…Reflections on ongoing Brain drain
By Uche Chuta
I attended a Burna Boy concert in Vancouver on Thursday night and as I enjoyed it and watched people from all over the world do so with me many thoughts entered my head.
Afrobeats and Nollywood have successfully put Nigerian culture on the global map. There are tutorials on YouTube with non-Nigerians learning Naija pidgin and even some of the phrases from our languages used in songs and movies.
Just imagine we had a Nigerian government that was able to leverage on this to increase the cultural reach, promote FDI and also tourism (countries like South Korea and the US have done this). Instead we’ve a regime that has created insecurity, the world poverty capital amongst other negative things.
“Sapa” is driving a swarm of people out of their countries via migration. Individually it’s resulting in the addition of value to these people (and their children) but the geographical entity of Nigeria will suffer with the brain loss.
We’re only hopeful that some of these Nigerians in the diaspora will one day return or help the land but that in itself is conditional on the presence of good leadership at all levels of government.
