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The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently launched a major new season of special radio programme exploring the Brain Drain phenomenon on the African continent. Ordinarily, this initiative should be seen as a most welcome development, laudable in concept as it addresses a fundamental problem, which has in the past two decades robbed Africa of its best brains in science, technology, medicine, commerce and industry.

Given the harsh and intolerable socio-economic climate of many African countries, gripped under the jackboots of military despotism in the eighties, coupled with the open disdain for the academia, it was little surprising that many of the continent’s intelligentsia opted to parlay their immense talents beyond our shores. With the dynamics of demand and supply at full play, those who found their sound footing in Europe and America prefer to remain there and earn their honest living rather than return to their home countries, which are still bogged down by excruciating poverty, social misery, illiteracy and diseases. That is, despite the return of democracy, which unfortunately has not made the desired impact on the lives of the citizenry.

What the BBC World Service Education Brain Drain programme called the African Universities Project (AUP) sets out to do is to find out why Africans are choosing to study abroad and stay put thereafter and identify the inherent problems within Africa’s institutions of higher learning. The BBC Arabic, French, Hausa, Somali and Swahili services will jointly explore these issues through documentaries, discussions and phone-in programmes.

And because brain drain hurts the continent both socially and economically, as most Africans who study abroad choose to work and live in their country of study, the BBC initiative aims to reverse this ugly trend. Good enough. What with a recent report that Nigerians in the United Kingdom alone are worth over N94 billion. That amounts to more than five times the nation’s external debt put at over $30 billion.

The Wimbley, Middlesex-based Trade and Investment centre’s study, which covered 700,000 Nigerians of the average working age group between the ages of 35 and 50 as its base, revealed that about two million Nigerians live in the United Kingdom. A particular Nigerian is said to own about 100 choice properties in England, each with an average rise in rating from 120,000 pounds some five years ago to 200,000 pounds today.

Early in the year, another British-based research study revealed that about 70 per cent of Nigeria’s abundant wealth is stashed in foreign vaults. What all these amount to is that Nigeria, nay Africa is being denied the best of its economic and intellectual resources, as a direct result of bad governance on the continent. When sanity was restored to Ghana’s polity in the late eighties the emigrants retraced their steps to be active partners in the rebuilding process. The same scenario can be re-enacted on the continent if political leaders and policy makers bring to bear frameworks to institutionalise sustainable democracy and deliver the dividends to the people, including strengthening, infrastructural facilities at tertiary institutions.

It is hoped that BBC’s initiative is not a subtle way of discouraging Africans from seeking the golden fleece in foreign lands.

Against this backdrop, the DAILY TIMES urges the BBC to go beyond the research on the brain drain phenomenon. It should also seek to find solutions to the free fall of our local currencies and trade imbalance between the continent and the developed world.That Nigeria can boast of world class brilliant minds in the mould of Professor Philip Emeagwali (one of the fathers of the Internet) and Professor Gabriel Oyibo (the first African to be nominated for the Nobel prize in Physics and discoverer of the Grand Unified Theorem) who are both based outside the country, is an eloquent testimony to the damage brain-drain has wrought on continent. An the enabling environment must be entrenched in Africa to discover and nurture more of such geniuses.

A reversal would entail a more holistic approach, embracing good governance, sincerity of purpose by the developed world and a good dose of patriotism.