, Africa lost 60,000 scientists, doctors, engineers, technicians and other experts to Western Europe, North America and other countries of the geopolitical North. I obtained this dismaying figure from a workshop which took place in Addis Ababa recently.
Organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), it sought to find ways of turning "...the net loss of skilled professionals into a net gain if we are not to be even further marginalised...." Those words were spoken by Joseph Ngu, an ECA economic analyst, at the start of the workshop.
The problem is well known. It is called the "brain drain." The causes are also well known. As long as we are either unable or unwilling to pay our professionals properly, as long as we, in our individualistic and tribal interests, persist in misplacing them and ignoring their advice, as long as the econo-political circumstances remain volatile as a consequence - so long will the brain drain and the refugee problem overwhelm us."3
In many countries across the continent, this exodus has been fuelled by political and civil unrest and outright civil wars, draining them of much-needed manpower and resources. The result is not only stunted economic growth but continued marginalization of Africa in the global arena in which we remain spectators rather than active players, and thus unable to protect our interests. We play only a peripheral role and have never been a part of the mainstream.
Even those who want to return to Africa are discouraged from doing so because of civil strife, corruption, tribalism and nepotism, poverty, and many other problems which continue to dog the continent because of poor leadership.
It does not mean that they are unpatriotic and don't love their countries as much as their fellow countrymen do. It's just a matter of being realistic; it's also a matter of survival. As Dr. Gichure wa Kanyugo, a Kenyan-born psychiatrist working in Boston, Massachusetts, and who has lived in the United States since and 1984 and became a naturalized citizen, stated: "We would like to return home, but domestic conditions don't allow us to do so. You cannot eat patriotism, can you?"4
It is a sentiment articulated and shared even by those who still live and work in Africa. As Professor Wene Owino at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, himself a disgruntled academic, said: "It would be absurd to expect optimal productivity out of people who do not have reliable amenities, like medical coverage, from their employer."
Academic standards across Africa have also been one of the biggest casualties of all this. As Owino explained, undergraduates are taught by inexperienced lecturers, while graduate students are left with no supervisors.
Many qualified Kenyan professors have left for other countries, mostly in Europe and North America and even Australia, increasing the brain drain; a point also underscored by Owino. As he put it: "The brain drain is one thing this country cannot afford."5 Nor can the rest of Africa.
What Africa can afford to do is create conditions and an environment conducive to sustained growth, and retention of its trained manpower - university graduates and others -by rewarding them accordingly. But nothing of the sort can be achieved in a climate of fear and intimidation where governments employ Gestapo tactics to silence and eliminate their opponents and critics; where they also encourage, and even thrive on, corruption; foster tribalism and provide jobs on the basis of ethnic ties and loyalties rather than merit; and foment civil unrest to weaken the opposition in order to perpetuate themselves in power.
In countries where genuine attempts have been made to tackle these problems, there has been some success in stemming the tide of the brain drain. Botswana provides one such example; a country which has pursued good economic policies and maintained democracy since independence in the sixties.
And it is within the capacity of other African countries to reverse the migratory trend of their highly trained professionals to minimize its devastating impact on the continent as a whole. Tragically, there is little optimism that is indeed going to be the case. And if history is indicative of anything in this context, probably nothing will be done on a significant scale. Prospects are bleak that anything will be done soon, if at all, because of the kind of leadership we have on the continent, increasing the brain drain.
It is ironic, yet expected, that the richest and most advanced country in the world also attracts the largest number of some of the most highly educated immigrants whom it doesn't even need as much as their countries of origin do. Africa is one such big source, supplying the United States as well as other industrialized nations with a steady flow of highly trained professionals every year. And the loss is of staggering proportions for such an underdeveloped continent.
According to the United Nations, about 27,000 highly educated Africans and professionals emigrated to Western countries between 1960 and 1975. And the number rose in the following years. From 1975 to 1984, 40,000 well-educated Africans left Africa every year, further and rapidly draining the continent of one of its most important natural resources, highly trained manpower, without which development is impossible; this resource is now almost depleted, compared to the continent's needs, compounded by civil wars, failed economies and political unrest.
The number of highly educated African immigrants headed West and elsewhere reached 80,000 by 1987, as the migratory trend accelerated between 1985 and 1987. The 1980s were some of the worst years in Africa in terms of lost opportunities, collapsing economies and civil strife. According to the same UN sources, the numbers went down thereafter, with an estimated 20,000 African professionals leaving Africa for the West every year since 1990.6
It was also during this period that African countries abandoned their failed socialist policies and one-party states, and introduced multiparty democracy - even if grudgingly by the leaders - after the end of the Cold War.
