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PORTUGAL: Brain Drain Still Bleeding Ex-Colonies Dry

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Sep 28 2007 (IPS) - The violence, corruption and generalised poverty marring more than three decades of independence in Portugal’s five former colonies in Africa, and five years of independence in East Timor, have been the main obstacles for development in these countries, but not the only ones.

Brain drain is another phantom that is slowly but inexorably destroying hopes for progress and wellbeing for the people of Guinea-Bissau, which became independent in 1974, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique and Sao Tomé and Príncipe, which became independent in 1975, and East Timor, independent since 2002.

Skilled and academically qualified people from African countries where Portuguese is an official language often give up their status in their unstable home countries to build a new life in peaceful Portugal, even if it means sacrificing their former careers and having to take up a hastily learned, lower skilled job.

In contrast, many of those who earn a degree in universities in Portugal, thanks to scholarships offered to young people in the six former Portuguese colonies by the Portuguese Institute for Development Support (IPAD), and return to their countries of origin find jobs in the professional sector.

“There are no reliable statistics, so we can’t be precise, but there is evidence that a reasonable proportion of students from Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique go back home, although this is not the case for the other three countries,” IPAD head Manuel Correia told IPS.

As this is the responsibility of the sending country, “IPAD ends up not having any concrete data about it,” Correia said. IPAD is subordinate to the Portuguese Foreign Ministry.

However, “although we lack a mechanism to monitor students’ return, every candidate for the scholarship programme must make a sworn declaration promising to return to his or her country of origin after finishing the course of studies,” said Anabela Toscana, head of IPAD’s scholarship division.

IPAD no longer offers scholarships indiscriminately. The aim is to reduce the brain drain that occurs when students stay on in Portugal, or head for other European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. The loss of trained human resources has an adverse effect on the five African countries and East Timor, instead of supporting their development.

“Our scholarship policy now is to discontinue them for high school students, reduce them for undergraduate university degrees, but expand them for master’s and doctoral students,” said Correia.

“This decreases the students’ length of stay in Portugal. And at the same time we are offering professional internships, that is to say, we will continue to pay students for six months or up to a year after they complete their studies, in exchange for proof that they are working in their home country, in an institution that will guarantee their salary when our support ends,” the head of IPAD said.

Asked about current projects in the former Portuguese colonies, Correia said “a great deal of aid goes to strengthening the universities in those countries, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, in order to boost teaching and research.”

East Timor was named by Toscano as the country to which the fewest students on scholarships returned. Between 2001 and 2006, 127 students on IPAD scholarships took degrees in Portugal, but only 55 of them returned to the island, situated between Australia and Indonesia.

Brain drain does not only affect the former Portuguese colonies, but is a problem throughout the developing South. The editor of the monthly magazine Africa 21, Joao Matos, describes it as “planetary apartheid.”

“Nicolas Sarkozy, a descendent of Hungarian migrants who has become president of France, one of the world’s oldest democracies, asked on a recent visit to Senegal if it could be considered normal that there are more doctors from Benin in France than in Benin itself,” said the Angolan writer who lives in Lisbon.

He said that Sarkozy commented on that occasion that “Africa needs its élites, because if they all end up in France one day, who will concern themselves with the development of Senegal?”

Sarkozy’s host, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, responded that he was not interested in students from his country receiving scholarships “only to have them fly off to France.”

According to Matos, the French president’s statements, which were reported in the global press, were “of doubtful sincerity.” He said he does not believe that “Sarkozy would make do without the doctors from Benin who are working in France: what he really doesn’t want are poor and indigent migrants, mostly from Africa.”

Matos associates the present plight of his continent with “the evils of slavery and European colonialism, and their effects on the peoples of Africa, which have not yet been assessed in full.”

The shaky economies of most African countries “are largely a consequence of the plundering of the continent’s resources by the West, which continues to this day. It began with its most valuable resource, people, millions of whom were taken by force to far-off lands, which they helped to develop with their slave labour,” Matos said.

He recommended reading a lengthy research article published by Angolan professor Jonuel Gonçalves, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, in the latest issue of Africa 21, entitled “Negroes and Mestizos in Latin America Today.”

In his article, Gonçalves points out that Latin America “is the region of the world with the highest degree of ‘mestizaje’ (mixed ancestry), from both the biological and cultural points of view, because it was the destination of the greatest flow of slaves in history, and the way in which slavery was abolished left deep marks that still endure.”

“There was no consistent programme in Latin America to help former slaves integrate into society, which condemned them to poverty and illiteracy that have lasted, to a greater or lesser degree, through the successive generations,” Gonçalves says.

One of the characteristics of Latin American social structures that demonstrate this “is the extremely low representation of descendants of slaves, blacks or mestizos in decision-making,” the article says.

“Brazil is one of the most striking examples, in spite of having the second largest population in the world of blacks and Afro-descendants, who make up at least 45 percent of its population of 188 million. It is surpassed only by Nigeria,” with 131 million people, Gonçalves says.

“Cuba, for three centuries another major destination for the slave trade, has similar characteristics,” because, in spite of the 1959 revolution and the country’s socialist system of government, “the number of black people in the governing bodies remains very small,” he says.

Nevertheless, Matos acknowledges that Africans themselves are not entirely free from blame, because since independence they have not managed to turn their countries into “good places to live, beginning with our own citizens, especially the young.”

For example, he pointed out that former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan (1997-2006), of Ghana, had spoken of the problems of destructive self-racism and of “our tolerance” of African tyrants.

Matos quoted Angolan intellectual Arlindo Barbeitos, who has frequently deplored the tendency for Africa to reproduce “the same ideas and models imposed by the colonial powers, such as racism, but in reverse.”

Matos agreed with the late Agostinho Neto, the first leader of the insurrection against Portugal in Angola, and the country’s first president (1975-1979), who said, “Today Africa is like a motionless body, and every carrion vulture is anxious to tear out a piece of that body.” Africa cannot carry on this way, he said.