Happy New Year to one and All at Gambia-L. Here is an article I want to share with you.Happy Reading. Education in Africa: The Brain Drain. On this edition of Africa Journal, we will look at the issue of Africans studying away from their homeland and their reasons for not returning. We'll discuss where brain drain occurs most often and what countries are doing to attract Africans to return home. We'll also talk about the economic and social impact of loosing Africans to other countries. The weekly host of Africa Journal is Maimouna Mills, a Voice of America radio host. What is your opinion about Africans studying away from their homeland? EMEAGWALI: There is nothing wrong with Africans studying abroad. America is the motherland of technology and I could not program the world's fastest supercomputers if I had stayed in Africa. What is wrong is that most African students that studied abroad did not return to Africa. The problem is that Africans who completed their studies in Europe and the United States are not returning to Africa. Since one in three African professionals will like to live outside Africa, African universities are actually training one third of their graduates for export to the developed nations. We are operating one third of African universities to satisfy the manpower needs Great Britain and the United States. The African education budget nothing but a supplement to the American education budget. In essence, Africa is giving developmental assistance to the wealthier western nations which makes the rich nations richer and the poor nations poorer. What are the causes of brain drain? EMEAGWALI: The primary cause of external brain drain is unreasonably low wages paid to African professionals. The contradiction is that we spend four billion dollars annually to recruit and pay 100,000 expatriates to work in Africa but we fail to spend a proportional amount to recruit the 250,000 African professionals now working outside Africa. African professionals working in Africa are paid considerably less than similarly qualified expatriates. We also have internal brain drain when people are not employed in the fields of their expertise. For example, many military officers are politicians in uniform and some medical doctors are moonlighting as taxi cab drivers. What are their reasons for not returning home? EMEAGWALI: The socio-economic conditions make it difficult for us to achieve our potential. Political instability increases the rates at which professionals emigrate to the developed nations. Many professionals emigrated during the brutal reigns of Idi Amin, Mobutu and Sani Abacha. The war in Sudan between the Islamic north and the Christian south has led to the emigration of half of Sudanese professionals. In 1991, one in three African countries were affected by conflicts. Today, there are more refugees in Africa than in any other region in the world. What are your reasons for not returning home? EMEAGWALI: First, I have an American wife that has her academic career and an eight-year son that is in a good school. It will be inconsiderate of me to disrupt my wife's career and my son's education. Second, I never received invitations from government officials. Individuals look me up on the Internet and invite me to Nigeria. Hopefully, by the end of the year, I should at least make a visit to Nigeria. Which countries are most affected by the brain drain? EMEAGWALI: The receiving countries are the winners while the sending countries are the losers. The receiving countries include the United States, Australia and West Germany. The sending countries include Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Ghana. Nigeria has 100,000 immigrants in the United States alone. In the United States, sixty-four percent of foreign-born Nigerians aged 25 and older have at least a bachelors degree. Forty-three (43) percent of foreign-born Africans living in the United States have at least a bachelors degree. Nigerians and Africans are the most educated ethnic groups in the United States. The wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola and Zaire contributed to the brain drain problem. What are the social impact of brain drain? EMEAGWALI: Brain drain makes it difficult to create a middle class consisting of doctors, engineers and other professionals. We have a two class African society: a massive underclass that is largely unemployed and very poor people and a few very rich people that are mostly corrupt military and government officials. Brain drain gives rise to poor leadership and corruption. A large educated middle class will ensure that political power is transferred by ballots instead of by bullets. When the medical doctors emigrate to the United States, the poor are forced to seek medical treatment from traditional healers while the elite fly to London for their routine medical checkups. Nigerian government officials are using tax payer's money to travel abroad for routine medical check-ups and malarial treatment. Overseas medical check-ups is a national disgrace and banning it would force Nigeria to re-hire those medical doctors that emigrated to Europe. What is the economic impact of brain drain? EMEAGWALI: It is the best and brightest that can emigrate, leaving behind the weak and less imaginative. It means a slow death for Africa. We cannot achieve long-term economic growth by exporting our natural resources. In the new world order, economic growth is driven by people with knowledge. We talk a lot of poverty alleviation in Africa. But who is going to alleviate the poverty? It is most talented that should lead the people, create wealth and eradicate poverty and corruption. The professionals that are emigrating out of Africa include those with technical expertise, entrepreneurial and managerial skills. Their absence increases the endemic corruption and makes it easier for the military to overthrow a democratically elected government. Africa needs a large middle class to build a large tax base which,in turn, will enable us to build good schools and hospitals and provide constant electricity. The 250,000 African professionals working overseas will increase the size of the middle class In what ways have you given back to your community? EMEAGWALI: Telecomunications has changed the world and we now live in a global village or community. Right now, you and I are using telephone and satellite broadcasting technology to hold live conversation. Being a guest in Africa Journal allows me to share my expertise and insight with you and other viewers. Each day, a dozen people look me up on the Internet and write me for advice on their career