The decline in the number of educated Africans seeking greener pastures elsewhere may partly be attributed to that, but the emigration continued to have a devastating impact on the continent, nonetheless. As Peter Da Costa of Gambia, a senior communication advisor with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), stated: "We have 30,000 PhDs living outside Africa. It's an all-pervasive problem."7
And that's a continent that needs about one million scientists and engineers in order to develop.
Where are they or where are they going to come from? Once they are trained, they are gone! Not all but many of them. And many of those who are trained abroad don't return to Africa. The same applies to other fields in which Africa does not have a critical mass to set things in motion and achieve progress.
In 1993, a UN Development Programme (UNDP) report also had some very disturbing statistics on this perennial problem. It said 21,000 Nigerian doctors worked in the United States alone.8 That is a staggering figure, considering Nigeria's great need for doctors.
What is even more disturbing is that the numbers increased dramatically within only a few years. According to the New Internationalist, there were at least 30,000 Nigerian doctors working in the United States by the end of the 1990s. The numbers may not have risen so sharply within only seven years or so since 1993 when the UNDP issued its report. But the figure, of 30,000, was within the range of possibility and highlighted the seriousness of the problem as much as it did the intolerable conditions within Nigeria which forced many educated Nigerians to flee or stay away from their country.
What is certain is that there were a lot more Nigerian doctors - far more than the 21,000 cited by the UNDP in 1993 - working in the United States alone by the end of the 1990s. They include some of my schoolmates in the United States in the 1970s from Nigeria and other African countries.
While Nigeria has all these doctors working abroad, the country continues to suffer from a serious shortage of trained personnel in all medical-related fields; with the shortage of doctors being the most acute.
Other African countries are caught in the same predicament, with the flight of trained manpower compounding the problem in societies which already don't have enough trained people in almost all fields including primary school education. For instance, in Ghana, 60 percent of the doctors who were trained there in the 1980s left the country.
And they were trained at government expense; a point underscored by President Jerry Rawlings and which was one of the reasons why he exploded at the conference in Switzerland, as we cited earlier, in a heated exchange with Professor Ali Mazrui on why many educated Africans had left and continued to leave their countries for Europe, North America and other parts of the world.
The emigration of so many Ghanaian doctors has, like in Nigeria and other African countries, left the health care system - already in tatters - grossly understaffed, making it impossible to provide even the most minimal - let alone adequate - service to the people on a continent ravaged by disease and crippled by all kinds of health problems.
But there is an equally important and compelling reason, besides the ones we mentioned earlier, why so many educated Africans are leaving their countries.
More than 80 percent of the scientific research in all fields is conducted in industrialized countries. Therefore there is very little incentive for African scientists and other highly trained professionals to remain in Africa where there are hardly any research facilities; where also the pay is low, and working conditions -including bureaucratic interference - make it impossible for them to do research and use their talents to the maximum to help their countries.
Yet, Africa cannot expect to develop without technological advancement. As President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda said during a visit to Tanzania towards the end of 2002, African countries are not going to develop by selling stones. They need to industrialize and become an integral part of the global economy. That is true. But how can they industrialize when their scientists and other highly educated people are leaving the continent because of intolerable conditions at home, conditions which are created by the very same people - the leaders - who blame them for leaving and accuse them of being traitors just because they cannot work in their countries the way they should?
Museveni did not address that. So, for now, we will keep on selling stones - gold, diamonds and other minerals - and agricultural products until there is a fundamental change in leadership and outlook across the continent to put our countries on the right course.
I was once ruefully reminded of our dire condition when I was a student at Wayne State University in Detroit in the United States in the early and mid-seventies. I was talking to one of my professors, R.V. Burks, who was also one of America's eminent scholars with international recognition, when he brought up the subject of underdevelopment and emphatically said: "What you need to do is industrialize!" Those were his exact words.
That was in early 1974, when I was 24, but I vividly recall the conversation as if it was only yesterday.
Professor Burks taught Western civilization and was one of America's foremost authorities on communism and the Soviet Union and its satellites. I also remember him telling our class that he talked to Leon Trotsky and was one of the last people who saw him not long before the former Soviet leader was killed with an axe by Stalin's agent in Mexico City in 1940.
Professor Burks knew that I was an African student; in fact, the only one in his class of more than 100. He also knew that many of our countries had adopted socialism in one form or another; an ideology renounced in the late eighties and early nineties because it failed to develop our economies.
