AmanaOnline

Everything about Africa seems to be fed to us from a hall. A hotel conference room, a long table, name tags neatly placed in front of participants, branded folders, notepads and pencils, bottled water and a microphone passed from one speaker to another. Somewhere at the back of the room, civil servants are often quietly calculating the allowances attached to their attendance rather than thinking about what they are supposed to take away from the event.

Then comes the familiar vocabulary: sensitization, capacity building, stakeholder engagement, technical assistance, knowledge sharing, policy dialogue, strategic framework, roadmap, template and implementation guidelines. We sit, we listen, we nod, we take notes and we are lectured on how to develop our countries. Someone arrives from abroad to explain governance to us; another comes to teach us economic reform; another comes to sensitise us about agriculture, digital transformation, climate change, education, healthcare or infrastructure.

Consultants produce reports, development agencies produce frameworks, international organisations produce recommendations and workshops produce communiqués. After several days, everyone goes home. The folders are put away, the photographs are circulated, the attendance sheets are filed, the reports are written, the allowances are paid, and Africa remains largely where it was.

This is not an argument against knowledge, cooperation or learning. No serious nation believes it has nothing to learn from others. Nations learn from one another, borrow ideas, adapt technologies, study successful models and cooperate where their interests coincide. The question is why Africa so often appears to be the permanent student. Why are we almost always the ones sitting on the other side of the table, being told what to do, how to think, what framework to adopt and what template to implement? When do we become the people calling the meeting? When do we arrive with our own agenda, our own questions, our own priorities and our own terms of engagement? Why do we so often behave as though someone else must first define the problem before we can begin discussing the solution?

There is something profoundly uncomfortable about a continent blessed with enormous natural resources, a huge youthful population, extraordinary cultural diversity and immense human talent perpetually attending seminars on how to unlock its potential. At some point, we have to stop asking why nobody has come to develop Africa and start asking a much harder question: why have we allowed so many others to define what development should mean for us? The world does not sit around waiting for Africa to tell it what it wants before pursuing its own interests.

Countries and corporations everywhere identify opportunities, calculate advantages, protect their interests and negotiate from positions of strength. They know what they have, what they need, what they can offer and what they are unwilling to surrender. They do not approach every international engagement as pupils waiting for instructions from the teacher. Yet Africa repeatedly enters the room as though somebody else must first explain our problems to us before we can begin solving them.

That is where the problem becomes bigger than development assistance. It becomes a question of power and agency. For decades, Africa has been encouraged to think about development largely through the language and frameworks created elsewhere. We prepare strategic plans, development blueprints and policy frameworks, often with external consultants sitting beside us to explain how our own countries should be organised. We attend workshops to learn how to build institutions that other countries built through their own historical struggles.

We are told how to manage our resources, how to reform our economies and how to structure our societies, while the same global system continues to compete aggressively for access to our minerals, energy, agricultural land, markets and human capital. There is an uncomfortable contradiction in this arrangement. The same Africa that is continually told that it lacks capacity possesses some of the world’s most sought-after resources. The same continent that is repeatedly told that it needs foreign expertise is exporting engineers, doctors, scientists, academics, entrepreneurs and technology professionals to countries that are happy to benefit from the investment Africa made in educating them.

We have the resources, but somebody else frequently determines their value. We have the markets, but others often control the technology and capital required to exploit them. We have the minerals needed for the industries of the future, yet too often our role remains that of the supplier of raw materials rather than the manufacturer of finished products. Our agricultural commodities leave our shores cheaply and return as processed products at considerably higher prices.

Our young people leave in search of opportunities that should, ideally, exist in the countries that educated them. We possess enormous potential but continue to occupy a position in the global economy that too often leaves the greatest value elsewhere. And after all this, we return to another conference room to discuss capacity building. Perhaps Africa’s greatest deficit is not capacity. Perhaps it is confidence in our own capacity and the political will to use it.

We need to move from being participants in other people’s development agendas to authors of our own. That does not mean shutting the world out. Quite the opposite. It means engaging the world from a position of clarity and purpose. There is nothing wrong with foreign investment, technical assistance or international partnerships. What is wrong is entering a partnership without knowing precisely what the national interest requires from that partnership.

A partnership in which one side knows exactly what it wants and the other side is grateful simply to have been invited to the table is not really a partnership. It is a transaction in which the stronger party is usually in a position to write the terms. Africa should therefore stop approaching international engagement merely by asking what the world can do for us and begin asking what the world needs from Africa, what Africa has to offer and what we are prepared to negotiate in return.

