By Dan Amor
It sounds very much like an apocryphal tale. But it is true that the
joke is once again on the Nigerian society. What I am saying is that Nigeria is
constantly losing batches of experts to the larger world. Thousands of highly
trained medical doctors and other professionals are daily departing these
shores for greener pastures abroad. Even those who summoned the courage to
return back home during the immediate past administration of Goodluck Jonathan
are heading back abroad.
They are going to join
millions of talented Nigerian intellectuals, academics and professionals, who
had been driven out of our land by the harsh realities of our current
existence. It is not a matter of profound argument or intellectual debate to
say that the death of the Nigerian middle class due to equivocation and
compromise has long been awaited. Yet, implicit in the very meaning of
compromise as a means of harmonizing the best features of opposing values is an
element of tension. And it is this unwearied straining after the ideal within
the actual rather than any lame begging of issues that imparts so devastating a
tone on the social life of our dying middle class. Check our various passport
offices, consular offices of other countries in Nigeria and international airports
to confirm this. The exodus of Nigerians to other lands in the past six months
is frightening. It sends shivers down the spines of most of us who don't have
money to move our families to our villages not to talk of traveling abroad.
In fact, it takes a thorough grounding and deep reflection on our
belligerent and turbulent social system to appreciate the interplay of the
social forces that impinge on the growth of the Nigerian educated elite. But
the situation now exerts a critical immediacy and honest evaluation. "We cannot pretend that the profound
implication of the exodus of members of the Nigerian middle class to foreign
lands have been intellectually confronted except in pious lamentations and
official platitudes. For instance, the Ibrahim Babangida task force on
brain-drain was another comic relief constituted in 1988 only to signal the
official recognition of the menace." Professor Ibidapo Obe who headed
the committee even attempted to bamboozle Nigerians into believing that brain
drain was a good thing. Whereas, according to Professor Adebayo Williams, the
inimitable critic and essayist, "nothing
can be more excruciating than the pain of having to abandon one’s patriotic
post at a time when national events demand scrutiny and vigilance, yet to
remain in Nigeria is to surrender your life to grinding poverty and penal
servitude or even death. Hence the compelling need to choose between dying in
abject poverty and negating your patriotic obligation by checking out”.
Consequently, in 1986, the first batch of Nigerian experts, having felt the
suffocation occasioned by a wanton reduction of their wages to mere pittance as
a result of the senseless devaluation of the naira, fled to the United States,
Saudi Arabia and other Asian Tigers for survival.
