Stop the African Brain Drain

By Andrew Brons.  

 

The calamitous plight of  Sub-Saharan Africa is not in question. Their economies are beset with corruption, frequently dependent on foreign aid and have GDP per capita figures among the lowest in the world. This is despite the rich natural resources to be found in many of them.

Their political systems are typified by personal greed, contempt for constitutional niceties and brutal repression and rebellion.

Their societies are fragmented by monstrously brutal civil conflicts.

Africa’s peoples are blighted by preventable and often curable diseases.

We might borrow the words of  Thomas Hobbes, from his Leviathan, and say that the lives of their peoples are often, “nasty solitary, poor, brutish and short”.

White Liberals are often genuinely concerned about the plight of Africans – rather more than they are concerned with the plight of their fellow nationals. However, their concern misses the point.

White Liberal political society has been corrupted by the universally harmful doctrine of Globalism and the provably false assumption of Nurturism.

Globalism believes that the whole world should have a single undivided economy with free movement of goods, services, capital and, of course, labour.

Nurturism is a philosophical assumption – if that is not an oxymoron – that believes, contrary to all of the evidence, that people are born with a clean slate and that ability and behavioural patterns are acquired after birth from upbringing, experience and education.

We know that the embrace of this dogma has not benefited the peoples of Britain, the rest of Europe or the European populations overseas.

However, what is not always recognised is that they do not benefit the poorest either.

The world’s poor are often depicted as being victims of deprivation, a concept that is usually predicated on the act of depriving, although the agents of that deprivation are not revealed to us clearly.

Sub-Saharan Africa has, indeed, historically, been the victim a deprivation of a most cruel kind. It is a deprivation of talent, creativity and capacity for running civic society. The agents of that deprivation have not been external human forces but the blind forces of natural selection. Nature has never been fair.

Variations in the allocation of talent and creativity are not attributable to lack of experience or nurturing; they are attributable to differences in heredity.

Does this means that Sub-Saharan Africa is completely devoid of people of talent? No, it does not. There have been people of ability in most population groups but we should not be surprised to see the incidence is not the same in all of them. Some of these people, against all the odds, manage to acquire higher education suitable to their ability, financed by miserably poor education budgets.

What happens then?

A high percentage of them are recruited (some would say looted) by countries in the Northern Hemisphere to enable them to prop up overstretched health services,. Without those countries having to pay for the education and training of these newly acquired employees.

Is everybody a winner? Well the recipient countries keep the costs of training down and the recruits earn incomes that they could not have dreamt of, at home. The fact that incomes of health practitioners in European countries, become depressed over time can be forgotten quietly.

The donor countries – often some of the poorest in the world – have paid out money on education and training that they could ill afford and see no return for it. The sick and the dying in Sub-Saharan Africa will just have to sicken and die for health care. If that were the only cost it would be far too much.

However, there is an even more insidious long term cost that must be borne by these donor countries. They see a constant and repeated drain of their increasingly rare pools of  talent to other continents. They will see their countries depleted of natural ability and left with only  residual  populations, with residual levels of ability.

As President Koroma of Sierre Leone said recently:

‘Africans are more recent migrants to Europe, the Americas and in the last few decades to Australia and East Asia, particularly China. Many of these migrants are amongst the most skilled and energetic of our people, and their emigration brought about enormous brain loss and skills gaps in many critical areas of our societies.’

What has this to do with Globalism? It is the creation of a world market for labour that robs Third World countries of their limited pools of talent.

What has this to do with Nurturism? This doctrine leads White Liberals to believe that there are rich – perhaps unlimited – reserves of potential talent in all of these countries, simply waiting to be unlocked by the educational tools that can be brought to them and bought for them, if we only dig more deeply in our pockets. The looted (or as they would say recruited) Third World workers can be replaced by an endless queue of people who can take their place.

It is a false assumption. There will be a very limited and short term supply to take their place. When they have gone, there will be no others. Africa will fall to a point of no return and will fall into a Renewed Stone Age from which there will be no escape.

There will be some selfish people who will say, “Well, any way, Europe’s gene pool will have benefited from this incoming flow of talent”.  Not quite!

Ability is a relative concept. Those considered to be  able by one reference point might not be so able by another.  One country’s or continent’s loss will not necessarily be another’s gain.

Should we decide our policies with only our interest in mind and forget about the interests of others? That will be tempting for some Nationalists and  our immediately potential voters. However, it would be repellent for some liberal-minded people who understand the problems of our country but do not want to be thought of as indifferent to the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves. These liberals are not, beyond the pale, multi-racial liberals and they must be target voters for a future Nationalist party. The Nationalist Movement must not think that it can rely on White Van Man alone.

So, how can Africa be helped to help itself from our hereditarian perspective?

We must, first of all, stop European and other advanced countries from recruiting or looting health services practitioners and people with technical or business qualifications from the indigenous Sub-Saharan populations. Indeed we should intervene actively to keep them in Africa, to help their fellow African immediately and their prosperity in the future.

Rather than the blank cheque form of foreign aid, we should direct help in the form of voluntary partnerships between hospitals, between businesses and between academic institutions in the First World and the Third.

Business based in Britain have a self-interested  need to engage in an Africa rich in resources. Any training they engaged in at the African end of their businesses would involve a pay back my home country clause, obliging the workers to remain in their own countries or their own continent.

Medical partnerships between First and Third World hospitals would involve distance-learning packages, the channelling of superseded but serviceable equipment and recruiting the oh so plentiful supply of  distant-altruism-is-more-altruistic-than- adjacent-altruism retired health workers. They would be invited to provide their services, salary-free but expenses-paid, in teaching roles in African hospitals. Recipients of such UK training would be required to sign the same pay back my home country clause.

The African countries concerned should be persuaded to provide plentiful child care facilities so that these most valuable members of their populations will not need career breaks or abstention from child bearing.

The one thing that might prevent Africa from sliding towards irreversible regression, would be the retention and cultivation of its limited pools of ability.

We said in our Policy Statement that we believed that our ideology was one for export and for imparting to the ethnic minorities in our midst. We must sell them the message that it would be a noble challenge to return to the countries of their ancestral origins – in Africa and elsewhere and help them to advance.

A Nation – ours or theirs – cannot be saved by a change of environment alone. It can be changed by avoiding or minimising dysfunctional and encouraging functional, demographic change.

To pretend, out of sentimental self-delusion, that the world is different from its reality is not an act of kindness; it is the condemnation of a continent to an eternity of misery.