I agreed with his prescription that African countries need to industrialize. Tragically, 30 years later after my conversation with him, and decades after failed socialist policies and one-party dictatorships across the continent compounded by corruption and inept leadership without transparency and accountability, our countries are no better off today than they were back then; in fact they are worse off, in many respects, and with an increasing number of highly educated people fleeing to Europe and North America in search of better life.
One of the countries which has suffered the most from this kind of haemorrhage, because of civil conflict for decades caused by bad leadership is Sudan. More than 30 percent of the engineers, 20 percent of the university lecturers, and 17 percent of the doctors and dentists who graduated in 1978 left the country through the years. Had it not been for civil war and political instability, probably most of them would still be in Sudan today helping to develop their country.
Other countries which have suffered just as much and sometimes even more so because of wars and other forms of civil strife include Sierra Leone, Liberia, the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), Congo Republic (commonly known as Congo-Brazzaville), Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia (dead as a nation), Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Eritrea; all devastated by large-scale conflicts for years and in some cases for decades.
Even South Africa, an anchor of stability on this mangled continent, has also been losing more than 30,000 people, mostly white and highly educated, every year since the end of apartheid in 1994; much of the flight being attributed to a wave of crime sweeping across the country and to what whites - wrongly - perceive to be anti-white policies pursued by the government to correct racial disparities by implementing affirmative action and other corrective measures across the spectrum.
None of this would have been necessary had the apartheid regime never existed. It did because the majority of whites supported it to maintain their privileged status at the expense of blacks and other non-whites, making it necessary for the post-apartheid governments to adopt policies to rectify the situation especially for blacks who suffered the most under the diabolical regime of apartheid as victims of deliberate and systematic discrimination by the white rulers.
Yet, the situation is not very reassuring even for them under black majority rule. Some of the people leaving South Africa, in fact a significant number of them, are highly educated blacks. Some of the reasons they give for leaving are the high rate of crime and lack of opportunities even under non-white rule.
Zimbabwe, one of the jewels of Africa, is another country which has lost a very large number of educated people especially since the late 1990s when the government started to implement its "fast-track" land-reform programme by seizing white-owned land to correct historical injustices resulting from the seizure of land from blacks by whites when they conquered and colonized the territory in the 1890s.
Tragically, it is an approach which plunged the country into violence and chaos destroying the economy when government supporters invaded white-owned farms, attacked black farm-workers and some whites to forcibly evict them from the land. They also attacked members of the opposition. But the opposition itself started violence in a number of cases as a pre-emptive strike and to destabilize the government.
There was need for land reform but the violence was unjustified. The tactics employed, including seizure of land, only exacerbated the situation. Even more tragically, the violence came from both sides, although the government, because of its power, unleashed its forces and perpetrated more violence than the opposition did, forcing an increasing number of educated people - as well as others - to flee the country.
What was once one of Africa's most successful and developed countries became a bankrupt nation and a pauper because of misguided policies by one of the continent's most illustrious and highly esteemed leaders who was an icon of African liberation. The violence under his leadership tarnished not only Zimbabwe but the entire continent and his image.
Yet, such violence and political instability is nothing new in this turbulent continent. It is a continental phenomenon. And it has cost Africa a lot, not only in terms of lives lost and economies destroyed, but also in terms of high-level manpower as trained professionals continue to flee to other countries for safety and better life; far better than their war-torn and unstable countries and dilapidated economies can offer. As Dr. Patrick Seyon, former president of the University of Liberia and later director of the outreach programme at Boston University's African Studies Center, stated:
"The violence, the repression, the economy, those are the main issues. This situation has become even more critical since the 1970's and '80's when repressive regimes began springing up and the scholars fled the universities. They have not been able to return."9
Dr. Seyon went on to say that low university salaries often force professors and other faculty members to take other jobs to supplement their income: "In Nairobi they drove cabs. The university lecturer has little time to spend on academic research or to help his students."10
It is the same problem throughout Africa. It also applies to doctors and other trained professionals who engage in different activities including owning a cow or two for milk, a garden for vegetables and even for extra income, as well as other income-generating schemes to make ends meet because they are not paid well.
Professors and lecturers also become private tutors, and doctors working in government hospitals go into private practice, with offices at home, to add to their meager earnings.
All this has led to erosion of academic standards and provision of poor medical service even in countries which are relatively developed by African standards, as the professionals also continue to leave the continent, never to return.
The countries include South Africa, the most developed on the continent. Yet it continues to suffer from a massive brain drain especially since the end of apartheid.11
Just as critical is lack of employment for many university graduates. For example, in my own country Tanzania, many university graduates in all fields, including those with master's degrees, remain unemployed for years. Some of the very lucky ones eventually end up getting jobs which don't even match their skills and educational qualifications, and at very low wages. For example, it's not uncommon to find a law graduate working as a secretary or an economics graduate teaching history at a secondary school.
