NIGERIA has set up a $5m (£3.07m) diaspora fund out of which it will pay $2,500 (£1,500) to any of its indigenes who returns home from abroad.
Proposed as part of an ambitious African programme to lure diasporans back home, the move is designed to reverse the current brain drain and turn it into a brain gain. At the Association for the Development of Education in Africa meeting in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso earlier this year, Nigeria was one of several countries which promised action on the matter.
Other African countries with large diaspora communities include Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. They all pledged to work on reversing emigration, as did other attendees like Senegal and Kenya.
Professor Kimberly King-Jupiter, the dean of the College of Education at the Albany State University, who has done a lot of work on the subject, said it needs to be taken very seriously. She added that there are two types of diasporans and both of them need to be wooed back home.
"There are those who were born on the continent and left willingly while others were forcibly removed many years ago. Those of us who were forcibly removed from our homes and live in the US,. receive messages about Africa that are not positive, so the challenge of that part of the diaspora is to move beyond the messages about black inferiority in order to reconnect to the continent."
It is not yet clear which ministry will be responsible for dispersing the funds or at what stage returnees will be paid. Officially, the Nigerian community in the UK is put at about 250,000, although unofficial estimates believe the figure may be as high as 2m.
Source:www.nigerianwatch.com
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