‘Global Britain’ has benefits for the African continent in the sphere of education. As an alternative to the EU’s Erasmus Plus scheme, for example, the UK is set to roll out a global student exchange programme which benefits students outside the European Union. In a report for King’s College London, a former UK universities minister Jo Johnson argued that ‘There is little reason to ignore the experiences and knowledge these countries offer to UK students in an exclusive relationship with its closer European neighbours.’ Not only does the novel exchange programme mean well for Britain in the sphere of higher education in terms of knowledge exchange and cultural influence, but students in African higher education institutions could enormously benefit from the knowledge and technical skills that such an exchange would provide and which hitherto they had no access to, as the Erasmus programme was mostly limited to European institutions for the specific purpose of creating a pan-European identity alien to the African student.
Of course, a pan-European identity is not necessarily a bad thing, but it seemingly excludes many from non-EU countries in the Global South – and what we do indeed need in the world are global exchange programmes that enable the development of a global identity amongst denizens of different polities rather than only a regional identity. The insistence on the building of regions and the construction of regional identities is almost always exclusionary and can preclude the intercultural dialogue and understanding that we need to curb the racism, brutalism, nativism within and beyond Europe.
In addition, Brexit has meant that the stringent policies instituted by Theresa May’s government – which contributed to the decline of international student enrolment in British universities – have been overturned. There is now a conscientious effort to ensure that international students can stay and work in the UK after their studies, regardless of where they come from. Although this has been criticised by Europhiles who have long benefited from preferential treatment in immigration and work requirements (including the lower home tuition fees they pay due to their passports and EU citizenship), these criticisms seem to suggest that the beneficiaries of these unequal treatments want to sustain the inequitable system.