and life goals. I respond to most of them. Also, my website EMEAGWALI.com is used in 6000 schools and I provide academic guidance to many primary and secondary school students. Do Africans who leave their home countries to study and work have an obligation to return and share the benefits of their education? EMEAGWALI: In theory, we are morally obliged to return to Africa. In reality, an African professional will not resign from his $50,000 a year job to accept a $500 a year job in Africa. A more meaningful question will be to ask: What measures can be taken to entice Africans leaving abroad to return home and what can be done to discourage those professionals in Africa to remain in Africa. How can brain drain be reversed? EMEAGWALI: You have to recruit and retain them. We can provide recruitment incentives such relocation expenses, loans for housing and for starting businesses, salary supplement for the first few years. However, when the salary supplement ends, many of the professionals will pack their bags and return to Europe and the United States. A more permanent solution will be to pay wages that are competitive. What changes will you like to see in governmental policies? EMEAGWALI: We have eliminate military spending and increase our spending the education, women's empowerment and youth development. Forty years ago, Fourah Bay College, Makerere University and University of Ibadan used to be one of the best in the developing world. Today, these universities are crumbling and have chronic shortage of books and equipments. Student and lecturer strikes create an irregular academic sessions and it is not uncommon for students to take five or six years to complete a four year degree. The problem began in the early 1980s, when many African nations were undergoing structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which required them to both devalue their currency and cut public expenditure. Devaluation restricted the amount of equipments and books that could be purchased. It also made it difficult to travel abroad to study the sciences, engineering and medicine. A university professor that was earning $1000 a month in 1980 now earns $50 a month and most are forced to emigrate. When the World Bank and IMF forced Nigeria to reduce public expenditures, Ibrahim Babangida cut the education budget instead of the military budget. While teachers salary were unpaid for several months, Nigeria was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to import arms. We must not forget to invest in basic education. Nigeria needs to learn from Zambia. The illiteracy rate in the Nigerian adult population is 49 percent while that of Zambia is 27 percent. Yet Nigeria has far more universities than Zambia. Nigeria should learn from Zambia and focus on good quality basic education for the masses. With a high illiteracy rate and millions of university graduates, Nigeria will end up with her feet in the Stone Age and her head in the computer Information Age. PROFILE OF PHILIP Emeagwali: Philip Emeagwali was born on August 23, 1954, in Akure, Nigeria, the son of James Emeagwali, a nurse’s aide, and his 16-year-old wife, Agatha. In April 1967, he was withdrawn from school as his family hid in refugee camps during an ethnic cleansing in which 50,000 Igbos indigenes were killed. At the age of 14, he was conscripted into the Biafran army as a child-soldier in one of Africa's bloodiest conflicts. After six months in the army, the civil war ended and he was reunited with his family. He attended school briefly and then dropped out again because his parents could not afford to pay his school fees. He earned his first diploma from the University of London (through self-study) in 1973 and, subsequently, won a scholarship to Oregon State University. From 1977-93, he did graduate study, professional practice and academic research at Howard University (civil engineering), Maryland State Highway Administration (transportation engineering), George Washington University (environmental, ocean, coastal and marine engineering), United States Bureau of Reclamation (civil engineer), University of Maryland (mathematics), University of Michigan (scientific computing), University of Minnesota (supercomputing), and Army High Performance Computing Research Laboratory (research fellow). For six years, he served as a distinguished lecturer of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (the world's largest technical organization) and the Association for Computing Machinery (the oldest computer society). He has delivered many major lectureships all over the world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (UNESCO, Paris) and the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 1974, Emeagwali read a 1922 science fiction article on how to use 64,000 mathematicians to forecast the weather for the whole Earth. Inspired by that article, he worked out a theoretical scheme for using 64,000 far-flung processors that will be evenly distributed around the Earth, to forecast the weather. He called it a HyperBall international network of computers. Today, an international network of computers is called the Internet. Initially his proposal to use 64,000 computers to form an international network was rejected by peers on the grounds that it would be "impossible." Denied funding and employment for a decade, he quietly developed and wrote up his calculations in a thousand-page monograph which described the hypothetical use of 64 binary thousand --- the equivalent of 65,536 --- processors to perform the world’s fastest computation. In 1987, an experimental hypercube computer with 65,536 processors became available at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the United States government's prime nuclear weapons research center. Frustrated by their inability to program 65,536 processors to simulate nuclear blasts, the Los Alamos officials had a hunch to allow physicists simulating problems similar to theirs. Fearing that the Lab officials will not accept him if it was known that he was black, Emeagwali decided to submit his proposal remotely. The Lab officials approved his usage of its computers and he remotely programmed 65,536 processors in Los Alamos (New Mexico) while living in Michigan. "It was his formula that used 65,000 separate computer processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989," said CNN. "That feat,” CNN continued, "led to computer scientists comprehending the capabilities of supercomputers and the practical applications of creating a system that allowed multiple computers to communicate." Emeagwali's discovery started making