The BBC ran two stories over the last few days that offer an interesting juxtaposition on the source of problems that African nations face.
Today it is running a story about complaints that Great Britain’s health care system is stealing nurses from Kenya. Kenya and other African nations have longstanding complaints that their most experienced nurses leave the continent to work in Western countries where they can receive higher pay.
The BBC quote Evelyn Mutio, who heads up a Kenyan nurses union as complaining that,
The UK is poaching our nurses though agents. The agents are here and they are opening up offices. They say ‘If you want to get a job in Britain, come here’.
So the obvious question is why don’t they simply pay nurses more money in Kenya, and then they wouldn’t all run off to Great Britain. Could Kenya be too poor to increase nurses wages? Perhaps, but Kenya isn’t poor enough that it can’t pay tens of thousands of non-existent government workers,
Kenya is considering a sweep of its civil service to track down “ghost workers”, imaginary employees created on the payroll by corrupt workers to pad their pay packets.
The government was worried that despite a 10% reduction in headcount under the previous government, the wage bill had in fact swelled by 2%, Finance Minister David Mwiraria told Parliament.
Cleaning out these “ghost workers” would, along with tightened tax collection controls, help bring the deficit down from a predicted 62bn shillings to about 47bn shillings (£390m; $621m) for the year to June 2004, he said.
It’s hardly Great Britain’s fault that Kenya would prefer to pay non-existent people to not work than it would on increasing wages and benefits for nurses.
The exodus of the best and brightest out of Africa is just one symptom of the disease of corruption and graft that has taken root in too many African states. If they would tackle corruption with the same zeal that they complain about the brain drain, African states might actually make some progress.
Sources:
UK still poaching African nurses. The BBC, July 21, 2003.
Kenya seeks ‘ghosts’ to ease budget woes. The BBC, July 18, 2003.