Although Nigeria is richly blessed with highly skilled professionals in all fields of human endeavour, its vital sectors are ironically in shambles, no thanks to the monster of brain drain that has forced many of its best minds to seek greener pastures in other parts of the world. OLUKOREDE YISHAU, who spent time with some Nigerian professionals resident in Botswana, United States and Turkey, reports on factors that are making them flee their fatherland.
THE air smells good. The road network near superb. Junctions are fitted with streetlights. And the people obey them. Commercial drivers comport themselves well and passengers have little or no cause for altercations. Here electricity supply hardly fails and importers of electricity generating sets look for market elsewhere. Water supply is managed in such a way that the country’s deficiency is well-covered. Welcome to Botswana, the landlocked Southern African country, where some of Nigeria’s best brains have found home.
In Botswana, many a Nigerian banker, lawyer and academic not only occupies top positions in the corporate and academic world; many top-flight professionals from Nigeria regularly arrive the country to swell the rank of those who have fled from what they see as a system that stifles talents.
Those who ditch the country for better climes can hardly be blamed. Back home, majority of Nigerians live under the yoke of poverty, diseases and corruption of the endemic proportion, yet their leaders merely pay lip service. And the house, not a few believe, looks set to fall.
Ask Hilary Inyang, Frank Ibikunle and Tunde Oladiran. They are three of the Nigerians, who have found home in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. They are all professors at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST). The school runs a temporary campus in Gaborone but will later move to Palapye, a town not far from Jwaneng – the home of the richest diamond mine in the world.
Oladiran, who has been in Botswana for over two decades, toyed with the idea of returning home recently as the vice-chancellor of a state university, but he jettisoned the idea for a post as BIUST’s Head of Mining Energy and Geological Engineering. He was with the University of Botswana at the time. His reason for turning down the offer was that the right things were not put in place. Things, he said, were done haphazardly.
“At the time I left Nigeria, the naira was sliding down seriously. Before I left Nigeria to the UK for studies, it was almost one naira to one dollar. You could spend naira in London. To see the naira slide down was shocking. I think another thing that added to it was the insecurity at that time and also the provision of utility. When I was at the polytechnic, we were living on the third floor and, of course, there was no water. We used to go close to Asejire to wash clothes and to Oba Dam in UI to fetch water and carry it up the stairs.
“It didn’t need to continue and having come out, one has seen that life can be better. In Botswana, the system works. The country has zero tolerance for corruption. Everything works for good. I have always returned home, even though sometimes distressful because of water, road and electricity. Each time I come to Ibadan, not only Ibadan, Nigeria generally, I almost cry,” he said.
Like Oladiran, Inyang, who is the Vice-Chancellor of the BIUST, was caught by the home bug after staying in the US for over 30 years. He returned to Nigeria as the President of the African University of Science and Technology (AUST) in Abuja. But, he found the environment stifling and returned to the US. Botswana saw the good in this egg-head, who has helped America and other countries in the area of environmental engineering and climate change and stopped him from taking a job at the University of China.
Inyang, who was a finalist for the United Nations Under-Secretary, told The Nation: “Circumstances in Nigeria were not conducive. Botswana already leads in African governance. There is a history of good governance there but that has to translate to advances in science and technology. In Botswana, the economy is diversified. They are embarking on an economic diversification drive. And they have picked me as the person to help the country push that forward through. That is how to build African intellectual systems. There must be a translation from research to entrepreneurship.
“For example, in Botswana I will be setting up with a budget I will get next year from that government. There will be entrepreneurship support centres in every local government area; we call them districts there and use those outreach centres to infuse knowledge into local companies. I plan to engage with banks to give loans to support initiatives but those companies must get certification as to whether they received the training and are able to attend most of the new technology briefings that they will be given at the local level. We could have done this in Nigeria, but the seriousness of Nigerian agencies is in doubt.
“They don’t spend that much time here. I was a VC here. So, I know what I am talking about. They now want to be like politicians. They keep quiet about the ills of society. They are afraid. Universities since time immemorial have been the place where you have the great thinkers and lions of society who speak out against the ills of society without fear of favour. From the times of Galileo Galilei who said the world was not flat and many others. This is why I resigned from my position as VC here and went to America.
“The 60s were the age of African political independence. What should have followed should have been an age of intellectual growth and renaissance but that never happened. What followed was a bunch of coups that never allowed creativity and innovation to take root in Africa. So for that reason, Africa has become dependent on Europe and America for so many things, while the Asians have moved on. Universities have to be the doyens of social thought; that is why in most countries they have dictatorships, intellectuals and journalists are the ones they go to first. But here it is not. These are problems that must be corrected.”
