MUGA: Kenya's complicated relationship with immigration

About a decade ago, I gave a lecture on foreign aid and its many failures and relatively few successes, at a university in Helsinki, Finland.

One of the points I made was that if American aid programmes implemented through USAID were sometimes abject failures, it was also true that when they succeeded, they sometimes did so on a transformational scale.

My first example of a major USAID success story was the American-funded free antiretroviral drugs programme, Pepfar, which quite literally saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans (and millions around the world) by bringing an end to the days when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence.

My second example, which was not very well known, was of the 1960s American “student airlift” programme that took thousands of Kenyans to the US for tertiary studies in American colleges. Although the heroes of this epic saga are well known – Tom Mboya, Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano, Dr Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy – what is not widely known is that those initial scholarships were just the first few such “airlifts” and that it was only when USAID took over the funding and management of this programme that the opportunities came forth in their thousands.

The significance of this programme was that it effectively helped to create a professional class of Kenyan technocrats within just a few years, so that the country was not destabilised by the continuing departure of the British civil servants who had up to the early years of independence, continued to run the country.

And the proof that this was an indispensable requirement for Kenya’s political stability, is revealed in what happened in the country that is now DR Congo, where the Belgian civil service left the country ‘en masse’ within just months of independence.

DR Congo, a country of immense mineral wealth, should by now have been the economic fulcrum of the entire sub-Saharan region. Instead, it has been plagued by secessionist movements, tyranny, regional civil wars and all other kinds of chaos.

In any case, after my lecture I was approached by a few members of the audience who had an interesting question to ask me: they all knew that President Barack Obama had a Kenyan father who abandoned his American wife and son and returned to Kenya. And that is what fascinated them: why did Barack Obama Senior return to Kenya instead of remaining in the US? For what they knew from the media was of Africans taking insane risks to end up in the “developed world” in search of economic opportunity.

I am not sure that I really convinced them with my explanation that no opportunities available in Western Europe or North America could in any way compare with the opportunities that were available in the newly independent African states back then.

But I did my best to explain that most African colonies in that era had a system not so different from that made infamous by apartheid in South Africa. And that the jobs which required college education had for many years been reserved for whites (whether citizens or expatriates) and came with the kind of benefits which expatriates still enjoy even to this day, if not more.

But with independence, educated Africans had very easy access to those enviable jobs, which had initially been structured very specifically to lure white technocrats from European capitals to go out and work in the colonies.

Given this context, why would a recently minted Kenyan graduate from some obscure American university struggle to find work in the US, when upon arriving back home he would quickly replace a white senior civil servant and be allocated an official car and driver; a large fully furnished house; and many other benefits previously reserved for the white elite?

My point was that the current illegal African migration to Europe was really just a factor of the mismatch between African economic growth rates (tragically inadequate) and African population growth rates (very rapid).

And that as and when a balance between these two factors was struck, the problem would effectively disappear as most Africans actually preferred to live in their own countries, among their own people.

More on this next week.