In a thought-provoking piece entitled “How Do We Reverse The Brain Drain?” Philip Emeagwali touches on the relationship of Africans abroad with their native homes. That Emeagwali believes in the necessity of reversing Africa’s brain drain is clear. Added to this is his idea that Africans in the Diaspora are partly to blame for Africa’s problems if only for their having abandoned Africa. One understands where Emeagwali is coming from, where his heart is. I think, however, that his ideas need some rethinking. My reaction is more of a continuation of the dialogue he has initiated than a rebuttal of some of his ideas.

Every Nigerian who has ventured out of the continent has made at least one experience that remains perennial in his or her mind. Mine was simple. I went to Austria in June 1986. A day after my arrival, one of my townsmen took me out for lunch. He ordered a fried chicken for both of us. Having said grace before meal, he looked at me with smile playing on his lips and then pounced on his share. Little did he know that I was in shock of what was placed before me. Or perhaps he planned it that way since he knew my poor family background. My mind flashed back to my village, to what took place a couple of nights before: my family of eight had shared a chicken of the same size, with my father pontificating over the usually meticulous ceremony of sharing. There in the Austrian restaurant, I had to suppress a surge of tears in order to consume my “eye-popping” share of fried chicken.

The second experience was about a week after the chicken incident. One morning, I looked out my window and saw a vehicle washing the streets. Wasting water! I thought about my sister in my village walking at least three miles to fetch drinking water.

I did not enjoy that meal of fried chicken. Nor did I enjoy my first year in Austria, for I always made instantaneous comparison between everything I saw there and its matching part in Nigeria: The good roads, steady and responsible government, lights that never went out, security, cheap food, a room of my own, the ease of communication, free education etc. Curiously enough, I was battered by guilt; I didn’t think I should enjoy all those amenities while my relatives had the exact opposites.

I was equally haunted by guilt each time I visited Nigeria. Guilt arose out of my helplessness in the face of poverty and decay; guilt re-surfaced just by seeing people suffer unnecessarily; people’s monthly salaries being withheld, people traveling on bad roads, going to bed at night in the fear of being woken by gunshots. You see some of your former colleagues who were perhaps more gifted than you were, but their chances of realizing their potentials are literally gone. You have realized yours; you are successful in your field due to a combination of certain things parts of which are environment that favors human flourishing, luck and your hard work.

Many Nigerians, I think, have faced similar situations and have been challenged to do something. Some sent money home in the hope of achieving great things. Quite a few quickly realized that the money they sent home has not achieved as much as they thought it would. A few were even tempted to come back because they believed that their homeland needed them. Indeed they came back, spent some time and did their best to change things. In the end they realized that their coming back changed nothing. Or, at least not much.

Evidently there is no lack of goodwill on the part of Nigerians abroad. Emeagwali’s concerns underline the common observation made about Nigerians: your body might leave Nigeria, but your soul or spirit never does. Part of it is guilt, which is that elemental ethical call to bear some responsibility. Emeagwali is right to suggest that “the talents and skills of the African Diaspora” should be tapped. It does, however, appear unproductive to want to tap into, or rely on any talent pool outside any given society for the purpose of developing that very society. Nor do I believe, as he does, that Africans in the Diaspora “should be blamed in part for Africa’s problems.”

Reversing the brain drain, I think, is only a fraction of the equation. Indeed, it should never be positively embarked upon. If anything, one should be thinking of how to staunch the drain. This is achieved by Nigeria necessarily taking the route many other developed parts of the world took: make the living conditions satisfying for people, imitate other successful societies. Moving “one million high-tech jobs from the United States to Africa” is ambitious and noble. It pays however to attempt to understand the nature of Africa’s problems.

