Western Repatriation is Necessary for Africa’s Future

In the general African public, diaspora, and elite there are two general sentiments that define our approach to the West. Those are:

1. The West wronged us with colonialism and owes us

2. The West is still wronging us and owes us

These are unfortunate positions, not least because they deprive Africans of our own agency and places the blame for all this continent’s ills upon a set of countries that are anywhere from hundreds to many thousand of kilometers away both physically and politically.

Do not mistake me, many Western corporations and governments are engaged in business on this continent and in some cases that business is incredibly extractive and harmful, but this is no different from the recent Chinese incursions onto our continent. This is now, however, the subject of this piece and therefore I shall reserve it for a future installment.

Returning to my central point: African politics towards the West centers around grievances and complaints that are often significantly overblown and or rooted in events which occurred many decades in the past. Africans prefer to blame our ills on the West all while ignoring the fact that our own cultures are driving people from our continent and into Western countries.

At the same time that African dysfunction drives people off this continent and into the West the set of incentives put in place by headache inducing Western liberal governments are pulling our populations to Europe and the United States. This pull is happening, rather noticeably, against the express desires of Western populations themselves. I am aggrieved for Western populations and their subjection to mass immigration at the hands of their elite in the same way I am aggrieved at that elite for hoarding Africa’s most talented sons and daughters.

And here lies the crux of my piece: Africa needs its best and brightest sons, daughters, and diaspora to return to this continent with their education and build it up. African governments are unwilling to deal with this issue themselves and so I am appealing to the rising nationalist movement in the West. Enact a peaceful and humane set of repatriation programs so that the talent and potential of Africa return to this continent.

One of the best examples of African diaspora this continent is in desperate need of is the higher educated.

According to USAID just 3.48% of Nigerians have a college degree, or about 8.1 million people in my home country. Compare this to Nigerians in the United States, an impressive 29% of whom possess a master’s degree or PhD and 64.4% of whom have a bachelor’s degree. There are nearly 700,000 extremely well educated Nigerians in the United States, contributing to that nation’s economy rather than that of this country. This is also a problem for Americans as Nigerians and other Africans are taking up tens of thousand of university places that should be going to African Americans. Harvard estimates that at least one third of its Black student body is composed of Africans or their children [Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?, NYT, June 26, 2011].

Mass immigration isn’t helping Nigeria, and it isn’t helping America.

A similar situation exists in the United Kingdom where Nigerian pupils are among the best performers. Nearly 200,000 highly educated Nigerians reside in that country, both depriving Nigeria of more educated and capable leaders and taking highly paid jobs and or university places from the British.

Number of Nigerians studying in UK hits 8-year high, by Bunmi Bailey, BusinessDay.ng March 27, 2023

Nigerians have become so ubiquitous in a country that is not our own that a Nigerian woman, raised in her own country from infancy, is now the leader of Britain’s right-wing party. I would rather that Kemi Badenoch—who is clearly highly competent and politically adept—were running for the presidency in Nigeria rather than attempting to become the leader of a country that is not even her own.

Nigeria needs competent leaders, and Africa more broadly needs highly skilled statesmen and stateswomen who can drive us forward.

Badenoch is representative of an ongoing trend where Africa’s most educated are relocating to the West, abandoning our own continent in favor of the higher wages and the superior quality of living in the West.

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The United Kingdom alone is issuing hundreds of thousands of visas a year to highly educated Africans, including our much needed medical, engineering, and computer science talent.

The West, itself deeply unhappy with the state of migration inflows, must begin the policy of repatriation that this publication calls for on a regular basis. The nationalists and nationalist parties rising in Europe must work with those African states that want to welcome the diaspora home and coordinate the return of Africa’s most talented.

We do not need more money from Western governments, more NGO workers, or more crates of food aid. Leaders like Paul Kagame of Rwanda have proven that Africans are capable of building clean, low crime, and well-maintained societies. While countries like Botswana have proven that Africans can, when wages are high enough, build effective healthcare and governance systems.

African countries need to work on retaining our best and brightest while Western countries, for the good of both civilizations, need to return Africa’s diaspora to us. Even a secondary school educated African from the West is a massive boon to this continent and stands a high chance of starting a business and creating jobs.

It is here that I should warn against a common strategy of African leaders: a tendency to attempt to extract money from the African diaspora while not calling them home. Remittance flows from the West are great for some families and the consumer spending market, but they do not create new factories, establish new industries, or ensure African nurses are treating African patients in African hospitals. It is estimated by the International Monetary Fund that the African diaspora earns nearly $55 billion each year, some half of which may return to the continent by way of remittances.

I dare both African leaders and the Western nationalists reading this to imagine how much better both civilizations would be if those Africans were in Africa generating wealth instead of extracting it from Western economies.

We can build a world where nations retain their identities and grow in prosperity, but to do that we must embrace the Western project of repatriation and accept that nationalism is a universal principle which can engender cooperation instead of conflict.