Brain Drain and National Development in Nigeria.
ABSTRACT
The thrust of this work is the evaluation of the expropriation of Nigeria’s vital human resources through the brain drain and its implications for its overall development.
Nigeria has been adjudged a top emigration country on account of the continuous efflux of its human resources to all parts of the world. Despite the lack of agreement about the exact migrant stock of Nigerians in the diaspora, Nigeria is listed among the top remittance receiving countries in the world.
The implication of brain drain to Nigeria is that it serves as a feeder- zone for the human resource needs of other countries, especially developed countries.
Undoubtedly, the erosion of Nigeria’s human resources has had far-reaching negative effects on its development trajectory as the vital highly-skilled personnel needed for national development are lost.
This study delineates certain specific development sectors of the Nigerian economy, such as the health, domestic investment, and technology acquisition and transfer, as the fulcrum of its investigation.
It sets as its objectives the task of interrogating the effect of the brain drain on the efficiency Nigeria’s healthcare delivery system.
How the domestic investment incentives have boosted diaspora-led investment in the Nigerian economy, and whether the tighter regulation of the global regime of intellectual property rights are amenable to brain gain that can facilitate technology transfer.
Using a combination of public choice and modern world system theories synthesised from the political economy theoretical framework, we generated relevant data through secondary sources and analysed them in the tradition of qualitative descriptive methodology using one-group time series research design.
The study finds that the depletion of the stock of Nigeria’s health professionals through the brain drain leads to inefficient healthcare delivery.
This depletion is sustained by lack of political will by successive Nigerian governments to eliminate the conditions that conduce to the emigration of its highly-skilled health manpower and the relaxation of immigration policies by Western countries.
Nigeria’s domestic investment profile has been boosted through diaspora-led investments in the Nigerian economy. The tighter regulation of the global regime of intellectual property rights is inhibitive of diaspora- led industrial investments towards technology transfer.
The challenge of diaspora integration in Nigerian development is locatable in the absence of coordinated domestic efforts in that direction.
INTRODUCTION
The brain drain question in the development crises of African countries is not an entirely new phenomenon. It has been a recurring decimal in the development analyses of Africa since its contact with the Western World.
Notwithstanding the supposed benefits of Euro-African contact, Africa suffered great losses than it gained from this contact: its natural path to socio-economic and political growth was derailed, thus atrophying its prospects of growth and development.
Indeed, the fundamental stratagem employed to institute these losses was the wholesale and organized depopulation of Africa’s human resources through the instrumentality of the slave trade, which Igwe (2002:398) affirms “lasted for hundreds of years up to the 19th century, and which affected or destroyed millions of innocent black Africans. …”
The notoriety of the slave trade is underpinned by its combination of human losses with human suffering, degradation and disorientation and, ultimately, the subjugation of Africa’s developmental capacity (Babangida 1991:244).
A direct consequence of the pillage of Africa by the West was the foregone possibility of development. The human resources that were essential to trigger off development were lost to the Western World.
The blood and sweat of these Africans contributed immensely to the consolidation of the fledgling western capitalist developmental trajectory.
Coleman (1986:41) contends that the same period that saw Africa tumbling down the cliff to economic subjugation and asphyxiation also marked the emergence of Europe from medieval stagnation and its transmutation through agricultural, industrial and intellectual revolutions.
In analyzing the impact of earliest Western onslaught on Nigeria via slave trade, Coleman (1986:40) asserts “the total effect of the slave trade upon Nigerian society, institutions, and peoples will, perhaps, never be known”.
The unquantifiable character of the effect of the depletion of African human resources is exacerbated by the unconscionable rapacity of capitalism. Capitalism, through the instrumentality of colonialism, neo-colonialism and contemporaneously, globalisation, created a world system of unequal relationship between nations.
This unequal relationship, which characterises the world economic system, is moulded in iron-cast compartments that are so interconnected that exit from one sphere to the other has been made nearly impossible. The modern world system, which is compartmentalised into the industrialized, developed, newly industrializing, transiting and developing countries, appears to be a deliberate creation of the capitalist system to minimize tension in the world system.
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