No place like home for African returnees

African immigrant Ibrahima Gueye has it all: A top executive job with a future. A two-story, four-bath deluxe home. Servants cook his food, clean his house and wash his clothes. A live-in nanny takes care of his children.

But not in Europe or the United States – in Africa.

Like a large number of African expatriate returnees, the 38-year-old financial analyst has given up his lucrative job in Europe, deciding West isn’t necessarily best.

“People just don’t realise that though you make a lot of money living in the West, you don’t even enjoy all that cash,” Gueye said, recalling how he spent most of his free weekend time in France – where he lived for 14 years – working around the house and grocery shopping.

Hundreds of thousands of educated Africans have left their home continent to escape ubiquitous poverty and high unemployment, and millions more yearn to.

But some are also moving in the opposite direction – attracted by lower costs of living, the desire to be close to family, and the chance to take on more senior positions than they’d likely get abroad.

As head of the finance department of an oil and gas refinery company in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, Gueye makes a salary equivalent to what he made in Paris as a senior accountant – with benefits.

“Basically, I have my life back,” said Gueye, dressed in an immaculate suit, barking orders over the phone in his air-conditioned office.

“Now, I can spend the weekend at the beach with my family,” he said. “Cooking is definitely a thing of the past.”

According to the International Organisation for Migration, 250,000 African professionals work in Europe and North America alone. UNESCO says at least 30,000 Africans abroad hold doctorates.

The exodus is part of a worldwide phenomenon known as ”brain drain” that’s seen trained workers flee poor countries en masse for wealthier ones – leaving home countries with deficits of doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

Statistics on the number of educated Africans heading back to Africa are hard to come by. In Senegal, no organisation keeps track, but hundreds have returned in recent years, said Pape Madike Diop, head of a job recruitment agency in Senegal.

African nations have tried to woo back expatriate nationals with patriotic calls to help rebuild shattered economies, but it’s a hard sell.

Around 300 million of Africa’s 880 million people live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than 50c a day and without access to clean water, adequate sanitation, health care or a decent education.

In Senegal, a relatively prosperous and peaceful country in war-ravaged West Africa, the unemployment rate is about 48%.

Some Africans overseas recognise the difficulties. Concerned about brain drain, they’re trying to encourage other Africans to return by helping them find jobs back home.

The UK-based non-profit organisation AfricaRecruit, founded in 1999 by a group of expatriates from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Ghana, has helped more than 200 African professionals relocate to the continent, the organisation’s chief executive Lola Banjoko said in London.

On AfricaRecruit’s Web site, skilled Africans abroad can register on a database, search for jobs and consult a list of potential employers in Africa.

Doudou Ka, a Senegalese citizen who used to work in France as a consultant for Deloitte & Touche, said “it was never a question of ’if,’ but finding the right time to return”.

Ka was among 25 foreigners who graduated from France’s prestigious Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees – the national engineering school – along with 105 native French students he said had “a serious cultural advantage over me” in the French job market.

Ka believed that competing with fellow Senegalese on his home turf instead would give him an advantage.

Returning last year, he secured a job as a financial engineer at a bank in Dakar – a senior management post with an internationally competitive salary.

“My ambition had always been to be at the top, not just be a simple engineer,” he said.

An added benefit was more living room. Ka lives in a three-bedroom flat in a quiet residential district of Dakar that costs the same as his tiny one-bedroom apartment in Paris.

After long days in the office, he and his wife now walk into an apartment tidied by a maid who washes, irons and folds their clothes.

Not all returnees have success stories to tell.

Ndiaye, a Senegalese woman who graduated with a communications degree from a university in southern France, returned home two years ago hoping for a good job.

She got one working at a local telecommunications company, but the pay was less than desirable.

“I thought it was a joke when I saw my pay chequepaycheque,” she said. “I even wondered if they had forgotten a zero.”

Ndiaye now wants to return to France, where “they appreciate and value my skills and degree” and where well-paid jobs are much more abundant than in Africa.

Ka said he would never work outside the continent again.

It is “out of the question,” he said. “The future is here in Africa.”