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Back to the Motherland
“Top of my list of reasons for returning to Lagos is a desire to contribute to Nigeria,” says 35-year-old Harvard graduate Seyi Borofffice speaking in Lagos, where he is home again after 15 years of living overseas. “The upside and opportunity is incredible. In terms of possibilities, I’d say Nigeria is comparable to the UK at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.” He is just one of thousands of African professionals in the diaspora who are returning home. They are driven by a combination of the desire to serve their home countries and the wealth of opportunities for self-growth the African commercial sector now offers. Slowly but surely, the returnees are reversing the decades-long brain drain that has so crippled the continent.
Africa’s diaspora professionals return home
After a decade of brain drain that has robbed Nigeria and the wider continent of its most talented workers, an increasing number of professionals are returning home. As recession dampens opportunities in the West, what started as a trickle home, triggered by economic growth as Africa’s governments started to deregulate key industries, has now grown to a steady stream.
Skilled professionals from countries including Ghana, Kenya, and Angola are returning home in significant numbers. Redundancies in the financial services industry in London and the US have encouraged returnees, or so-called re-pats, say recruitment agencies specialising in placing Africans in the diaspora in jobs back home. The number of Nigerian expats working in the UK is estimated at 3m, and at 1m in the US. Although there are no firm figures of the exact number of repatriates, the numbers returning are still thought to be small. Nevertheless, it amounts to a ‘brain gain’, helping to reverse the damaging flow of an estimated 30,000 African professionals who leave the continent each year, according to statistics from the International Organisation for Migration.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says between 25% and 50% of the college-educated citizens of countries including Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya and Uganda live overseas in OECD countries. This contrasts with just 5% of the skilled citizens of newly emerging powers such as India, China and Brazil opting to do so. Recruitment agencies say returnees are seeking opportunities in the oil sector in Angola. Ghana is also attracting skilled home-comers since it discovered oil in 2007. In Nigeria, financial services and telecoms, as well as new sectors of the economy like manufacturing, fast food and even some dynamic and progressive SMEs, are luring re-pats. Mayo Okunola is two weeks into his new role as general manager of Lagos-based DMTV Nigeria, a subsidiary of South Africa’s MultiChoice, developing TV content for mobile phones.
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