Until early this year, Ibikunle was a lecturer at the privately-owned Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State. BIUST has ‘hijacked’ him with superb condition of service, including relocating his family and they are having it good. Compared to many of his colleagues in government-owned universities, Ibikunle was well paid by world-class Covenant University, the number one private university in Nigeria. But, what Botswana offered him through BIUST was too good to be resisted.
But, Botswana is not the only countries where Nigerians have found home away from home because of what they describe as a failed system. The United States, Canada, South Africa, England and Turkey also feature in this realm. Nigerian scientists and other professionals regularly troop out of the country to take up abode elsewhere.
Scary statistics, grave implications
The effects of brain drain on Nigeria’s vital sectors are too disturbing to ignore, for Nigeria’s loss is other countries’ gain. The worst hit is Nigeria’s health sector, now in a parlous state. According to a report by the Partnership for Transforming Health Systems II (PATHS2), 227 medics trained in Nigeria left the country in 2012. The same report also said 637 Nigerian doctors left the country in 2010 and 3,552 in 2007, which was the peak period. One of the debilitating consequences of this ugly trend is paucity of medical professionals to man the country’s hospitals. The president of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA), Dr. Osahon Enabulele, said of the 71,740 medical doctors registered with the Medical and Dental Council, only 27,000 are practising in Nigeria. The result is that only 40 doctors serve 100,000 Nigerians. This is against the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 2.3 doctors, nurses and midwives per 1,000 people as minimum threshold of health worker density.
According to the WHO representative in Nigeria, Dr Rui Vaz Gama, a recent assessment made by the global health body revealed that “36 countries in the African region (including Nigeria) have shortages estimated at 820,000 doctors, nurses and midwives.” Yet, at least 40,000 Nigerian medical doctors are reportedly practising in the United States.
Former US Ambassador to Nigeria, Walter Carrington, said over three million Nigerians live and work in the US and Canada alone. Instructively too, a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) report indicates that 215,000 medical consultants in Britain are Nigerians. Many of them got qualified there and never bothered to return home. It is believed that if Nigerian doctors in the UK or Canada or United States return home en masse, the healthcare system in those countries may collapse.
The implication of the brain drain, especially concerning doctors, is also captured by a recent NMA projection, which states that before the end of this year, no fewer than 5,000 Nigerians will seek medical attention in countries with developed medical services. It added that Nigeria loses about N125 billion annually to capital flight as a result of patients’ treatment cost overseas, among other things.
But, it is not only a parlous health sector that Nigeria has to show for the monster of brain drain bedevilling it. Also in a bad shape are the country’s universities, which are now reeling under the pangs of paucity of good hands, among other afflictions. While many first-rate universities abroad are brimming with celebrated professors of Nigerian origin, universities back home are lacking in top-level manpower and other things that make universities tick. Going by a recent article by the Vice-Chancellor of the Plateau State University, Prof. Nenfort Gomwalk, 70 per cent of lecturers in the country’s public universities are assistant lecturers with only master degrees. Most of them, the VC said, have spent an average of 10-15 years pursuing their PhDs without success.
Another grim picture of the situation in the sector was painted by the findings of an 11-man committee on Needs Assessment of Nigerian Public Universities. The report, which was submitted to the former Minister of Education, Prof. Ruqayyatu Ahmed Rufa’i, in 2012, said the universities have only 37,504 lecturers compared to 77,511 non-teaching staff employed on full-term basis. That is not all. According to the report, only 43 per cent of the inadequate number of academics has the requisite qualification for teaching, which is PhD, leaving a majority of the teaching personnel as junior staff or assistant lecturers. The net result is over-bloated student-lecturer ratio, as high as 1:100 in many universities compared with 1:4 in Harvard University and 1:3 in Cambridge University.
This has kept tongues wagging. One of those who believe brain drain, corruption and insecurity are damaging the country is Carrington. He said: “Over three million Nigerians live and work in the United States and Canada, to say nothing of the large numbers in the United Kingdom. They excel in their contributions to all sectors of our society. I have said many times to American audiences that I regard Nigerians as the most accomplished immigrant group in the United States. What made Nigeria the country that I looked up to for so long was the fact that it produced some of the most educated, most talented black people to be found anywhere on earth.
“My country and others around the world profit from Nigeria’s greatest export her accomplished people. I often ask Nigerians who are legally in the US why they remain. The two major impediments to going back which they cite are their fears of the omni-presence of corruption and the growing absence of security.”