front page headlines and cover stories in 1989, a feat that is a rarity in science. [Time magazine reported that the odds of a scientist "becoming even a little bit famous are a lot worse than 5,000 to 1."] The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 27, 1990) wrote: “Philip Emeagwali, who took on an enormously difficult problem and, like most students working on Ph.D. dissertations, solved it alone, has won computation's top prize, captured in the past only by seasoned research teams … If his program can squeeze out a few more percentage points, it will help decrease U.S. reliance on foreign oil.” With his success, academic journals that formerly rejected his work began to sing his praises: “The amount of money at stake is staggering. For example, you can typically expect to recover 10 percent of a field's oil. If you can improve your production schedule to get just 1 percent more oil, you will increase your yield by $400 million,” wrote the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize Committee in the academic journal Software (May 1990). In the bimonthly news journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, mathematician Alan Karp wrote: "I have checked with several reservoir engineers who feel that his calculation is of real importance and very fast. His explicit method not only generates lots of megaflops, but solves problems faster than implicit methods. Emeagwali is the first to have applied a pseudo-time approach in reservoir modeling.” (SIAM News, May 1990) His success in using 64 binary-thousand processors gave credibility and renewed interest in his formerly rejected proposal to use 64 thousand far-flung computers to forecast the weather for the whole Earth. Because the topology of his rejected international network of computers was similar to, but predated that, of the Internet, it was rediscovered and called an “idea that was ahead of its time” and “a germinal seed of the Internet.” For his contributions, the book History of the Internet profiled him as an Internet pioneer, was voted one of the twenty innovators of the Internet, and CNN called him "A Father of the Internet." A measure of his impact is that he was rewarded with the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize (supercomputing's Nobel Prize) for his contributions which, in part, inspired the petroleum industry to purchase one in ten supercomputers. Emeagwali's use of 65,000 processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations, in part, inspired: Apple Computer to use his multiprocessing technology to manufacture its dual-processor Power Mac G4, which had a peak speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second; IBM to manufacture its $134.4 million supercomputer, which had a peak speed of 3.1 trillion calculations per second; IBM to announce its plan to manufacture a 65,000-processor supercomputer, which will have a peak speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second; and every supercomputer manufacturer to incorporate thousands of processors in their supercomputers. Each day, visitors to his Web site, emeagwali.com, view one billion bytes or the equivalent of one thousand books. Materials from his Web site are frequently reprinted in small newspapers across Africa. Another measure of his influence is that one million students have written biographical essays on him --- thousands wrote to thank him for inspiring them. President Bill Clinton called him a powerful role model for young people and used the phrase "another Emeagwali" to describe children with the potential to become computer geniuses. Emeagwali considers himself to be "a black scientist with a social responsibility to communicate science to the black diaspora." In other words, he has a dual sensibility of being deeply rooted in science while using it as a tool to remind his people in the Diaspora of where they have been and who they are. Dubbed a "renaissance man" by the media, he is admired not just for his enormous scientific contributions but for his deep and broad knowledge of literature and the arts. The media contacts him, daily, for interviews on issues as diverse as brain drain to Islamic fundamentalism to the future of the Internet. During his career, Emeagwali has received more than 100 prizes, awards and honors. These include the Computer Scientist of the Year Award of the National Technical Association (1993), Distinguished Scientist Award of the World Bank (1998), Best Scientist in Africa Award of the Pan African Broadcasting, Heritage and Achievement Awards (2001), Gallery of Prominent Refugees of the United Nations (2001), profiled in the book Making It in America as one of "400 models of eminent Americans," and in Who's Who in 20th Century America. In a televised speech, as president, Bill Clinton described Emeagwali as “one of the great minds of the Information Age.” His wife, Dale, was born in Baltimore, was educated at Georgetown University School of Medicine, conducted research at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Michigan, and taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1996, she won the Scientist of the Year Award of the National Technical Association for her cancer research. They both live near Washington, D.C. with their 11-year-old son. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Philip Emeagwali's Website Do you need a keynote, conference or convention speaker?Contact Philip Emeagwali at 443-850-0850 or [log in to unmask] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With the very best of good wishes, Musa Amadu Pembo Glasgow, Scotland UK. [log in to unmask] Da’wah is to convey the message with wisdom and with good words. We should give the noble and positive message of Islam. We should try to emphasize more commonalities and explain the difference without getting into theological arguments and without claiming the superiority of one position over the other. There is a great interest among the people to know about Islam and we should do our best to give the right message. May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,guide us all to His Sirat Al-Mustaqim (Righteous Path).May He protect us from the evils of this life and the hereafter.May Allah,Subhana Wa Ta'Ala,grant us entrance to paradise . We ask Allaah the Most High, the All-Powerful, to teach us that which will benefit us, and to benefit us by that which we learn. May Allaah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala grant blessings and peace to our Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions..Amen. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~