Happy New Year to one and All at Gambia-L.
Here is an article I want to share with you.Happy Reading.
Education in Africa: The Brain Drain.
On this edition of Africa Journal, we will look at the issue of Africans
studying away from their homeland and their reasons for not returning. We'll
discuss where brain drain occurs most often and what countries are doing to
attract Africans to return home. We'll also talk about the economic and
social impact of loosing Africans to other countries. The weekly host of
Africa Journal is Maimouna Mills, a Voice of America radio host.
What is your opinion about Africans studying away from their homeland?
EMEAGWALI: There is nothing wrong with Africans studying abroad. America is
the motherland of technology and I could not program the world's fastest
supercomputers if I had stayed in Africa. What is wrong is that most African
students that studied abroad did not return to Africa.
The problem is that Africans who completed their studies in Europe and the
United States are not returning to Africa. Since one in three African
professionals will like to live outside Africa, African universities are
actually training one third of their graduates for export to the developed
nations. We are operating one third of African universities to satisfy the
manpower needs Great Britain and the United States. The African education
budget nothing but a supplement to the American education budget. In
essence, Africa is giving developmental assistance to the wealthier western
nations which makes the rich nations richer and the poor nations poorer.
What are the causes of brain drain?
EMEAGWALI: The primary cause of external brain drain is unreasonably low
wages paid to African professionals. The contradiction is that we spend four
billion dollars annually to recruit and pay 100,000 expatriates to work in
Africa but we fail to spend a proportional amount to recruit the 250,000
African professionals now working outside Africa. African professionals
working in Africa are paid considerably less than similarly qualified
expatriates.
We also have internal brain drain when people are not employed in the fields
of their expertise. For example, many military officers are politicians in
uniform and some medical doctors are moonlighting as taxi cab drivers.
What are their reasons for not returning home?
EMEAGWALI: The socio-economic conditions make it difficult for us to achieve
our potential. Political instability increases the rates at which
professionals emigrate to the developed nations.
Many professionals emigrated during the brutal reigns of Idi Amin, Mobutu
and Sani Abacha. The war in Sudan between the Islamic north and the
Christian south has led to the emigration of half of Sudanese professionals.
In 1991, one in three African countries were affected by conflicts. Today,
there are more refugees in Africa than in any other region in the world.
What are your reasons for not returning home?
EMEAGWALI: First, I have an American wife that has her academic career and
an eight-year son that is in a good school. It will be inconsiderate of me
to disrupt my wife's career and my son's education.
Second, I never received invitations from government officials. Individuals
look me up on the Internet and invite me to Nigeria.
Hopefully, by the end of the year, I should at least make a visit to
Nigeria.
Which countries are most affected by the brain drain?
EMEAGWALI: The receiving countries are the winners while the sending
countries are the losers. The receiving countries include the United States,
Australia and West Germany. The sending countries include Nigeria, Ethiopia,
South Africa, and Ghana. Nigeria has 100,000 immigrants in the United States
alone. In the United States, sixty-four percent of foreign-born Nigerians
aged 25 and older have at least a bachelors degree. Forty-three (43) percent
of foreign-born Africans living in the United States have at least a
bachelors degree. Nigerians and Africans are the most educated ethnic groups
in the United States.
The wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola and Zaire contributed to the brain drain
problem.
What are the social impact of brain drain?
EMEAGWALI:
Brain drain makes it difficult to create a middle class consisting of
doctors, engineers and other professionals. We have a two class African
society: a massive underclass that is largely unemployed and very poor
people and a few very rich people that are mostly corrupt military and
government officials.
Brain drain gives rise to poor leadership and corruption. A large educated
middle class will ensure that political power is transferred by ballots
instead of by bullets.
When the medical doctors emigrate to the United States, the poor are forced
to seek medical treatment from traditional healers while the elite fly to
London for their routine medical checkups.