A survey by one of Tanzania's leading newspapers, The Guardian, in 2002 showed that many university graduates had not been able to find jobs five years or more after they graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam and other institutions of higher learning in and outside Tanzania.
In neighbouring Kenya, some accountants and other university graduates have been hauling bricks and sacks of maize or coffee to earn a living, the equivalent of one dollar to four dollars per day not enough even for basic necessities. During President Daniel arap Moi's tenure, Kenyan leaders including the president himself were daring enough to publicly tell university graduates that they should look for jobs in other countries.
They did not even think about creating jobs for them, as the economy continued to shrink under rotten and corrupt leadership in spite of Africa's enormous economic potential and all the aid poured into Africa through the decades. Since the sixties, more than $500 billion in grants and soft loans have been pumped into Africa. Yet we have nothing to show for it. Where did all that money go? Stolen and squandered by our kleptocratic and egomaniacal leaders.
This is the kind of leadership we have in Africa, in most cases. Yet, you wonder why we are in such a mess?
Don't blame those who seek greener pastures elsewhere. Blame our leaders, most of whom have done nothing for our countries and for us since independence besides raiding national coffers to enrich themselves and keeping our pockets empty with exorbitant taxes, low pay or none at all. They are busy stealing and squandering money. And as they continue to do so, tens of thousands of Africans emigrate to other countries every year as the only way to make it in life or just to earn a simple living.
A significant number of professionals and university graduates including lawyers and some with Ph.Ds have taken jobs as janitors, taxi drivers, security guards or manual labourers in the United States and elsewhere just to survive. But they also earn a lot more money than they would ever have dreamt of earning had they remained in Africa.
Had it not been for the conditions at home, most of them would probably not have left Africa. And most of those educated abroad would probably have returned home. Yet, they are blamed for doing what any sensible person caught in a predicament or who is faced with a potentially dangerous situation would do. And that is get out of it if he can. As James Shikwati stated in his article "Brain Drain versus Africa's Economic Woes":
"Do African intellectuals who migrate to developed countries betray their home? If you have ever attended a fundraising function in Kenya meant to assist a student going for further studies abroad, you will surely never miss to hear a politician give a piece of advice thus: "Make sure you come back home to develop your nation, this country needs your expertise."
After three years or so, a keen reader of the local daily newspapers may read in the mail section of the paper, "A Kenyan residing abroad urging Kenyans to be democratic, accountable and pro-progress." In the same paper, there may be a story about certain top-notch academicians who migrated to other countries citing harassment, low pay, poor academic freedom and inadequate funding for research initiatives.
The editorial too may be screaming betrayal: "They waste tax payers money and then vanish in search of greener pastures." Meanwhile, on the page on African news, a number of African heads of state would be quoted lambasting Western countries for Africa's political and economic instability. In the same breath, they would be heard in conferences and seminars appealing for assistance from experts in the West to advise them both on economic and political issues.
Interesting enough, the "imported experts" tend to be people using ideas from the "African experts" who were exported by unfavourable conditions in Africa. Who is to blame for Africa's political and economic problems? Brain drain?
Take Kenya for instance. How many leaders listen to our local experts? Who runs our universities - academics, or politicians? From primary schools, secondary schools, college to university level, academic institution leadership is controlled by political alliances. Political correctness is the key to success, so states political law. When serious academicians migrate, betrayal is the tag they receive.
Those who choose to remain and voice what their rationality dictates, are told, "You've been paid by foreign masters." The same political acrobats ask for aid from the very foreigners to "develop their country." If they miss aid, they opt to insult the developed countries for having robbed Africa.
Do we have such a thing as brain drain? If you dig a drainage channel outside your house to direct storm water away from your compound, are you to reproach the storm water for escaping? Will it be justified to import water when you allow your own to run-off? If Kenya does not nurture an environment conducive to academic growth, holds intellectuals with conjecture; what effect does it expect from its actions?
How can Africans expect to escape the quagmire they are presently wallowing in by blowing bridges to their freedom, and economic prosperity? If you enslave men of ideas, if you discourage thinkers and murder reason - why pretend to be seeking solutions to African problems? How can a system that holds poverty as a virtue struggle for prosperity?
Revulsion against intellectuals in Africa is suicide to our economic and political stability. Free the academic world, and the spring of ideas to solve African problems will emerge.
