[OPINION] When Training Children Abroad Becomes A Huge Mistake, By Anayo M. Nwosu

Oghom and I had one thing in common. We brushed our teeth daily with poverty while growing up. Oghom’s parents were from a neighboring town and had lived in Nnewi since Nigeria’s Independence in 1960.

Being the children dubbed “Aghaebie” meaning “those children born immediately after the war”, we grew up in lack as our parents tried to adapt to post Biafra-Nigeria Civil War era even though we were luckier than those other children that saw the war many of which died of kwashiorkor.

Our early childhood was very unique and interesting.

It was easy for children in the late seventies to pass through primary and secondary schools courtesy of Obasanjo military government’s free Universal Basic Education programme for primary schools. The old Anambra State also offered free education in the secondary schools.

Only parents’ teachers association(PTA) fees were charged in schools then. Even as at that, it was a paltry sum.

Oghom and I had no difficulty raising the PTA fees and money for uniforms because we engaged in sundry menial jobs like cultivating farmland for people and plucking palm nuts from palm trees for a fee. It was not a big deal.

While Oghom passed through Okongwu Memorial Grammar School, I attended Nnewi High School. Both of us  passed our school certificate exams at a sitting with good grades. We became instant stars and could toast any girl in the community. We nursed ambitions of furthering our education and making our marks in the sands of time.

I was happy when Oghom secured scholarship to read Engineering in the USA. He promised to return to Nigeria after his education. He left and remained in the USA many years after graduation.

Oghom has been in America since 1988. He married an American, had his kids, bought a house and helps to grow the economy of the USA. He had only returned home twice. The first was to bury his father and two years later to bury his mum. Ever since then, he has remained in America even though he ensured that his children answer Igbo names.

On my last vacation in the USA, I visited my friend at his Baltimore home and was convinced that he would have achieved more if he had returned to Nigeria after few years after graduation. He did not know that the money is in Nigeria.

America has deprived Oghom’s town named Akwa Ihedi in Nnewi South Local Government of Anambra of the benefit of one of its most brilliant persons I have ever known.

Oghom’s hometown needs human capital to develop their community and to make it great but their illustrious son is in America contributing to the greatness of a foreign country.

For how long shall our communities be losing our best to foreign lands in the name of reaching or fulfilling our great potentials? How can we ensure that our sons and daughters would return home after acquiring educational and developmental skills and use their acquired knowledge to improve our towns?

Any Igbo parent planning to send the children to school abroad should have a strategy to get the children back to improve our home land. It is a curse for us to export our children to live and die abroad.

My job has exposed me to relationships with wealthy people that exported their children abroad to study and who now grieve over their children’s refusal to even return to take over the management of their conglomerates. And the kids are not even doing any better abroad. They just don’t want stress!

I have been compiling notes on how well the children of wealthy men from Nnewi sent their children abroad are doing as compared with those who returned home or didn’t go abroad at all. The initial results are quite damming.

Economic emigration is understandable but not that  in which comfortable parents don’t have post-education strategy for the children they ship abroad. In some cases, it is a status symbolic act gone so sour.

No community would develop as long as their best heads live outside their shores and don’t get involved in the progress planning of their community. If the good heads leave and don’t return, the bad ones remaining would continue to give the community a bad name.

Imagine what Africa would have been if Herbert Macaulay, Zik, Akwaeke Nwafor-Orizu and Obafemi Awolowo didn’t return from abroad after education. They would have sought employment and remained abroad.

That’s why ndi Nnewi are different. We come back home. We know that as Nnewi people, we strive and must continue to maintain the status of the great town we inherited from our ingenious ancestors. Even an when an Nnewi citizen dies abroad, the corpse must be returned home for burial.

Every Nnewi child born of his real father knows and feels the weight of the responsibility of his nativity. He knows that his greatness lies in how well he has contributed to the upliftment of his town just as Dr. Ifediaso Innocent Chukwuma. He has not only done well for Nnewi but for Igbo race.