Nigerian government officials are using tax payer's money to travel abroad
for routine medical check-ups and malarial treatment. Overseas medical
check-ups is a national disgrace and banning it would force Nigeria to
re-hire those medical doctors that emigrated to Europe.
What is the economic impact of brain drain?
EMEAGWALI: It is the best and brightest that can emigrate, leaving behind
the weak and less imaginative. It means a slow death for Africa.
We cannot achieve long-term economic growth by exporting our natural
resources. In the new world order, economic growth is driven by people with
knowledge. We talk a lot of poverty alleviation in Africa. But who is going
to alleviate the poverty? It is most talented that should lead the people,
create wealth and eradicate poverty and corruption.
The professionals that are emigrating out of Africa include those with
technical expertise, entrepreneurial and managerial skills. Their absence
increases the endemic corruption and makes it easier for the military to
overthrow a democratically elected government.
Africa needs a large middle class to build a large tax base which,in turn,
will enable us to build good schools and hospitals and provide constant
electricity. The 250,000 African professionals working overseas will
increase the size of the middle class
In what ways have you given back to your community?
EMEAGWALI: Telecomunications has changed the world and we now live in a
global village or community. Right now, you and I are using telephone and
satellite broadcasting technology to hold live conversation.
Being a guest in Africa Journal allows me to share my expertise and insight
with you and other viewers. Each day, a dozen people look me up on the
Internet and write me for advice on their career and life goals. I respond
to most of them. Also, my website EMEAGWALI.com is used in 6000 schools and
I provide academic guidance to many primary and secondary school students.
Do Africans who leave their home countries to study and work have an
obligation to return and share the benefits of their education?
EMEAGWALI: In theory, we are morally obliged to return to Africa. In
reality, an African professional will not resign from his $50,000 a year job
to accept a $500 a year job in Africa. A more meaningful question will be to
ask: What measures can be taken to entice Africans leaving abroad to return
home and what can be done to discourage those professionals in Africa to
remain in Africa.
How can brain drain be reversed?
EMEAGWALI: You have to recruit and retain them. We can provide recruitment
incentives such relocation expenses, loans for housing and for starting
businesses, salary supplement for the first few years. However, when the
salary supplement ends, many of the professionals will pack their bags and
return to Europe and the United States.
A more permanent solution will be to pay wages that are competitive.
What changes will you like to see in governmental policies?
EMEAGWALI: We have eliminate military spending and increase our spending the
education, women's empowerment and youth development.
Forty years ago, Fourah Bay College, Makerere University and University of
Ibadan used to be one of the best in the developing world. Today, these
universities are crumbling and have chronic shortage of books and
equipments. Student and lecturer strikes create an irregular academic
sessions and it is not uncommon for students to take five or six years to
complete a four year degree.
The problem began in the early 1980s, when many African nations were
undergoing structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which required them to both
devalue their currency and cut public expenditure.
Devaluation restricted the amount of equipments and books that could be
purchased. It also made it difficult to travel abroad to study the sciences,
engineering and medicine. A university professor that was earning $1000 a
month in 1980 now earns $50 a month and most are forced to emigrate.
When the World Bank and IMF forced Nigeria to reduce public expenditures,
Ibrahim Babangida cut the education budget instead of the military budget.
While teachers salary were unpaid for several months, Nigeria was spending
hundreds of millions of dollars to import arms.
We must not forget to invest in basic education. Nigeria needs to learn from
Zambia. The illiteracy rate in the Nigerian adult population is 49 percent
while that of Zambia is 27 percent. Yet Nigeria has far more universities
than Zambia. Nigeria should learn from Zambia and focus on good quality
basic education for the masses. With a high illiteracy rate and millions of
university graduates, Nigeria will end up with her feet in the Stone Age and
her head in the computer Information Age.
