In a recent commentary, Angeyo Kalambuka - a lecturer at Nairobi University, sparked a debate about brain drain, beginning his article with the observation that “it has become fashionable to lament the brain drain”. In the article, Angeyo proceeds to argue that “brain drain”, as a factor limiting African states’ ability to realize their growth potential, is a myth that does not hold under scrutiny. Angeyo’s approach is on pseudo-economic terms arguing that, in as far as knowledge or “brain power” transfers are concerned, African countries are net receivers of foreign produced R&D and technical expertise. The lecturer contends that to the extent that poor countries in Africa can free ride on cutting-edge technologies developed at high cost in the west, Africa need not lament brain drain, especially where the numbers of those who leave are negligible compared to the wasted talent that remains, in proportional terms.

It is not hard to see the source of Angeyo’s concern. Brain drain has become a fashionable excuse, given the practice by many of Africa’s political leaders and their apologists of diverting attention away from their own policy inadequacies. Indeed, brain drain, to a significant extent, can be viewed as the political expression of trained professionals who, voting with their feet, choose to take their expertise elsewhere. However, responding to this impulse in such extreme terms that completely dismiss the reality of net immigration hardly does any justice to the underlying sentiment in Angeyo’s critique. Indeed, in a dissenting article entitled “Brain drain real and we must shed tears for it”, Atieno Ndede-Amadi the CEO of Africa’s Brain Gain, unbraids Angeyo Kalambuka, arguing that professionals trained in Africa should stay in Africa and work to improve Africa’s own capabilities. Contradicting Angeyo, Atieno calls such a move “strategic” and not “protectionist”.

Again as with Angeyo, it is not hard to isolate Atieno’s motivations. In today’s highly competitive world, African countries need all the help that they can get from their own sons and daughters, especially their “best and brightest” and the highly technically trained. However, again like Angeyo, Atieno tries to buoy her position by taking an extreme position that does little justice to her core idea. In her article she writes, “There is no such thing as free flow of knowledge from the rich to poor countries!”

To take a slightly different route that I think goes to the core of the real issues, I believe that it is important to consider what brain drain means on an individual basis instead of dehumanizing it by elevating the debate to an impersonal plain. On an individual level, many factors enter into the making of the decision to take one’s skills away from one’s country of birth. It is worth noting that it may sometimes make better sense to be in a different physical location to advance further the interests of one’s country. A Kenyan engineering student may be positioned to help design low-cost microchips that are suitable for Kenya’s climate using the million-dollar equipment more readily available in US universities than at the University of Nairobi. A biological sciences student interested in advancing our knowledge of HIV in sub-Saharan countries may be better able to do that from Europe.

In this light, far from being a cause for concern itself, brain drain is only symptomatic of the greater challenge of good governance and opportunity that many African countries are yet to resolve. Further, with greater mobility between states and continents, the focus of strategic nation building that forms the main concern of Atieno’s rebuttal should not be the protectionist impulse of keeping trained professionals within their countries of birth. Instead, effort should be concentrated on creating a flexible but competitive and enabling environment to retain local talent as needed, to strategically encourage migration to other physical locations where such transfers can be beneficial and to attract foreign expertise where such is desired. This kind of strategy is best informed by better understating individual motivations to migrate, instead of discussing brain drain in terms of net information flows and claims of who bears the highest cost of knowlegde transfers.

I have often wondered in discussions of brain drain in Africa, why it is usually taken for granted or implicitly assumed that one is bound to one’s country of birth in a way that makes the country entitled to an individual’s skills. In other words, is there an umbilical tie between a person and their country of birth akin to that between a mother and a child? This question is increasingly urgent in a world where traditional boundaries defining the state and, by extension, citizenship, are disintegrating. This may be especially relevant in most African countries where the sense of belonging that should characterize citizenship rests on shaky foundations because nationhood was less the result of a deliberate collective choice but more of a somewhat arbitrary outcome of the squabbling of colonialists during the Berlin Conference (1885). Thus, deliberating this question, that is relevant to understand the phenomena of brain drain at the individual level, on a national scale may lead to useful insights.