Perhaps the greatest challenge facing a weekly columnist such as I have lately become is finding a suitable hanger on which to hang his weekly discourse. At the beginning of the week after the column has made its sometimes unlikely appearance, there is a feeling of relief and accomplishment and one can relax. This feeling however evaporates quickly at the realisation that another week had come round and before the end of it another article had to be concocted and inflicted on an unseen audience containing at least a few people who had the rightful expectation of reading another offering. The first couple of days after publication may be comfortable enough but a slight panic sets in if the column has not assumed some shape and quickly balloons into a full panic if by mid-week the next instalment has not been formed in the mind.

There is really no fool proof method to getting anything out but the columnist hunts for a suitable topic of conversation virtually all the time especially because not everything that comes  to mind can be developed into an article that is worthy of presentation to an informed audience. The search for a suitable subject can lead into all sorts of venues each of them more unlikely than the last and some of these could be alleyways which under normal circumstances cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered worthy of consideration.

Last week, I was blown onto the right track in my search for a reasonable topic of discussion by a rare visit to Facebook and quite coincidentally, I have the same source to thank for inspiration for what I have decided to talk about this week.

The ASUU strike which has led to the closure of our public universities has been a hot topic of discussion on social media and indeed other fora of public discussion in the land. At this point there is hardly anyone with a voice who has not taken a stand, for or against ASUU. The indifference which characterised the declaration of the strike six months ago has now evaporated to be replaced by indignation in many quarters. The government which not too long ago was confident that the strike would be broken after a few weeks has been stung and confounded by the resoluteness of their battered opponents and are now wondering what could be done to cower the striking lecturers and force them back into their cobwebbed classrooms and shuttered libraries, there to teach whatever they had been paid, or not paid to teach. Talks have been held in a rather desultory manner between union and government and more importantly, the striking lecturers were supposed to have been put in their place by their inadequate salaries being withheld for the duration of the strike which under the circumstances should be short. Unfortunately those strong-arm tactics do not seem to have worked and the strike has now stretched into the seventh sterile month. The lecturers are not being paid and government has upped the ante whilst pleading with the lecturers to call off their strike, by insisting that all those accumulated salaries that had been unpaid were to be forfeited to government whenever they returned to work. So far, the hungry or perhaps, starving lecturers are hanging tough and the universities are still shut down.

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The other trending subject and one which cannot be separated from the strike is the continued migration of our young and not so young people to what has been described as greener pastures found mainly in the affluent countries of the West. It is not coincidence that the people taking flight are those who have attended one Nigerian university or the other and in doing so had acquired the means of being found useful within the developed economies of their intended societies. The most visible cohorts in this happy band of travellers are doctors and nurses who are being vacuumed up to serve in those well equipped hospitals and clinics of the first world. One commentator on Facebook drew attention to this phenomenon in a rather lengthy post which he brought to what many, if not a majority of his readers considered to be a highly debatable conclusion. It was his opinion that it was not just right for people who had been trained in Nigeria to jump ship as soon as there was some turbulence. I agreed with that conclusion because the receiving country was reaping a rich harvest from a field in which they had not bothered to sow.

Not unexpectedly, I was set upon by two young(?) doctors who were convinced that they, as doctors were entitled to make a decent living from their profession. Since their country of birth had more or less turned her back on them, they had no option but to wash the dust of Nigeria off their feet and seek their entitled fortune elsewhere. The doctors insisted that I had been unfair to doctors who had the primary responsibility of saving lives and were not being adequately remunerated for this function within Nigeria. In that circumstance therefore their qualification as doctors was a flight ticket into whatever paradise they chose to fly into.