Just last year when I visited Enugu I went to my favorite barber, Powerful, to have a haircut. There was power failure and, because of fuel scarcity at the time, he had no fuel for his generator. It was painful to see this otherwise hardworking guy sitting idle with three other barbers he had employed, waiting for light. The simple arithmetic of his situation runs in a straight line: No light. No customers. No business. No revenue. No growth. It has been said that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. My barber’s problems is compounded by the fact that every once in a while the revenue office in Enugu collects money from him for owning a business in the city. Considering this barber’s condition, how feasible would it be moving one million high-tech jobs to this part of Africa? It does not require a stretch of the imagination to see that the barbershop is the microcosm of Nigeria’s problems.

The truth, however, is that Nigerians in Nigeria do not need Nigerians abroad in this regard. What Nigerians in Nigeria need is simple: good governance. Expressed in very simple human terms, they need to be taken seriously as humans. They need the government to somehow feel some of their pains. I hear the average Nigerian, like my brother, or my barber, repeating the saying attributed to Archimedes: Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.

The easiest way to stem Nigeria’s brain drain is to make those still living in that country as comfortable as possible. Repair the roads. Provide constant electricity and water supply. Make society secure. Provide telecommunication infrastructures. Let people know that the government cares. In the absence of these, it would be foolhardy to expect a reverse in the brain drain.

Philosophers have articulated a bit more accurately what we all know by instinct: human beings generally avoid pain while being drawn to pleasure; they move to where they will flourish. It is this principle, which you might call existential osmosis, that sends people migrating from point A to point B.

Africans tend to be melodramatic about the simple act of leaving their places of birth. And because nearly all of us have left behind conditions that are nothing to write home about, we wallow in guilt. Guilt on the other hand prompts us to overcompensate for the “problems” we have created by leaving. In most cases that guilt leads to a messianic syndrome: you have the solution to your people’s problems because you have seen better alternatives. Our inability to solve those problems often leaves us helpless, and depressed. In many instances it leads to thinly veiled abhorrence of our people. Yes, unknown to us, we despise our people because of their perennial penury. Instances of this hatred could be seen in some inherently violent and dismissive languages some of our writers and thinkers use to address our people’s failures. 

I am, of course, not suggesting a total dissociation. It does appear, however that at this time, it is eminently more helpful to study and understand Nigeria’s problems. This would avert despair and the belief that our solutions must come from without, either from Africans living abroad or foreign governments whose heartstrings have been moved by our indigence. Failure to study Africa’s problems in microcosmic units has been one of the major flaws of the first and second generations of African postcolonial intellectuals. Without having sufficiently understood the continent, most of them began to prescribe largely abstract solutions.

Let it be known that no community has ever developed without the energy to change coming from within. Change begins with understanding, coupled with that primeval instinct in each individual to live as fully as possible, and to live now, without making apologies to any person, without begging.

Chielozona Eze

www.Chielozona.blogspot.com

Robot  # 1 | 24.01.2009 23:37

In a thought-provoking piece entitled “How Do We Reverse The Brain...?” Philip Emeagwali touches on the relationship of Africans abroad with their native homes. That Emeagwali believes in the necessity of reversing Africa’s brain drain is clear. Added to this is his idea that Africans in the Diaspora are partly to blame for Africa’s problems if only for their having abandoned Africa. One understands where Emeagwali is coming from, where his heart is. I think, however, that his ideas need some rethinking. My reaction is more of a continuation of the dialogue he has initiated than a rebuttal of some of his ideas. Every Nigerian who has ventured out of the continent has made at least one experience that remains perennial in his or her mind. Mine was simple. I went to Austria in June 1986. A day after my arrival, one of my townsme...Read the full article.

olubadan  # 2 | 25.01.2009 16:53

A brillant article, well thougt and explicit i must say i share the same view as your. Our problems are enormous but the solutions are simple as you rightly said. We need to all come together to achieve a common purpose and forge the collective will to do the right thing. Move away from the politics of divide that uses corruption, religion as a wedge,that has dominated us for too long. i believe as nigerians we must take our destiny in our hands and strive for common good of our country..