People who oppose reason fill the void left by the migrant intellectuals. Haters of reason are quick to blame brain drain, "unpatriotic" intelligentsia for their shortcomings. But one thing they fail to recognize is that the haters of reason provided the infrastructure of destruction. They polluted the intellectual world of reason by their strategy of "carrots and sticks."
Africa's woes are a result of reason held hostage by pseudo-intellectual leadership. They are further sustained by the robber ultimatum of "your life, or your mind."
The Western countries that are absorbing Africa's thinkers do so because they recognize the power of the mind. Africa fails to learn from its environment. For instance, it is a known fact that some plants are adjusted to the climate in such a way that they have deep taproots in areas with less water, and they also shed leaves during dry seasons.
Africa, unlike its characteristic vegetation mentioned above, does not make any effort to tap its intellectual potential. It has not learnt to adjust according to seasons - colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial seasons - it specializes in the "blame industry." The taproot of African governments is aimed at destructive military arsenals, destruction of reason, techniques of silencing dissenters and populist policies.
By failing to offer "green pastures" for its own intelligentsia, Africa is committing suicide by slow poison.
In conclusion, African intellectuals who migrate to developed nations do not betray Africa. They simply illuminate the fact that priorities are misplaced in this continent. For example, why do African governments that claim to be poor, find it logical to pay expatriates hundred times more than local experts? The message to Africans is clear: go abroad to seek green pastures.
The African intellectuals have been betrayed by their mother countries. Their abilities were doubted before being put to a test. It would be better for a politician presiding over a fundraising in aid of a student jetting abroad to say: 'This country is in no urgent need for thinkers, go for a holiday and come back to sing praise songs.'"12
That is Africa's tragedy. Yet, human capital flight is not unique to Africa. Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world including former communist countries also suffer from the brain drain. But the problem is worst in Africa. Tragically, it is also the poorest and least developed continent which can ill-afford to lose such capital: its trained professionals and other highly educated people.
And statistics on the problem don't get any better no matter where you look. For example, another study by the World Bank says about 70,000 highly qualified African scholars and experts leave Africa every year to work in other countries, mostly in the developed West. This figure does not include the large number of students who also leave the continent every year to study overseas. A significant number of them don't return, either, after they finish their studies. And for good reason.
To replace those who left, African countries spend about $4 billion annually on hiring an estimated 100,000 expatriates without whom the continent would literally come to a grinding halt or degenerate into total chaos and even dissolve in anarchy in some cases.
Almost everything of an infrastructural and technical nature would shut down due to lack of a critical mass of highly skilled manpower needed to keep the countries functioning as socio-political and economic entities.
The problem is so serious that Africa is destined to remain on the periphery of the international mainstream unless something is done now, by our leaders, to reverse the trend. As the World Markets Research Centre stated in its 2002 report, "The Brain Drain - Africa's Achilles Heel":
"The brain drain problem has also contributed to Africa's growing marginalisation in the global economy. According to a study by the Geneva-based intergovernmental body, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), there are currently just 20,000 scientists and engineers in Africa - or just 3.6 per cent of the world's scientific population - serving a population of about 600 million.
Africa would need at least 1 million scientists and engineers to sustain the continent's development prospects. At least one-third of science and technology professionals from developing countries are currently working in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia."13
And as Katrin Cowan-Louw, assistant programme officer at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), said: "There are more African scientists and engineers working in the US than there are in Africa. Long-term economic growth cannot be achieved by primarily exporting natural resources."14
One tragic case after another demonstrates the utter futility of the efforts by African governments to keep educated Africans in their countries with empty rhetoric and with promises the leaders never intend to fulfill.
A few years ago, Zambia had 1,600 doctors. By 2002, only 400 remained in the country. The rest had emigrated, literally fled, to Europe, the United States, neighbouring Botswana and South Africa, lured by higher salaries and better working and living conditions.
Some African countries may have lost fewer doctors, but the impact is the same, nonetheless, in terms of diminished capacity to cope with Africa's enormous problems in the health sector, compounded by the flight of other professionals whose departure from Africa has ripple effect across the spectrum as much as that of any other highly trained personnel leaving our continent to work overseas.
So far, we have failed to reduce let alone stop this outflow of human capital from our continent; as much as we have failed to stop the financial haemorrhage of our countries caused by our leaders who are busy stealing billions of dollars from us every year, depositing the loot in foreign banks, mostly in the West. It is a loss we can't afford in either case.
But in spite of the mess we are in today, one also wonders if we can really afford to be colonized again as some of our people, desperate for help, have suggested.
We have come a long way since independence in the fifties and sixties And we still have a long way to go. We are now at the crossroads.
