Maina wa Njuguna
Germany, like the United States of America has experienced its share of refugee migrants upsurge as North Africa, The Middle-East and wars in East Europe continue to cause a lot of instability.
As most Germans worry about the character and the future of their country, right-wing politicians aligned with Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party are not skipping a beat.
According to a report filed by BBC, the co-chairman Alexander Gauland has talked of fighting an “invasion of foreigners” and the party openly focuses on Islam and migration, seeing Islam as alien to German society. Some of the party’s rhetoric has been tinged with Nazi overtones.
As immigrants numbers have surged so has the party grown in popularity and hardened its stance against ‘invaders’.
What is deeply disheartening is the rising number of conflicts throughout the world especially from areas where these ‘unwanted’ refugees hail from.
Sudan warfare between Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has totally destabilized the region. According to RESCUE, the “total number of people internally displaced in the country has surpassed 9 million, making it the largest internal displacement crisis in the world.”
Think about the pressures that the spill over has on those trekking the Savanah Desert headed to Europe via the deadly passage, The Mediterranean Sea.
What about the Islamic insurgencies in the Sahel region (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Northern Nigeria) creating thousands of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and the spill over forcing some to head North towards Europe?
Push factors such as poverty, bad governance, corruption, human rights violations, ethnic and tribal conflicts, and religious antagonism keep fueling the Africans, the Middle-Easterns quest and necessity to head to the West where they are very likely to face a lifetime of hardships, rejection and relegated to second class status.
What will it really take to tackle these problems and put an end to these vicious cycles in Africa? The problem seems to be getting worse as the rise of African professionals join the ranks headed for the exit lane to the Global North.
AFRICAN PROFESSIONALS LEAVING THE CONTINENT
To complicate matters, the vast brain drain is on the rise. The very people needed to bring the much needed change are on their way out.
The African Union (AU) and the International Organization for Migration (UN Migration) in the second edition of the African migration report, Connecting the Threads: Linking policy, practice and the welfare of the African migrant, which was launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Geneva, Switzerland has urged African leaders to focus beyond the narrow lense of financial remittances and address holistic challenges that beset the continent if the next century will be the African century.
According to Scott Firsing, a former senior lecturer in international relations at Monash University in South Africa, the African professionals continue to be pulled or pushed towards Canada, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and among other major economies in the Global North.
According to The Voice, a Black British national newspaper, there are now more Ghanaian Nurses working in United Kingdom (UK) than in Ghana where the education investments were made.
The UK like some of the Western countries are busy poaching for healthcare professionals to plug in manpower gaps. So what happens to African countries reeling from the professionals shortages?
The Federation of State Medical Boards supports the US state medical boards in licensing, disciplining and regulating physicians and other healthcare professionals.
According to LANCET, the doctor–patient ratio in Nigeria stands at an alarming 1:9083, far from the recommended 1:600 ratio. This is directly as a result of high levels of skilled health-care workers emigrating out of the country to the West.
Some 3,895 Nigerian-educated doctors are licensed to practice medicine in the US as of 2020, Xiaomei Pei, a research and data integration manager at the federation told Africa Check.
Nigerians accounted for 1.7% of all licensed physicians who were international medical graduates.
Pei said that 6,536 licenses were held by these 3,895 doctors, with the greatest number of licenses issued by the states of Texas (11%), Georgia (7%) and New York (6%).
Germany is a lens of the continued rise of right-winged politics spread in the West as nativism and anti migrants sentiments fuel the general body politic.
Germany whose checkered past was responsible for the genocide of Herero and Nama people of Namibia, the holocaust of the Jews and two major world wars, should serve as a warning of how dangerous and a slippery slope this potentially is.
The Onus is upon Africans to hold those in power accountable for the future they want and deserve, and to put to a stoppage the hemorrhage of the most important resources, the human capital that is and will be pivotal to usher in the African century.
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