PROFILE OF PHILIP Emeagwali:
Philip Emeagwali was born on August 23, 1954, in Akure, Nigeria, the son of
James Emeagwali, a nurse’s aide, and his 16-year-old wife, Agatha. In April
1967, he was withdrawn from school as his family hid in refugee camps during
an ethnic cleansing in which 50,000 Igbos indigenes were killed. At the age
of 14, he was conscripted into the Biafran army as a child-soldier in one of
Africa's bloodiest conflicts. After six months in the army, the civil war
ended and he was reunited with his family. He attended school briefly and
then dropped out again because his parents could not afford to pay his
school fees.
He earned his first diploma from the University of London (through
self-study) in 1973 and, subsequently, won a scholarship to Oregon State
University. From 1977-93, he did graduate study, professional practice and
academic research at Howard University (civil engineering), Maryland State
Highway Administration (transportation engineering), George Washington
University (environmental, ocean, coastal and marine engineering), United
States Bureau of Reclamation (civil engineer), University of Maryland
(mathematics), University of Michigan (scientific computing), University of
Minnesota (supercomputing), and Army High Performance Computing Research
Laboratory (research fellow).
For six years, he served as a distinguished lecturer of both the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (the world's largest technical
organization) and the Association for Computing Machinery (the oldest
computer society). He has delivered many major lectureships all over the
world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (UNESCO, Paris) and
the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
In 1974, Emeagwali read a 1922 science fiction article on how to use 64,000
mathematicians to forecast the weather for the whole Earth. Inspired by that
article, he worked out a theoretical scheme for using 64,000 far-flung
processors that will be evenly distributed around the Earth, to forecast the
weather. He called it a HyperBall international network of computers. Today,
an international network of computers is called the Internet.
Initially his proposal to use 64,000 computers to form an international
network was rejected by peers on the grounds that it would be "impossible."
Denied funding and employment for a decade, he quietly developed and wrote
up his calculations in a thousand-page monograph which described the
hypothetical use of 64 binary thousand --- the equivalent of 65,536 ---
processors to perform the world’s fastest computation.
In 1987, an experimental hypercube computer with 65,536 processors became
available at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the United States
government's prime nuclear weapons research center. Frustrated by their
inability to program 65,536 processors to simulate nuclear blasts, the Los
Alamos officials had a hunch to allow physicists simulating problems similar
to theirs. Fearing that the Lab officials will not accept him if it was
known that he was black, Emeagwali decided to submit his proposal remotely.
The Lab officials approved his usage of its computers and he remotely
programmed 65,536 processors in Los Alamos (New Mexico) while living in
Michigan.
"It was his formula that used 65,000 separate computer processors to perform
3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989," said CNN. "That feat,” CNN
continued, "led to computer scientists comprehending the capabilities of
supercomputers and the practical applications of creating a system that
allowed multiple computers to communicate."
Emeagwali's discovery started making front page headlines and cover stories
in 1989, a feat that is a rarity in science. [Time magazine reported that
the odds of a scientist "becoming even a little bit famous are a lot worse
than 5,000 to 1."] The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 27, 1990) wrote:
“Philip Emeagwali, who took on an enormously difficult problem and, like
most students working on Ph.D. dissertations, solved it alone, has won
computation's top prize, captured in the past only by seasoned research
teams … If his program can squeeze out a few more percentage points, it will
help decrease U.S. reliance on foreign oil.”
With his success, academic journals that formerly rejected his work began to
sing his praises:
“The amount of money at stake is staggering. For example, you can typically
expect to recover 10 percent of a field's oil. If you can improve your
production schedule to get just 1 percent more oil, you will increase your
yield by $400 million,” wrote the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize Committee in the
academic journal Software (May 1990).