Carrington’s stand may make more sense with the scary experience of Prof. Victor Ibeanusi, Dean of School of Environment, Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University, United States. His resolve to return home to help from time to time has been hampered by an incident during a visit to Abuja. During one of his visits, armed robbers stormed his hotel room and were almost manhandling him before they were distracted by voices and hurried out of his room. Appraising the situation, Oladiran said insecurity and absence of basic amenities would keep professionals abroad, adding that unless poor conditions of service and living were addressed, the country would continue to lose many of its best brains to better climes.
According to Dr Elizabeth Rasekola, who is the President of the African-Carribean Consortium on Science and Technology, Nigeria ought to be better than it is. She added that the situation of things in the country is what is encouraging the menace of brain drain. Rasekola said the country should have managed its oil resources to the advantage of its people.
She said: “What is disappointing is what Nigeria has done with its oil resources. Malaysia’s oil is owned and controlled by the people and government. They even export oil and have assets abroad. Malaysia gave the oil giants only five years to prospect and thereafter ensured complete transfer of technology and others. They now own the oil 100 per cent. Nigeria has not been able to do that. It is a shame. I worked for Petronas for two years and I cried a lot of the time because NNPC was supposed to be doing the things Petronas, which is owned by Malaysia, was doing. They own assets outside Malaysia. They own assets in South Africa. What does NNPC own outside Nigeria? They haven’t even invested enough in Nigeria. Not only has our inability to manage this resource to the benefit of the people encouraged brain drain, it has totally demoralised the development of Nigeria beyond terms you can quantify. The damage has been colossus.”
Experts give conditions
Some professionals in the Diaspora have said for them to return home or for more professionals not to join the bandwagon, basic amenities such as roads, electricity and insecurity should be tackled. They also want corruption curbed. A WHO report once rated Nigeria 191st of 192 countries with the world’s un-safest roads. A committee set up by the Federal Government to realise a United Nation’s mandate of reducing the high number of deaths recorded on Nigerian roads, said auto crashes kill 162 deaths per 100,000, forcing the Health Minister, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, to say auto crashes kill more people in Nigeria than diseases. This cannot be otherwise given the fact that only about 15 per cent of the country’s over 160,000 kilometres of secondary and tertiary roads is paved and motorable.
Another headache Nigerian professionals want addressed is electricity supply in the country, which is currently nothing to write home about. Despite the huge investment on power generation in the last decade, the country has been unable to generate up to 5,000 megawatts of electricity when smaller countries generate far more and are self-sufficient. The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) last Wednesday said the country’s power generation now hovers between 3,800 mega watts and 4,000 mega watts. Significantly, if power projects under various stages of completion are completed and operational, power generation, according to experts, will only reach about 10,000 MW.
The Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, said the country needs about 200,000 MW before it can realise its dream of adequate power supply. The privatisation of the Distribution Companies (DISCOs) may not yield immediate changes. For now, they can only distribute the power generated by the TCN. The implication of this is that Nigerians have had to generate their own electricity. At the last count, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) said no fewer than 60 million Nigerians own power generating sets, requiring more than N1.56 trillion to fuel them yearly.
Corruption, according to Nigerians in the Diaspora, is another challenge the country has to surmount. A Tribune-Review investigations show that the country’s money is regularly stolen through multinational banks into secret accounts and shell companies. An estimated $1 trillion gets stolen from developing countries, including Nigeria, in a typical year, according to Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based non-profit organisation that traces illicit money. Raymond Baker, director of Global Financial Integrity, said: “Places such as Nigeria represent the ugliest chapter in global affairs since slavery.” Unfortunately, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) have been unable to make the desired changes, as the war against sleaze has been specious and half-hearted.
The worsening insecurity and corruption were also the reasons the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Competitive Report 2012-2013 ranked the country 134th in the world only 10 countries were worse off. The WEF warned that Nigeria’s economic situation remained grim.
The report finds out that the environment does not support competitive economy. Reasons for slamming Nigeria with this unfavourable report: corruption, government inefficiencies, worsening insecurity, poor infrastructure and so on.
The WEF said: “The institutional environment does not support a competitive economy because of concerns about the protection of property rights, ethics and corruption, undue influence, and government inefficiencies. The security situation in the country continues to be dire and has worsened since last year (134th). Additionally, Nigeria receives poor assessments for its infrastructure (130th) as well as its health and primary education levels (142nd). Furthermore, the country is not harnessing the latest technologies for productivity enhancements, as demonstrated by its low rates of ICT penetration.”
