By Emmanuel Ifesemen
The current government strategies against emigration of citizens looking for greener pastures are inimical, in particular, their attempts to reduce students travelling abroad for better education.
In this synopsis, I am not going to dwell on the importance of creating better-funded institutions locally to compete with the foreign schools, because that is basic enough for the policymakers to focus on. Instead, I will discuss why we should treat our population as an opportunity.
The current media trends on the number of dependants accompanying Nigerian students abroad have totally underscored the contributions of these students and their dependants to their host communities.
In the UK for example, visa fees are collected for each dependant, and they pay in advance for the use of the NHS. I will say that their contributions on just these two notes are quite significant, despite the fact that they do not have any recourse to public funds.
There have been recent attempts to discourage the institutions in the UK from admitting students or employing Nigerians, but as I mentioned earlier we are about passing the most important opportunity our population presents.
For the students, the Nigerian government should assist in renegotiating the fees paid to foreign institutions. We should attempt to fix this as a percentage of what local students pay in these countries. So where they are currently paying twice as much, it should be reduced or capped at 50%. This would definitely be a win for Nigerian foreign students.
The question is how does this benefit the Nigerian state?
Firstly, we get our people trained while we buy the time to improve our local institutions.
Secondly, we can negotiate some type of homage for every Nigerian student admitted.
Thirdly, PR that the government is interested in the success of her citizens
Fourthly, relative reduction in the initial take-off funds from Nigeria, because most of the students ends up working anyway.
Asian countries like China and India have greatly benefited from this. And I believe this is something we can further develop and make the most from.
We need to discourage the negative trend and approach that it is not our business because we don’t benefit directly from the success of others. This is not true. As our population grows, we would need to send our people out more to conquer the world, because we cannot allow the delayed growth in infrastructure to slow the next generation for another 100 years.
We need to encourage our government to see the bigger picture, and how tomorrow our human capital can become our true foreign investment.
Let’s move this discussion further.
Thank you,
Emmanuel Ifesemen
Engineer Emmanuel Ifesemen is CEO of EST Energy Services Nigeria Ltd