In the bimonthly news journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied
Mathematics, mathematician Alan Karp wrote: "I have checked with several
reservoir engineers who feel that his calculation is of real importance and
very fast. His explicit method not only generates lots of megaflops, but
solves problems faster than implicit methods. Emeagwali is the first to have
applied a pseudo-time approach in reservoir modeling.” (SIAM News, May 1990)
His success in using 64 binary-thousand processors gave credibility and
renewed interest in his formerly rejected proposal to use 64 thousand
far-flung computers to forecast the weather for the whole Earth. Because the
topology of his rejected international network of computers was similar to,
but predated that, of the Internet, it was rediscovered and called an “idea
that was ahead of its time” and “a germinal seed of the Internet.” For his
contributions, the book History of the Internet profiled him as an Internet
pioneer, was voted one of the twenty innovators of the Internet, and CNN
called him "A Father of the Internet."
A measure of his impact is that he was rewarded with the 1989 Gordon Bell
Prize (supercomputing's Nobel Prize) for his contributions which, in part,
inspired the petroleum industry to purchase one in ten supercomputers.
Emeagwali's use of 65,000 processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations, in
part, inspired:
Apple Computer to use his multiprocessing technology to manufacture its
dual-processor Power Mac G4, which had a peak speed of 3.1 billion
calculations per second;
IBM to manufacture its $134.4 million supercomputer, which had a peak speed
of 3.1 trillion calculations per second;
IBM to announce its plan to manufacture a 65,000-processor supercomputer,
which will have a peak speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second; and
every supercomputer manufacturer to incorporate thousands of processors in
their supercomputers.
Each day, visitors to his Web site, emeagwali.com, view one billion bytes or
the equivalent of one thousand books. Materials from his Web site are
frequently reprinted in small newspapers across Africa.
Another measure of his influence is that one million students have written
biographical essays on him --- thousands wrote to thank him for inspiring
them. President Bill Clinton called him a powerful role model for young
people and used the phrase "another Emeagwali" to describe children with the
potential to become computer geniuses.
Emeagwali considers himself to be "a black scientist with a social
responsibility to communicate science to the black diaspora." In other
words, he has a dual sensibility of being deeply rooted in science while
using it as a tool to remind his people in the Diaspora of where they have
been and who they are.
Dubbed a "renaissance man" by the media, he is admired not just for his
enormous scientific contributions but for his deep and broad knowledge of
literature and the arts. The media contacts him, daily, for interviews on
issues as diverse as brain drain to Islamic fundamentalism to the future of
the Internet.
During his career, Emeagwali has received more than 100 prizes, awards and
honors. These include the Computer Scientist of the Year Award of the
National Technical Association (1993), Distinguished Scientist Award of the
World Bank (1998), Best Scientist in Africa Award of the Pan African
Broadcasting, Heritage and Achievement Awards (2001), Gallery of Prominent
Refugees of the United Nations (2001), profiled in the book Making It in
America as one of "400 models of eminent Americans," and in Who's Who in
20th Century America. In a televised speech, as president, Bill Clinton
described Emeagwali as “one of the great minds of the Information Age.”
His wife, Dale, was born in Baltimore, was educated at Georgetown University
School of Medicine, conducted research at the National Institutes of Health
and the University of Michigan, and taught at the University of Minnesota.
In 1996, she won the Scientist of the Year Award of the National Technical
Association for her cancer research. They both live near Washington, D.C.
with their 11-year-old son.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Emeagwali's Website
Do you need a keynote, conference or convention speaker?Contact Philip
Emeagwali at 443-850-0850 or [log in to unmask]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the very best of good wishes,
Musa Amadu Pembo
Glasgow,
Scotland
UK.
[log in to unmask]
Da’wah is to convey the message with wisdom and with good words. We should
give the noble and positive message of Islam. We should try to emphasize
more commonalities and explain the difference without getting into
theological arguments and without claiming the superiority of one position
over the other. There is a great interest among the people to know about
Islam and we should do our best to give the right message.
May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous
Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May
Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise .
We ask Allaah the Most High, the All-Powerful, to teach us that which will
benefit us, and to benefit us by that which we learn. May Allaah Subhanahu
Wa Ta'ala grant blessings and peace to our Prophet Muhammad and his family
and
companions..Amen.
_________________________________________________________________
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