Brain Drain - Irreversible Short of Revolutionary Thinking

On March 3, 2008, a conference on Afrika’s brain drain (particularly of medical professionals) opened in Kampala, Uganda. The conference aimed to highlight the desperate medical needs of the continent, and how the lure of better pay in the West prevented Afrika from meeting those needs. I have heard that there are as many or more Nigerian doctors in the West than in Nigeria. In any case, the brain drain, dealt with here with respect to health professionals in Afrika, has created lopsided imbalances in doctor-to-population ratios, and has resulted in the biggest health care shortage of all world regions. The conference highlighted that a global action plan is necessary to “manage” the migration, which cannot be halted. But I think our planning around the problem of the brain drain in the third world, Afrika in particular, must take a far more critical and revolutionary cast than this talking shop would allow.

Afrika is losing fastest its citizens with the skills most readily desired in the West - including engineers, doctors, lecturers, writers, nurses, therapists, musicians, and others in the creative and professional fields, whose training often comes at great expense to their home countries. But these countries can’t compensate, or in many cases permit to operate in freedom, such professionals to the levels expected in the West. And in the West, the fiscal priorities of governments no longer include training domestic health-care professionals, engineers, and other professionals. Thus in much of America, doctors and nurses frequently come in dark skin and bear international accents - be they Indians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, etc. It is cheaper to import professionals than to invest in education. If not for immigrant professionals in the contemporary economies of the US, Canada, the UK, or France, these countries would likely face labor shortages in critical areas like health-care, infrastructure, university staffing, and so on.

The West is currently winning the war over the world’s best and brightest workers. Immigration schemes in the US, Britain and France privilege the most highly trained and certified candidates. When Afrika tries to fill its shortages of professionals by employing expatriate staff, she winds up spending over $4 billion a year, according to a This Day (Lagos) article from April 26, 2007. And since 1990, Afrika has been losing 20,000 professionals per year to more developed countries.

There is an even more desperate exodus to highlight, of ordinary Afrikans leaving the continent for Europe by any means - a dangerous boat ride to the Canary Islands, a long trek across the Sahara to Morocco to jump the fence into Melilla and Ceuta, Somali and Ethiopian boat-people bound for Yemen, and so on. But the root of the problem is the nature of global capital itself, the geographies of wealth, power and influence established by Western imperialism. The global centers and the peripheries - and most of us, especially Afrikans, are living in the peripheries - are in a dialectically opposed relationship based on who defines wealth and who is supposed to produce wealth for its definers.

Our economies, based on primary commodity exports, are chasing after what Western economies are willing to give of their prestigious currencies for our unprocessed goods. Our cocoa, coffee, diamonds, gold, petroleum, coltan, etc. - their prices are all controlled in the West, and are subject to the rise or fall of demand for them in the West. Thus our economies are controlled by the West, to the extent that we continue in this totally economically unimaginative, uncreative and slavish direction, which directly continues neo-colonialism and permits neoliberalism.

In such a regime, how can lasting wealth ever be generated among the masses, and within the broader economy such that it can retain its professionals, indeed all its workers who are all of equal worth, by compensating them well, by providing them with free, democratic, protected spaces in which to work, by having jobs available at all, jobs which contribute to Afrikan economies and Afrikan people’s well-being, not Westerners? How long will we listen to the dictates of “comparative advantage” within structural adjustment philosophy, which bids us keep doing what we are good at (selling cash crops and minerals, etc.) to get wealthy, while eliminating public expenditures on health care, education, etc. and introducing user fees that very few Afrikans can pay?

If you want to stop the brain drain, you will need a revolution, both in economic structure and in the ideology which socializes Afrikans. We must learn to stop seeing everything Western as prestigious and come to have full faith in and love for ourselves. That means we will be dedicated to using our skills, whatever they may be, first and foremost for the benefit of other Afrikans, and not merely seek for jobs offered in the West or by white bosses. And the economic structure has to use Afrikan resources for the benefit of Afrikans first, meaning we Afrikans will use our own raw materials and process or manufacture them into something useful to us first.

I’m not interested in “export-led growth” or the free-market and whatever GDP numbers are supposed to show us. They say Afrikan economies are now growing at x percent a year. Which Afrikans are getting richer then? Mainly those running banks, and running tel-com companies, and running churches, and doing crime. The rest are starving or leaving Afrika in droves, including doctors, nurses, engineers, laborers and farmers. The news is not good.

Revolution - in economic policies, in consciousness, all around - must govern how we think and plan towards stopping this “brain drain.” Afrikans must realize that we are continuing to sell ourselves out, if we do nothing to overturn the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and the global economic structure and the geographies of wealth and exploitation. Afrika and the third world must overthrow the maquiladoras and plantations of the West, the mines, etc. and assume self-sufficiency, self-confidence, and commitment to our own peoples and lands. We must overthrow our notion of what money is, indeed we should get rid of money all together, or at least stop holding in such high prestige and value these currencies imposed on us by the West, on which most Afrikan currencies are based, their values pegged to them without afterthought. Humanity, progress, the beauty of a just and healthy Afrikan society and a clean Afrikan community and nation with great infrastructure and health and education - these things must come to be the prime motivators of Afrikan peoples, not cash money, especially all this money based on Western currency, and ultimately hoarded and locked up in the West itself.

If not revolution, Afrika will only become further ghettoized by the further emaciation of its own knowledge and skills base, the crumbling of its own already blasted universities, and so on. Then, these neo-colonial governments will spend billions on NGOs and expatriates from the West to look like they are doing something, when these foreigners only further alienate us from our will to act independently and see ourselves as capable of whatever is necessary to rescue ourselves.

Afrikans need to believe in and work for ourselves, or at least build towards that reality. There is no reason, no rule in the universe, that Afrikans in Afrika cannot have the highest living standards in the world, based on our great material resources, and on our human resources - and the most important resource of all is the human resource.