The vestiges of Colonialism are very much alive with us. We keep on reenacting Slavery and Colomentality in various ways. There is no position in the world that Africans have not occupied at home but it is the ones abroad, even that of the head of the dog-catcher that Africans glorify. What is so much of enabling environments outside Africa for Africans working against all odds; waiting for a soft-landing in a strange land at any cost including giving up your fortune or life?
We now have a new wave of Africans who idolize Foreign Salvation as the panacea to all African problems while successful countries in other continents built from within. It is true that there are Africans that succeeded outside their countries after working against all hope. But to hang on to positions in an alien land demonstrates our lack of perseverance in order to cure our addiction to international brandings. So we want appointments as foreign representatives to any country.
Unfortunately, those gullible Africans working against their own self-interest think Foreign or International African employees would not have succeeded at home. This is despite the fact that no African has ever achieved greater success outside than they did inside Africa. Before anyone mentions Barack Obama, they need to read about his American experience at Harvard or even worse, the experience of Secretary of State, late General Colin Powel with the Police.
So, is it the President, General, Billionaire or Inventors status that has never been achieved in Africa by Africans? Decent Africans are willing to do anything anywhere without blemish or stain.The least likely are lazy, criminal or kleptomaniacs who would describes his village, town or country in a derogatory manner but refuses to work hard at home and swear that he could have achieved more but the lack of enabling environment stunted his potential and growth.
On the other hand, there are Africans who remind us that technological transfer is not enough to change Africa as long as we have a leaking basket of corruption supported by kleptomaniacs that drain whichever gain we make. Americans are calling on Japan, China and other Asian countries to pay for intellectual property stolen from them. American intellectual properties as technologies were stolen from Europe. So, where did Europe get their intellectual properties?
What then do we call the intellectual properties of Sudan (Northern Egypt) where the Greeks and the Romans learned? It is true that Africans cannot cry about Slavery in which every continent participated to build their economic base. The Arabs raided Africa for slaves before Europeans. But we cannot ignore the First Papal Edict from Rome that empowered the Portuguese to raid Africa for slaves in order to build the European economic power base of today.
This Papal Bulls of 1452 gave the Portuguese monarchy a secured unprecedented monopoly over slave trade along African Coast, unlike other powers that never enjoyed the same privilege.
African civilization was not in a vacuum. Indeed it attracted other civilizations and powers from Europe to the so-called Middle East until Morocco traced African Kings like Mansa Musa; Queen like that of Sheba home. The Marauders explored African extravagant wealth displayed outside.
We fail to realize that what is crude technology today, when stolen and refined or built on by others in the intellectual circles, becomes the technology of tomorrow. It was not long ago that the Northern Europeans were called Barbarians by the Greeks and then Romans! The Seven Wonders of the world do not command the same awe as the discovery of Nuclear Bomb and their deployment today. The crude power of Mass Destruction controls every country.
This expectation of manna from heaven or reaping where your fathers did not sow induce the expectation that the grass is greener on the other side. It is the reason the middle class and the children of the wealthy class are willing to sell their land, houses and inheritance in exchange for any crude alien culture at any risk to become richer abroad with indignity. More remain honest abroad for fear and the consequences of being caught red handed without godfathers like home.
Some recruiters prefer foreign trained graduates, not because of their rare expertise in Africa but because they lost their rich African cultures, replaced by foreign accents. Even with our superior technical skills, African accents abroad are not enough to qualify you above lower qualified local candidates waiting for you to fall so that they can replace you. But in many African countries, foreign accent is enough to secure a better position than the locals.
Employers and recruiters have used the number of years spent in school for the quality of the professors’ experience. But foreign professors of African studies gain more respect than those in Africa! The irony is that these excuses are not about science students alone but for art, political and religious graduates as long as they are from foreign universities. They command more respect than local science professors.
However, employers in foreign countries insist on local experience abroad, even for a cleaner’s position. Our acquired preferences for foreign made and trained did not start today. While some of us are shaking it off, the vestiges of inferiority complex remain. This is why we have not produced world renowned engineers since Carter Bridge in Lagos was built without local university graduates as trainees or apprentices.
The rush to study abroad, even in African studies, sending our children abroad for the sake of “good” education are nothing but fallacies that rob us of our good cultural heritage. If you visit the same children abroad, they want you to adapt to their foreign training like ordering parents to move and wash their own plates. Even those that join local politics abroad, stand against migrants from their own continents to gain privileges or attain better political positions.
Seriously, what is the benefit of sending youths like Kemi Badernoch, the new Conservative leader or Dele Ali, the soccer player that rejected his parents abroad;Toni Iwobi, originally from Nigeria, that said his election for the League in Italy shows the far right party has no problem with ‘legal migration”. One Nigerian-born Canadian Kelechi Madu alias Kaycee Madu became the Minister of Justice and Solicitor General of Alberta, of one province in Canada. They are examples of miseducated spoiled African brats lost to “good education “ abroad.
