EPISODE 19: BRAIN DRAIN IN THE EDUCATIONAL SECTOR

Brain drain can be defined as the movement or migration of professional services from a developing or underdeveloped country to a developed region. It simply refers to immigration of individuals who have received advanced training at home with benefit of human capital fiat for the receiving country. However, the truth is that there are few highly trained and qualified manpower actually emanating especially from most African institutions and they often have to be retrained on getting to developed countries. In other words, brain drain can be seen as not being limited to the immigration of highly trained or qualified manpower in a country to greener pastures but actually the immigration of potential gifted and talented citizens of a nation or a country as well when they are gradually moving out of that country to a greener pasture. The research in the field of the gifted and talented found that 3% of the population of any given generation is actually gifted and talented and they are the true salt of the nation.

Brain drain is very prevalence here in Nigeria. There are a lot of brain drain in different sectors of the economy; most especially in the health sector. The following reasons are posited as causes of brain drain in Nigeria:

• Psychological: Because we are psychological beings, hence the reason why the school of psychology focus on studying the mind and various behaviours; why we do what we do, why people behave the way they behave, etc.  The law discovered in psychology over the years which is one of the powerful laws affecting human behaviour is the law of reinforcement which consists of the law of positive reinforcement and the law of negative reinforcement. The emphasis by scholars is on the law of positive reinforcement and the summary of the law is that human beings tend to flow or gravitate more towards pleasurable and rewarding experience.

• Information Explosion of internet: Every human being will naturally gravitate towards pleasurable experience and what is gravitating more in the recent time is the information explosion via internet. So, the world is becoming a global village, people are getting more aware of what is happening in other countries and how other countries are more organised and more comfortable. People are getting motivated by their friends’ experiences who travelled out to other countries and they begin to ask themselves why are they suffering here when their friends are enjoying out there? And those who have had a little bit of it, maybe they went on holiday and they do not want to come back again, so, that is the law of reinforcement at work. We need to be conscious of this, it is just natural with every human being that we gravitate towards any positive change.

• Leadership lack of awareness, appreciation and under-utilization of the true salt of the nation: The group called the true salt of the nation are those in business E.g., the Aba boys who are not too literate, but when they get hold of any gadget or product from any part of the world, they can dismantle it and reproduce it in another bit. These are the people that are called the salt of the nation. The leaders are not even aware of this; so, they are not utilising them. These are people that can turn the development of the nation around if they are properly organised. Vendors in the various institutions are part of this group. They know their worth. There are various unique talents in various fields which leaders are not even aware of. They do not understand the dynamics of development of how to actually harvest these talents, nurture them and then deploy them to develop the nation.

• Poor Infrastructure: Electricity, Internet, production facilities, etc. Some people have lots of ideas but cannot turn them into products because the facilities are not just there to make that happen and that could be frustrating. When someone thinks of poor roads, spending hours on traffic to and from work, etc., there is no time for creativity. The engine room for productivity and development is inspiration, so poor infrastructure affects individual’s comfort, rest, etc., which eventually makes frustration level to be eroded. It is a chain reaction that can lead to or affect the health of people both psychosomatic and physiological and then cutting short the lifespan of people at the end of the day.

• Security Issues: Some of the threats being faced nowadays in the country are issues like kidnapping, ritual killings, boko haram, armed robbery, Fulani herdsmen, etc. Armed robbers kept harassing people in most places. A lot of people had to leave their own houses that they built and rent another accommodation in another environment just to keep safe. So many people are running out of the country for security purpose. These issues need to be identified and dealt with to stop brain drain in our country. The professions that are mostly affected in the area of brain drain are the Medical Sector, Biological Sciences, Engineering, Computer Sciences especially Programming, Lecturers and then Counselling and Social Workers.

Specifically, for the educational sector, some of the reasons for the brain drain are as highlighted below:

1. Curricula for most subjects. There are no curricula for most subjects/courses.
2. Coding: Most of the educational system especially most universities do not have coding for their subjects. Some of the coding that are supposed to be part of the Computer Engineering courses for instance are learnt by students on their own.
3. Creativity and Problem-solving Skills: This skill is usually not included in school curriculum. It should actually be infused in every university curriculum because that is the engine room of productivity and development.
4. Affective or Emotional Intelligence
5. Financial Intelligence: Building of financial intelligence is very important because so many people have been frustrated for not knowing how to raise necessary funds.
6. Psychomotor Intelligence: This has to do with building your physique and body structure because if you are not healthy, you would not be able to achieve your dreams.
7. Spiritual Intelligence.

All these are supposed to be infused into the school curriculum but the system is not just allowing such to happen. Again, talking about infrastructure, especially the educational system, the buildings, the teaching facilities, teaching aids, self-learning facilities, counselling facilities, testing facilities, production facilities, virtually these vital elements are lacking by way of human element or the basic materials needed for those human elements to operate.

Also, poor quality of teachers and teaching/assessment in itself is a vicious cycle and the kind of curriculum most lecturers have been using are obsolete; so, the information they have are also becoming obsolete. However, to ascertain the currency of the lecturers, they need to continuously develop themselves; they need to have the ability for self-development because if they do not do that, they may go into extinction, their brains become dormant and they begin to stink because if you stop learning, you would start stinking.

Then, talking about teaching and testing, it is discovered that most times, our educational system is encouraging remote learning, cramming of information because there is no in-depth understanding of core underlying principles of issues that is boiled down to the quality of education and teaching system as it were.

Educational institutions are also a reason for the brain drain as a result of the following:

• Poor reward and reinforcement system: Imagine the ongoing ASUU strike because of salary issue. Many people are running away from the academia because of poor remuneration especially teachers in public secondary schools.

• Eroded Dignity of Labour. Teachers are not respected at whatever level, either in primary, secondary or university. There is no dignity of labour which is the reason why some people are now changing their levels, location and environment in search of greener pasture. The kind of treatment lecturers are being given is becoming so frustrating hence the ASUU strike; and lecturers are not to be blamed because government is not helping matters.

• Lack of government incentives: There is a particular American educational policy that give scholarship ability to any student from any part of the world who can score up to a particular threshold of scores. So, brain drain is not limited to only the highly trained and skilled individuals but even the potential, gifted and talented can also be attracted which is why when students go on scholarship to these countries, they do not come back.

Conclusion

Brain drain obviously cannot be considered as a good thing because it leads to great destruction in the ecosystem and it could degenerate to the level of extinction of weaker population with time.  So, brain drain need to be checkmate and stopped. And some of the ways that can be stopped is to engage mind orientation concerning life purpose. It is important for every citizen of Nigeria to be aware that they are born into this nation for a purpose, so when you go to develop yourself outside the country, have the mindset of coming back to contribute your quota back to your country.

Government should eliminate all forms of threat to peaceful living and security issues. They should also make sure they provide a central infrastructure for optimal learning and productivity. They should have instrument that will help people to discover their talents, develop it and then deploy it because this is actually what will contribute to national development and by the time that is done, the rate of people running away from the country for greener pastures will reduce. Even when they travel, they would still want to come back to contribute their quota because they would know themselves as solution providers.

Finally, the national reward system should be overhauled. That is, the national reward and enforcement system. Great leaders are always great in empathy, but unfortunately our leaders are not even aware of what people are going through. They are so detached and these are the things causing brain drain majorly because they are not treating the country as their own family. There is no empathy and that is greatly affecting the entire system.

“This thought leadership piece is culled from the CIPM radio programme, ‘The Office.’ The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the Guests and do not represent the views of CIPM.”