EMEAGWALI:
We begin by building a data bank of the 100,000 African academics,
scientists and experts living abroad and identify their potential
contributions. Then we offer them reasonable compensation and benefit
packages that will entice them to return to Africa.
Recruiting some well-paid scientists and engineers may not be possible. An
alternative will be to use their services on a voluntary and part-time
basis. For example, those American college professors can teach in Africa
during the summer months and on their one year sabbatical leave.
Our internal loss of skills is a form of a brain drain. To make ends meet,
most skilled African professionals have “extracurricular” occupations. I
know a Nigerian professor that raises poultry; a doctor that manages a beer
parlor; and an engineer that operates a kiosk. Last year, 2,000 Nigerian
pharmacists left the country. Street hawkers fills the void and are
dispensing expired drugs to Nigerians.
After increasing the compensation packages of professionals, we need to
establish “brain gain” by encouraging a cross-migration non-African
professional to compensate for those who left Africa. For example, Russian
recently lost 80 percent of its mathematicians. After the cold war, many
Russian scientists emigrated to Iran, Iraq and Israel. African nations
failed to hire unemployed Russian scientists who were accustomed to earning
low wages.
They should require African professionals to give something back to their
country as repayment for the state-subsidized education they received. For
example, they could require doctors to do three years of rural community
service before receiving their medical certificates. I find it amazing that
more Sierra Leonean medical doctors are practicing in Chicago than in
Sierra Leone!
Africa’s brain drain is United States’ brain gain. The United States has
increased its immigration quota to admit 135,000 Information Technologists
over the next three years. They should ask the United States to pay an
indemnity for luring those 135,000 professionals from Third World nations.
One might ask: Where can we find the money to pay these experts? I will
recommend we reduce arms purchases. Nigeria claims it can only afford to
pay its professors 50 dollars a month although it is spending one million
dollars a day to fight in Sierra Leone. The money spent on warfare will pay
the salary of 600,000 professors. We need to change our priority from
warfare to technological advancement.
Affluent Africans fly to the United States for medical treatment. In other
words, some Africans can contribute to the $200,000 a year salary of an
American medical doctor while they only pay doctors in Africa less than
$1,000 a year.
Even the soldiers have abandoned their jobs to become politicians in
military uniform while politicians are now business persons and contractors.
The Nigerian defense sector had the largest budgetary allocation while
technological development received the smallest. The military budget was
100 times larger than the technological development budget. It should be
reversed.
After forty years of exporting oil, Nigeria still contracts petroleum
exploration and recovery to western companies who, in turn, retain 10
percent of the oil revenues. Strength is not purchasing an obsolete Russian
jet fighter. Strength is Nigeria owning the technology it uses to extract
and refine petroleum.
Emeagwali
Emeagwali dropped out of school at the age of 12, served in the Biafran army at the age of 14 and came to the United States on scholarship in March 1974. Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, computation's Nobel Prize, for inventing a formula that lets computers perform their fastest computations, work that led to the reinvention of supercomputers. He has been extolled by Bill Clinton as "one of the great minds of the Information Age," described by CNN as "A Father of the Internet," and is the world's most searched-for scientist on the Internet.
Click on emeagwali.com for more information.
