Brain Drain or Brain Waste: On Leaving and Returning
The post reflects on six Burundian robotics students who disappeared in the US during a competition, using their choice as a lens to examine the continent's talent migration. The writer argues that while leaving Africa to develop one's potential may be understandable, the deeper obligation is to eventually return and apply that knowledge at home.
On July 20, six kids from Burundi aged 16-18 were reported missing in the United States. The six students were in the US to represent their county in the FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition held in Washington D.C.
According to the Washington Post, “How and why the students or others orchestrated what appears to authorities a well-planned but very secret bid for possible asylum in Canada and the U.S. remains a mystery. Neither the students nor their relatives could be reached, and the organizer of the competition and a representative of the Burundi Embassy called their disappearance a surprise.”
I guess we can all sympathize with Donald Trump for a moment here.
That six kids from Burundi, a country that has been roiled by civil war and reports of human rights abuses orchestrate their disappearance in the US should not be a mystery in the world we now live in. That the Burundi Embassy calls their disappearance a surprise, now, that is the mystery.
It is obvious that the kids received some help and coaching from a few family members or family friends to be able to do what they did. Two of the kids are already reported to be in Canada and four remain in the US, their exact locations still unknown.
You are not going to hear this make the headlines because America does not care about sending such bright minds back to Burundi. If it was some scammer, we would know more by now.
Any-ha!
If you dig deep into the employee database of many of the big engineering companies in the US, you will find that most of their engineers, the ones doing the hard and dirty work, are foreigners from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. We are talking about people who have nothing to run back to in their countries of origin, therefore ready to persevere through any distasteful working conditions in the U.S just to have something for their families.
It is hard for me to sit here and tell people how to live their lives. Everybody has different challenges and it is totally understandable with what I see in Cameroon that someone will resort to leaving the continent to go in search of a better life somewhere. I get the opportunity to make the same decision like those kids and I have more coaches than the entire Cameroonian football league but I chose to stay and fight the battle from the front. Some people think I am not man enough to face my challenges in life as they believe facing the challenge of being African is by leaving Africa.
I am happy that those kids even made it to the competition and I am happy that they are finally in a place where they can attend better schools and actually put their gifs to use. If those kids go back to Burundi, their talents will most likely be disregarded and put to waste. At least in America, they will have the joy of putting their minds to work albeit for somebody other than their own people.
I will advocate for brain drain over brain waste everyday of my life. What is important though is that we understand the nature of our challenges and make the right decisions or as I like to put it always, we have to tell the right stories.
Those kids need to be made to understand why they are the subject of this post right now and also made to understand that there are many others like them that will not even have the opportunity to escape to a place where they can better themselves. That that have been blessed with such an opportunity is so that they can one day come back home and make the difference for their own people, in the land that is rightfully theirs.
We can all escape to other countries but everyday of our lives, there will be something hunting us, reminding us we are just strangers in another mans house. We will be given the liberty to move around and do things but we will never taste the freedom of walking around naked in your bedroom.
Written in 2017, at a moment of intensifying emigration from sub-Saharan Africa and mounting anxiety in African thought leadership about the sustainability of talent loss. The post speaks to a personal and philosophical tension many educated Africans face: the pull of opportunity abroad against a sense of duty to one's place of origin.
The piece captures a nuanced position that resists both the romance of diaspora and the guilt of those who stay—acknowledging that brain drain may be preferable to the waste of talent in contexts that cannot use it, while insisting on the moral weight of eventual return. It remains urgent because the framing—not whether people leave, but why and to what end—continues to shape how African societies think about migration and responsibility.