Africa's new class of power players

To be sure, study in the West does not automatically bestow perspective, integrity, or a penchant for democratic principles. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, for example, has six degrees from prestigious Western universities. Few today would consider Mr. Mugabe at the vanguard of democratic reforms.

Some say study overseas can be counterproductive, imbuing ideals that do not suit the real world back home. But many of those interviewed say that overseas exposure made them "global citizens," giving them a perspective that they wouldn't have been able to get without leaving Africa for a time.

Kenyatta was sheltered growing up, he admits today with a lopsided grin. The people around him did not encourage any real challenge to the system.

"Things were done one way, and that was the only way," he shrugs, resisting a cigarette - he is trying to quit - and smoothing down his smart gray suit. He owns traditional African garb - a colobus monkey skin and hat, and a fly whisk, for example - but they come out only on special occasions. He prefers his designer clothes.

Kenyatta certainly benefited from Kenya's corruption. But unlike many other sons and daughters of privilege across the continent, he claims to want to fix what has gone wrong. He came back "not exactly to make amends," he says, fumbling as he tries to formulate carefully the delicate sentence, "but, well, I began seeing there were a lot of things not necessarily right with the order of things in Kenya."

If you are an African, says Darkoh in Botswana, and you leave Africa and come back, people more often than not regard you with suspicion.

"They think you have tried too hard to Westernize," he says. "They ask: 'Are you trying to be white?'" New ideas and dynamic people are not welcomed with open arms, he says.

So governments can become filled with the also-rans. "A crisis like HIV/AIDS comes along and everyone looks to the government to address it - but they can't handle it," he complains. "Most of the systemic institutional inadequacies we are currently experiencing with HIV/AIDS existed long before the disease came knocking on our door. HIV/AIDS did not create these systemic deficits - it has simply exacerbated them."

The numbers bear out Darkoh's concerns. According to statistics from the International Organization for Migration, more African scientists and engineers work in the US than in all of Africa. A few years ago, Zambia had 1,600 doctors; now only 400 practice there. More than 21,000 doctors from Nigeria are working in the US. Sixty percent of Ghana's doctors left during the 1980s, placing the healthcare system in critical condition. An estimated 20 percent of skilled South Africans have left the country in the past 10 years, and in Zimbabwe the professional workforce has shrunk by two-thirds in just five years.

In order to replace those who have left the continent for greener pastures, Africa spends an estimated $4 billion annually on recruiting some 100,000 skilled expatriates.

The solution, says Darkoh, is for African governments to invest in getting the right people. "Major corporations do not get the results they do by hiring weak talent," he explains. "The right people in the right place at the right time will deliver the right results." It is time for donors and recipient countries to insist on results and institute accountability frameworks, he says. "In the 1980s, development aid was based on cold war needs, but today, it's about accountability. That, coupled with African leaders realizing that they themselves have to be more responsible ... those are already improvements," he says.

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