Speech by Joe Frans at Nigeria Union's 30 years anniversary at Rinkeby Salen, Rinkeby Folketshus on 9th, December 2006.
Your Excellency, Chairperson, Dear Friends, ladies and gentlemen,
Let me start by paying tribute to the union.
I believe the Nigerian union is one of the oldest African associations here in Sweden.
Let me also extend my best wishes to the president of the union and the organisers of this anniversary celebration. It is deeply moving for me to be part of this celebration.
Ghana and Nigeria share many good things in common. My memories of Nigeria dates back to school days when my cousins, who lived in Victoria Island came home for summer holidays.
I remember reading about the history of Nigeria and the Nok settlers of the Jos plateau in 800BC during my early school years. I hardly knew what a plateau was then.
I remember reading about the kingdoms and empires of Nigeria. The Hausa Kingdoms and the Borno dynasties in the north. The Oyo and Benin kingdoms in the south and of Olaudu Equiano, whose story of the slave trade enkindled my political imagination and consciousness. Incidentally, Oladu Equino was later given the Swedish name Gustavus Vasa.
One of my schoolmates in Adisadel College was nicknamed after your first Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. We use to shout out to him, ta fa wa, and he would respond ba le wa.
Today both Ghana and Nigeria enjoy democracy and I am deeply honoured to be with you as a Ghanaian.
It acknowledges the realization that the African Diaspora in Sweden share a common destiny, and that we need to support each other.
Over the past four years that I served as a member of the Swedish parliament, I tried my very best to bring to light some of the issues that I believe your association supports. One such issue is that of the role of the African Diaspora.
I believe the African Diaspora in Sweden can play a vital roll in development cooperation between Sweden and Africa. It can turn Africa’s brain drain into a brain gain.
I have called for, and succeeded in getting the parliament to adopt a private members bill, that I tabled to present a new policy on Africa. This policy will be presented by the new government sometime next year.
I believe that the issues of migration and development and issues of foreign remittances should be addressed.
I believe that the taxes taken of our remittances should be exclusively pegged for development cooperation with the Diasporas involvement.
I also believe that we should be given the right to deduct from our taxes up to 10000 kronas as a tax break for remittances we send home. It is turning a brain drain into a brain gain.
Ladies, and Gentlemen, brain drain in the short run is not necessarily a
bad affair for any country. This is due to the fact that most people, will return to their native countries, and if they don’t, somehow contribute to the virtual intellectual capacity and social capital of their original country as long as they maintain some contact with their home country, also they may send back remittances or invest in their country of origin in due time.
But, the phenomenon of brain drain is perhaps most problematic for developing nations. In these countries, higher education and professional certification are often viewed as the surest path to escape from a troubled economy or difficult political situation. For example, in 2005, eighty percent of Haitians and Jamaicans with college degrees live outside their country. And more than fifty percent of the university educated professionals from many countries in Central America and the Caribbean also live abroad.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Africa has already lost one third of its human capital and is continuing to lose its skilled personnel at an increasing rate, with an estimated 20,000 doctors, university lecturers, engineers and other professionals leaving the continent annually since 1990.
There are currently over 300,000 highly qualified Africans in the Diaspora, 30,000 of which have PhDs. At the same time, Africa spends US$4 billion per year (representing 35% of total official development aid to the continent) to employ some 100,000 Western experts performing functions generically described as technical assistance. For example, 90% of private firms in Gabon are managed by expatriates.
The problem of brain drain has reached quite disturbing proportions in certain African countries, with Ethiopia ranked first in the continent in terms of rate of loss of human capital, followed by Nigeria and Ghana.
Over the past 10-15 years, about 50% of Ethiopians who went abroad for training did not return after completing their studies. According to the IOM, Ethiopia lost about 74.6% of its human capital from various institutions between 1980 and1991. While Ethiopia has 1 full-time economics professor, there are more than 100 Ethiopian economists in the United States.
According to the estimates of the Presidential Committee on Brain Drain set up in 1988 by the Babangida administration, Nigeria, between 1986 and 1990, lost over 10,000 academics from tertiary education institutions alone. Total estimates, including those who left public, industrial and private organizations, are over 30,000. 64% of Nigerians in the United States aged 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree.
Basically, African countries are funding the education of their nationals only to see them end up contributing to the growth of developed countries with little or no return on their investment.
As serious as the consequences of brain drain are for the overall development of the African continent, the health sector is particularly affected; indeed, the desperate shortage of health professionals is the most serious obstacle as Africa tries to fight AIDS and support other health programs.
In several countries, including Kenya and Ghana, the brain drain of medical professionals is threatening the very existence of the countries health services. Kenya loses on average 20 medical doctors each month.
Ghana lost 60% of its medical doctors in the 1980s and between 600 to 700 Ghanaian physicians are currently practicing in the USA alone, a figure that represents roughly 50% of the total population of doctors in Ghana.
