By Osy Agbo
Over the years ,India has earned its place as a favored destination for medical tourism from all over the world. Her clientele are drawn from every country on the planet including the developed nations of Western Europe and North America. For patients coming from developed nations, it offers a cheaper alternative to a rising cost of healthcare. For the rest of the world,it’s sometimes the only available access to a life-saving treatment.
Over the years, medical tourism has proven to be a huge foreign exchange earner to this emerging market in Southeast Asia. Within the past decade, there has been an exponential rise in need for the services especially from Africa.
In Nigeria, it has become all too common that you’d think India is just another state with many airline now offering direct round trip flights. Even the visa process is now streamlined to run efficiently in both Indian consulates located in the heart of Lagos and Abuja. Whereas this exchange has been mutually beneficial in many cases, we have also heard horrible stories of fake promises that failed to deliver and folks swindled of their hard earned money.
Permit me to please add another phrase to your growing lexicon, namely; Educational tourism. For their is no better way to describe the latest fad of shipping young Nigerians off to India to study following dubious promises and on a phoney scholarship.
Am inspired to write this piece based on the experiences of two individuals within the last two months, totally oblivious of each other’s plight but shared the same sad experiences. They both got accepted to two different schools in India only to arrive and got the shocker of their lives.
The beautiful school designed in bricks shown in the introductory bronchure was far from built and that the course promised to them weren’t even available. They both were offered to study a different major which they never signed up for as an alternative. Needless to say both were devastated.
Few years ago, the All India Council for Technical Education, a body charged with regulating educational institution started giving out licences at low cost and with little consideration to anyone willing to set up institutes for research and education in India. With that, businessmen and all kinds of people with money started to build colleges and universities geared specifically towards making profit. They advertise offering wide variety of courses ranging from biotechnology to medicine.
They employ the services of very experienced recruitment agents who travelled to countries and promise “a premium international experience” in India. These are the folks that literarily invaded Nigeria, setting up seminars and workshops. They cash in on people’s ignorance, deplete the little that is left of our foreign reserve and return half baked and poorly equipped graduates to our workforce. In some cases such as my friend’s daughter, she was promised some kind of scholarship that turned out to be phoney.
But things wouldn’t have been that bad if that was all the story. This students from mostly African countries face untold hardship with extremely stressful living conditions and unprecedented discrimination.
There was the story of Wandoh Timothy published in the Economics Times of India.
In 2014. Tim, a Chad national, who had lived in Bengaluru for eight years, was dropping off his daughter when he cautioned a seemingly drunk man to be careful to avoid hurting himself.
The man took offense and started raining abuse on him and before he knew it other locals soon joined in beating him to stupor and left him for dead . He was lucky to have miraculously survived.
“They think all Africans are bad, that they steal,” says Timothy.
In another bizarre twist, an Indian teenager had gone missing in the neighbourhood where a young Nigerian girl, Amina and other members of a small African community who live and study in Greater Noida’s famous education hub resided. In no time ,rumour got around that Nigerian students were cannibals and may have eaten up the boy. Protestors took to the street demanding that all Africans leave the area.
In the end, a Kenyan woman was dragged out of her cab by locals and was fatally attacked. These are just but two examples but report showed instances like those abound.
Their has to be something about Nigeria that makes us develop an insatiable taste for anything foreign and at same time treat everything Nigerian as less desirable. It doesn’t even matter if such a foreign country is the impoverished nation of Burundi. Am pretty sure that if you offer some kind of Visa to Afghanistan a long queue would build up in no time with young Nigerians ready to dispense with their life savings to get a chance. Somehow we have come to believe that just about anywhere offers more opportunities than our home country. We have this lofty dream about making it big there and coming back with loads of cash.
Fact is, hardly is that the case. Upon getting there we will now confront a different set of realities and are left with no other choice than to submit to a life of drug peddling and a host of other societal vices in a foreign land with disastrous consequences. You know the drill!
We have seen the all too familiar pictures of black faces with bodies fried to crisp as they embark on the dare-devil Odyssey across the Sahara desert. Every now and then, major news outlets across the world flash stories about a rickety ship fully parked with African immigrants racing to smuggle their way across Europe through North Africa.
More than half get wasted away and end up a free lunch to the sharks. Very recently, we also learnt of a few that couldn’t make it that we’re exploited for slave labour in Libya.
Now the question; When shall we Africans start to believe in ourselves and begin the process of developing our own country. When shall we stop all this mad rush to a foreign land believing that everywhere is better than home.
*Osmund Agbo, MD, FCCP writes from Houston, Texas