These are two apparently irreconcilable positions, both of them heavy with moral implications begs the question, what is the purpose of education? It is clear that in Nigeria the primary purpose of education is to secure the comforts necessary for a life of ease. You go to school so as to become a ‘big man’ having risen far above the common herd. Anything else must be considered secondary to this purpose. This has been drummed into the consciousness of succeeding generations of Nigerians to such an extent that any effort to change or modify this mind set is bound to fail. It has become set in concrete especially in our brave new world of overnight billionaires who have turned computer languages into gold mines which keep giving. In this environment there is moral justification for expecting a life time of reaping the benefits of subjecting yourself to the discipline of the classroom for a few years after which the rewards which are reaped for life becomes an entitlement. On the other hand, how can a third world structure within which some form of education has been extracted be expected to provide the comfortable environment which their educated status demands? In any competition between their home environment and the lands flowing with milk and honey overseas, Nigeria loses hands down and the country which has provided the education which has now become a passport to global wealth no longer deserves to be served in any capacity. The only option is to leave as soon as possible. Nigeria is in an obvious state of underdevelopment and needs to move up but how can this movement be achieved when the people who have been educated with the sole purpose of driving this development process take flight as soon as they have acquired the wings necessary for this purpose?

The flight of doctors, nurses and indeed other professionals from Nigeria has now acquired the status of a roaring epidemic. It has become a yard stick for measuring success. For some people of my experience and generation, their success in life is now measured by how many of their children live in Canada or some other exotic location. It is clear now that Nigeria has been producing graduates in virtually all fields at a rate which is far beyond her requirement for servicing the country optimally. We obviously have too many doctors and nurses than are required for our healthcare needs and with lawyers being pumped out  at the rate of knots, it is to be expected that young lawyers, when they find jobs at all, are offered the kind of salaries which secondary school leavers would have rejected out of hand only a decade ago. And yet the queue of hopeful university freshers is as long as the imagination will conjure up.

Doctors and nurses are needed in Britain because unlike in Nigeria, that country has an extensive and expanding healthcare delivery system. For all that the system is notorious for being stingy with its wages. Britain is not willing or able to spend the kind of money she needs to spend to maintain her National Health Service. Apart from this, they cannot afford to pay for the education of the personnel required to keep the service running. In addition, there are not enough Britons who are willing to pay for medical training or make the effort to study medicine. But why should they bother when there are thousands of doctors who are surplus to requirement in Nigeria? True Nigerian doctors have been trained at minimal cost, they are still good enough to pull through their shift within the NHS. The situation is that Nigeria with all her disabilities is now providing technical aid to Britain which, compared to Nigeria is a rich capitalist country. During the extended period of the Atlantic slave trade, millions of West Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic to work in the plantations which made it possible for capitalism to be planted in the rich soil of Europe and America. This in turn made it possible for those places to become the affluent societies which are now attracting our professionals in droves. In other words, the triangular trade which enriched Europe at the expense of West Africa is still alive and well complete with the coercion which characterised it so many centuries ago.

My antagonists on Facebook made the point that they, being doctors they deserved a guaranteed high standard of living no matter how deprived other members of society are. Well, they have a point well worth defending. But there are other ways of looking at this situation. Immediately after the Cuban Revolution a little over sixty years ago, the decision was taken to bring the healthcare standards of the ordinary Cuban to first world standards. The first step taken to achieve this objective was to accelerate the production of doctors and this was accomplished at record speed. Cuba was suddenly awash with doctors. But being a revolutionary society, the doctors were not hoisted on a pedestal. They were not paid more than plumbers and carpenters and had no special privileges. Some of those doctors defected but an overwhelming majority stayed at home and today the life expectancy on that island is only  a couple of years lower than what it is in the USA. Cuba has one of the lowest figures for child mortality in the world and Cuban medical scientists have made a name for themselves in the area of vaccine development and production. Cuban doctors have been contracted to work for their government in no less than sixty-seven countries. Cuba has a population of eleven million and for this number there are 100,000doctors and the same number of nurses and there 50,000 professors making sure that the next generation of medical doctors will continue to roll off the assembly line. In the meantime, medical tourism is one of the healthiest sectors of the Cuban economy and Cuban medical schools are attracting students from all over the world. All these indices are in spite of the vengeful economic blockage by the USA which has been in place over the last sixty years. If Nigeria was in any way like Cuba, her professionals would mostly be at home working towards the development of the nation.