The 1993 UNDP Human Development Report indicated that more than 21,000 Nigerian doctors were practicing in the United States alone while Nigeria suffers from a shortage of doctors.
If you add up the number of Nigerian doctors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Europe, Australia and those in other African countries, the figure would be close to 30,000.
One third of Ethiopian medical doctors have already left the country. According to Randall Tobias, the United States Government’s global AIDS coordinator, there are more Ethiopian-trained doctors practicing in the city of Chicago alone than in Ethiopia.
In Zambia, the public sector only retained 50 out of 600 doctors trained in the country’s medical school from 1978-1999. The flight of health professionals is not limited to doctors and affects nurses, pharmacists and social services personnel as well.
The loss of nurses, in particular, is a growing phenomenon, fuelled principally by the shortages in developed countries. The United States has 126,000 fewer nurses than it needs and government figures show that the country could face a shortage of 800,000 registered nurses by 2020.
Because of such shortages, industrialized nations have embarked on massive international recruitment drives, offering African nurses the opportunity to earn as much as 20 times their salaries.
For example, Malawi has only 17 nurses per 100,000 people. In contrast, many Western countries have more than 1,000.
The impacts of Brain Drain is clearly negative;
• It reduces the already low quantity of skilled manpower available in African countries
• It reduces numbers of dynamic and innovative people, whether entrepreneurs or academics
• It increases dependence on foreign technical assistance
• It slows the transfer of technology and widens the gap between African and industrialized countries
• It negatively affects the continent’s scientific output
• It leads to money lost in income tax revenues and in potential contributions to gross domestic product
But of course, one can also see some positive impact as well,
• Contribution of new skills when migrants return
• Remittances from skilled migrants boost household welfare
• Remittances support the balance of payments
Some estimates suggest that Africans working abroad send home some US$45 billion a year. While the importance of remittances for developing countries is not disputed, it does not make up for the social costs and adverse effects on developing economies of the outflow of skilled personnel in the form of brain drain.
The Diaspora option or, “virtual participation” which encourages highly skilled expatriates to contribute their experience to the development of their country without necessarily physically relocating emerged in the early 1990s as realistic strategy to alleviate the consequences of brain drain and to turn it into a brain gain.
There are some 41 expatriate knowledge networks in the world with the explicit purpose of interconnecting the expatriates themselves and with their country of origin, 6 of which are linked to countries in Africa, including the Association of Nigerians Abroad.
The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) calls for the establishment of a reliable, continental database to determine the magnitude of the problem of brain drain and promote collaboration between Africans abroad and those at home.
An important NEPAD priority is to develop Africa's human resources and reverse the brain drain. Under NEPAD, African leaders explicitly call for the creation of the "necessary political, social and economic conditions that would serve as incentives to curb the brain drain...."
Regardless of the type of migrant - educated or not – the money the migrants send back home does help alleviate poverty in their former home.
Close to 200 million people are living outside of their home countries, with remittances estimated to reach about US$225 billion in 2005, according to the Global Economic Prospects 2006. I believe there is a direct link between migration and poverty reduction
Ladies and gentlemen, today, symbolises the celebration of the first generation of Nigerian association in Sweden. Their contribution to the brain gain of Sweden is important, and their contribution to the brain gain of Nigeria and Africa is vital.
In 1976, when the association was formed, Gowon had just been overthrown, a year before, and Murtala Mohammed was assassinated in a coup attempt and was replaced by Lieutenant-General Olusegun Obasanjo.
In Sweden, constitutional reforms had been enacted a year earlier. It stripped off the last remaining powers of the monarch, so that his duties became purely ceremonial.
When the organisation turned 10 years, in 1986, Shehu Shagari had been overthrown by Major General Mohammed Buhari, and in 1985, Ibrahim Babangida seized power in a bloodless coup. In Sweden, Social democrat Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated by an unknown gunman on a Stockholm street. This was the year that I first heard of Nigeria Union.
In 1996, when the organisation turned 20 years, Abacha had already been in power, Ken Saro-Wiwa had been executed and Chief Abiola was on the Scene.
In Sweden, Social Democrat Göran Persson became prime minister after Ingvar Carlsson stepped down.
And now, 30 years on, Nigeria is the first African nation to pay off its debt to the Paris Club of rich lenders and Sweden has a new government.
Ladies and gentlemen, time flies and we grow old. Our duty is to contribute to the common good of mankind. In a small way, that’s what the Nigerian Union does.
Your Excellency, Mr Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is my singular pleasure to congratulate you, and wish you success in the coming years.
If I may, with your help, ladies and gentlemen, ask you to join me in a toast for the Union.
.....
For the Union! Skål!
Visit Joe Frans' site at www.joefrans.se
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