Burma’s Wasted Intellectual Potential

By SAI SOE WIN LATT

As Burma’s economy continues to shrink year by year, the domestic labor market cannot keep pace with the country’s growing population or its expanding number of university graduates. As a result, thousands of graduates leave the country every year for the sake of their future.

The loss of an educated labor force to foreign countries is not a problem unique to Burma. The “brain drain” phenomenon is common one in most underdeveloped countries.

After a recent conversation with several old high school friends who are now working in Singapore, however, I realized that Burma’s youthful university graduates are finding it especially difficult to find a place to use their skills. Both the regime that rules at home and the exile groups that operate abroad have failed to fully appreciate their value.

Many of my friends living both inside Burma and overseas seem to have lost their childhood dreams because of the country’s failing education system. I recall that many of them were among the top 40-45 students out 4-500 students for each grade—very promising young people who had the potential to succeed in high-status professions such as medicine or engineering.

But over past ten years since we all graduated from high school, their aspirations have been beset by a host of problems. The frequent closure of universities in the late nineties was one obstacle; the government’s decision to move campuses to remote, out-of-the-way locations was another. The emergence of information technology drew some of them away from their earlier aspirations of becoming doctors or engineers. Some got Bachelor’s degrees and either married and settled down in Burma or moved overseas to join the migrant workforce.

There are some who went abroad soon after graduating from high school to study in foreign universities. But even these people ended up studying subjects that would enable them to make a living as typical immigrants, instead of pursuing their original dreams.

In Singapore, many Burmese immigrants are university graduates and skilled laborers. They are engineers, computer technicians and managerial staff—the sort of people that commercial and industrial economies are after. But all seven of the people I spoke to complained about exploitation by Singaporean employers who refused to give them the official minimum wage and forced them to work overtime for little or no extra pay. They also said that they were experiencing financial and social distress and even occasional racism in the workplace.

Working in such diverse fields as computer science, engineering, hotel management and accounting, these people could have made an important contribution to the Burmese economy if the opportunities had been there for them. They would have been leaders, decision-makers, bureaucrats, high-end professionals, technicians and university faculty, rather than immigrants in countries that exploit their skills and labor for cheaper wages.

But the Burmese regime is not alone in undervaluing the skills of these young people; pro-democracy groups have also failed to give them the opportunities they need to help them improve both their own and their country’s prospects.

Burma’s pro-democracy groups seem to be reluctant to recruit younger people. Instead of making scholarships available to them—and creating a future talent pool for their organizations—most democracy groups have shown little interest in cultivating the skills of the young. Some groups have had scholarship programs, but they fell far short of the hopes of young people who were prepared to make a commitment to the democracy movement. When opportunities for further study opened up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were quickly claimed by older members of the leading organizations.

These groups have failed not only to create new opportunities for study, they have also done little or nothing to make use of the skills of hundreds of students from opposition backgrounds or from border areas who have received an education in Asian or Western countries (not to mention those who came out of Burma directly).

Meanwhile, the Burmese government is recruiting technicians and administrators to support its military bureaucracy by sending them off to colleges and universities in Russia, Singapore and some other countries. But the exile groups are failing to offer any opportunities to those who have taken the initiative in seeking a university education either on very limited scholarship money or by financing themselves.

There have been instances of university graduates being recruited as “assistants” by some exiled organizations. Usually, however, they end up working as general office staff, while their upgraded skills and knowledge go unused. “Assisting” the aging leaders of such organizations seems to be the highest available positions for well-educated young people.

Countries like Canada, the US and other developed nations, on the other hand, are quick to take advantage of the skills of educated people to maintain their superior position in the global order. For example, the Canadian immigration system, which is based on a point system, attracts thousands of educated and skilled people each year by offering permanent residency and citizenship.

Some Burmese graduates in these countries have already been recruited as policy advisors, researchers and junior officers by host governments and government-funded institutions. Some have entered the private sector as technicians as well.

These countries can’t be faulted for recruiting talented young Burmese; they are simply making use of the human resources that are available to them. If Burma wants to retain its best and brightest, both the government and opposition groups need to do more to recognize the need for new minds with fresh ideas.

Sai Soe Win Latt is a Ph.D. student of geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.