Nigeria lags behind some of the countries on the continent, where its professionals are finding new homes such as South Africa, Botswana, Kenya and Ghana, which made an impressive record moving up 11 places to 103rd position. South Africa is ranked 52nd this year, remaining the highest-ranked country in sub-Saharan Africa and the third-placed among the BRICS economies.
The 10 ten spots on the report remain dominated by countries outside the continent where Nigerian professionals are running to in large droves such as Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. To add salt to injury, the country has been cash-strapped for some time now, reducing the cash available to government to spend improving basic amenities such as roads and insecurity, as represented by Boko Haram in the North and other social vices in other parts of the country.
The Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, told a bewildered nation recently that the country may soon be reeling from cash crunch and may be unable to pay salaries. The monthly allocations to the three tiers of government from the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FACC) have been in bad shape for some time now. It got so bad that the FAAC could not meet its obligation to state governments and many of them had to resort to borrowing or dipping their hands in reserves to pay salaries and do other things. Only N3.893 trillion was received as gross revenue in the first six months of 2013, as against the projected revenue of N4.215 trillion for the period, leaving a shortfall of N321.73 billion.
A FAAC document puts the monthly budgeted gross federally collected revenue for the country at N702.54 billion, which it planned to realise from three sources mineral revenue, N465.057 billion; non-mineral revenue, N158.711billion and value added tax, N78.77 billion. This is the breakdown of the N3.893 trillion earned for the first half of this year: January, N651.26 billion; February, N571.7 billion; and March, N595.71 billion. In April, May and June, revenue receipts by the country were N621.07 billion, N590.77billion and N863.02 billion. It is, therefore, apparent that the country recorded significant revenue drop between January and May. Other months, except June, also witnessed a revenue shortfall. January, N51.28 billion; February, N130.84 billion; March, N106.84 billion, April, N81.47 billion and May, N111.77 billion.
There was a surplus of N160.48 billion in June as the country’s revenue receipts of N863.02 billion exceeded the budgeted N702.54 billion. As a result of the grim financial outlook, experts believe that the country may rake in about N7.78 trillion for the fiscal year, instead of N8.43 trillion it projected. So, chances of concentrating efforts on capital projects are slim.
Why efforts to reverse the trend have failed
Four years ago, the Federal Government tried to take the advantage of the global meltdown to get Nigerian professionals back home. It worked with the African Diaspora Initiative (ADI). ADI’s Director-General, David Okoror, estimated that 7,500 Nigerians returned to work in the financial, telecoms and information technology industries in a period of seven years. The founder of WazobiaJobs.com, a recruitment portal for West Africa, Ade Odutola, guessed that 10,000 skilled Nigerians returned because of meltdown.
Years before the meltdown, the Directorate of Technical Cooperation in Africa tried to encourage brain gain. The DTCA was established in 2001 to sensitise experts in the diaspora to look back into Africa. Its Director-General, Suleiman Shuaibu, said this was to stop a situation where Africa, though blessed with some of the best brains, is the least developed continent in the world.
The way things stand, with no seriousness on the part of government to address insecurity, corruption, absence of basic amenities and lack of better work incentives, observers insist that getting back the professionals abroad and stopping new ones from going overseas will remain a dream. And not a few will continue to look for countries with better incentives, orderliness and sense of belonging, which observers say Nigeria is not prepared to provide.
In an article, Dr. Jide Adelugba, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Regional Psychiatric Centre (Prairies), Canada, said: “The situation of everyday living in Nigeria needs no further documentation; we all know that it is very bad when compared with that of advanced countries of Western Europe and North America…The root cause of brain drain in Nigeria lies with our successive leaderships and governments that have demonstrated, very convincingly, that the interests of Nigeria and its citizens were never their priority. They relentlessly pursued their own agenda.”
He added that the various governments that have ruled the developing nations of Africa should be blamed. “Those governments, through their ineptitude and lack of vision, have turned their populations with productive capacities to willing sophisticated slaves in foreign lands. It is not in the interest of developing nations that this trend should continue unabated. The idea of free, trade globalisation and free movement of labour would find new meanings with the apologists of brain drain. For the Nigerian people, the impact of brain drain is too costly and should no longer be ignored,” he said.
Chukwu, however, said Nigeria’s continued loss of trained professionals to countries with better work incentives was the result of globalisation. He said: “Some of our Nigerian brothers and sisters trained by Nigerian money are outside, but we can get them back, if we can pay for their services.” But, since paying for their services goes beyond just cash and the country seems handicapped to address other needs, the minister’s wishes are not horses and beggars cannot ride. And the question remains: Who is the next ‘Andrew’ checking out?
