| Does the diaspora help more when it is abroad or in Africa? | ||
Brain drain or brain gain? Where is the diaspora of more help to Africa – at home or abroad?Read our two pieces from both sides of the story – Martin Kimani in Washington and Ayodele A. Faiyetole in Nigeria. Then have your say below. |
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Unfortunately for Africa, until we have learnt how to delink politics from development, meaningful change will be hinged to and will come via the political path. When the African diaspora begins to participate in that process, then we can talk about their contributions to Africa.
PS: Governments can/should make it possible for their fellow country-folk in the diaspora to participate in the electoral process. But power concedes nothing without a demand. So even that gain will have to be secured through electoral means by electing better and far-sighted leaders.
Whether people are better fulfilled by working within the nation state in which they were born, or abroad (where if you're black and in a western state your race is one additional thing working subtly against you), is an individual choice. That all - those that stay and those that leave - contribute economically and in other ways to the motherland is clearly not in question.
Interesting though, that if you go beyond the world of academia where obviously a good number of Africa's best are located in institutions away from home, African professionals in other disciplines haven't really made much of a mark in the west, have they?
In as much as exposure is gained by travelling around the world, working in a foreign land and meeting with people of different cultures, the values gained cannot be transmitted to development if they are not brought home. The Chinese have set up the developmental policies and implementation plans that got China rising with their heroes in China, so has India. These are fast developing economies, basically built by their citizens, by staying at home and [concentrating] on the tasks of nation-building, even if their education and some work experience was gained outside the shores of their countries.
Money without the required human capital to manage it may be a curse rather than a blessing. Most of the money from citizens living and working abroad is wrongly used, either on perishable goods or on functions such as weddings and funerals, which have little or no developmental value. But, if a well-trained engineer from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] decided to come back home, he could lead projects that meet world standards.
A great country needs its citizens to care of and take actions for their country and their communities... you can do this better on the ground. In our schools and communities, there are future leaders, scientists, doctors, farmers, technicians, engineers and the innovators of tomorrow. We can help shape them to face the challenges of the future only by being by their side and helping them realise the potential for greatness in them.
The Africans who've left Africa in the last 20 years to go abroad have not been taken on the holds of slave ships. In fact, Africa’s greatest drain brain has been local. It is not teachers going to Australia, it's teachers leaving their teaching jobs in Nairobi to do business in Nairobi. The greatest brain drain does not involve people leaving.
Why don't we ask this about India, or China, where their migration seems to have led not to the impoverisation of their countries, but rather to its strengthening? You have over a third of companies in Silicon Valley in the US which are directly built by people who were born abroad, and especially born abroad in the Indian subcontinent, in Asia and especially China. You have the whole of South-East Asia with a huge Chinese diaspora. The economic elite in places like Malaysia and Thailand is Chinese, and it’s led to the enrichment [of the relationship] between China and these places.
The brain drain argument tends to be terribly insulting to people who stay and don't leave. It assumes that the 'cream of the crop' has left and that the people who are left behind are helpless or even idiotic. It's not like those left behind are any less intelligent, or any less dedicated to whatever it is that they're doing.
But now to the commercial aspect and to the hard numbers. The Kenyan diaspora sends more money back home than tourism, than coffee, than tea, than any product Kenya sells. It sends more money home than any aid donor gives. On that basis, it seems to me that that is a pretty good deal.
And it’s very important that this question be rooted in the real lives of people, as opposed to the kind of generalisation of the NGO workshop. For example, in London there's a group of middle-aged women in their 50s and 60s who were healthcare professionals in Kenya and other African countries. Back home, they worked in the nursing system until it could not sustain their middle class aspirations and they left nursing to go into business.
But then there was the huge economic crunch that started in the 80s. They tried for about 10-15 years and it wasn't working. In the 90s, these people say “hey, gotta move” and they came to England. And what have these women done? They live in dormitories; they train under terrible racist conditions where they're given no help whatsover. The idea that Britain is trying to attract these people is laughable, when you see the actual way they live. And what are they doing? They are paying back loans that they took in the 80s; they're trying to protect family properties that were acquired in the 70s and 80s and were acquired by banks – they're trying to educate their kids.
That's the reality of the African diaspora. The African diaspora is not somebody leaving medical school and going on a plane and constantly going to work in a hospital in London. There are people who do that, but for the vast majority, it's an incredible struggle and it's a struggle not to rob their country of their qualifications.
It's actually an attempt to maintain a dream and a place they were told they belong to. They were told they belong to a middle class, they were told they belong to a certain status, and they're desperate to stay there. In the other words, these are people who have actually bought into the national dreams that they were trained to attain.
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