Our minerals should not simply leave the ground and return as expensive finished products. Our agricultural commodities should not be exported cheaply while we import processed food at several times the value. Our young people should not remain a reservoir of cheap labour for economies that understood long ago that human capital is itself a strategic resource. We need to negotiate technology transfer, local manufacturing, skills development, intellectual property, infrastructure, employment and value addition as part of the bargain. We need to know the value of what we possess before somebody else tells us what it is worth. Above all, we need institutions capable of defending the national interest even when powerful foreign interests are sitting across the table.

Nigeria: From Victim to Accomplice

And this is where Nigeria deserves particular attention, because Nigeria cannot continue to describe itself simply as a victim of the international system when we are increasingly becoming an accomplice in our own predicament. We cannot blame outsiders for everything when our own leaders willingly negotiate the terms under which our resources, markets and national assets are made available. We cannot complain that foreigners take advantage of Nigeria while our own government makes decisions of enormous financial and strategic consequence without meaningful input from the Nigerian people whose future is being committed.

This is particularly troubling when our President finds it easier to make billion-dollar investment commitments and major economic decisions abroad than to engage Nigerians meaningfully at home about the direction of the country. Decisions affecting the lives of millions are discussed in foreign capitals, announcements are made on international platforms, and Nigerians are frequently expected to accept them after the fact. We are told what has been agreed, what has been promised and what investment is supposedly coming, but the citizens whose country is at the centre of these transactions are often spectators rather than participants. I do not believe that is how a sovereign nation should conduct its affairs.

The issue is not whether the President should travel abroad or meet foreign governments and investors. Of course he should. A Nigerian President must engage the world. The issue is what Nigeria takes into those rooms. Does the President arrive with a clearly articulated national strategy developed through meaningful domestic consultation, or does Nigeria simply arrive with opportunities that others are free to shape according to their own interests?

There is a profound difference between Nigeria seeking investment and Nigeria negotiating from strength. If our leaders go abroad looking for anybody willing to bring money into the country, we have already placed ourselves in a weak negotiating position. But if Nigeria first decides what it wants to build, what resources it is prepared to commit, what technology it requires, what jobs must be created, what value must remain in Nigeria and what conditions must govern foreign participation, then the conversation changes completely. We stop asking somebody to please invest in us and start deciding which investment serves our national interest.

Nigeria should not be a marketplace where whoever arrives with money gets to write the rules. We have seen too much of this mentality already. A foreign investment announcement is celebrated as though the announcement itself were development. A memorandum is presented as though it were a factory. A pledge is treated as though the money has already entered Nigeria. A photograph with foreign executives becomes evidence of economic transformation. Meanwhile, Nigerians continue to ask the same basic questions: Where are the jobs? Where is the electricity? Where is the manufacturing? Where is the technology transfer? Where is the improvement in living standards? Where is the value being retained in Nigeria? We should stop being impressed by the size of the cheque and start examining the size of the Nigerian benefit.

This is why I describe Nigeria increasingly as an accomplice rather than merely a victim. A victim has little control over what happens to it. An accomplice participates. When our own governments willingly accept arrangements that fail to maximise national value, when we negotiate from desperation rather than strategy, when we make major commitments without adequate domestic consultation and when we allow foreign interests to define the terms of our economic engagement, we cannot forever blame somebody else for the outcome. Our greatest problem may not simply be that the world is exploiting Africa. The world has always pursued its interests. Our problem is that African governments too often fail to pursue African interests with the same determination.

We Need to Change the Conversation

Africa therefore needs a fundamental change in posture. We should not stop listening to the world; we should stop listening as though we have nothing to teach it. We should not reject foreign investment; we should learn to negotiate it. We should not reject development assistance; we should ensure that assistance builds capacity rather than permanent dependence. We should not reject international institutions; we should enter them with our own priorities rather than waiting for somebody else to tell us what Africa’s priorities should be. Africa needs to develop the confidence to say: This is what we want. This is what we have. This is what we need. This is what we are prepared to offer. And these are the conditions under which we will partner with you.

That is how serious nations conduct themselves. If Africa possesses the minerals required for the technologies of tomorrow, then Africa should be asking how much processing and manufacturing can happen here. If Africa has the agricultural land to feed hundreds of millions of people, then Africa should be asking why so much food must still be imported. If Africa has millions of young people capable of becoming engineers, programmers, scientists and entrepreneurs, then Africa should be asking why its most talented people must leave home to find the laboratories, companies and opportunities that should exist here.

The continent should be moving deliberately from the export of raw materials to the creation of value, from dependence on imported solutions to the development of African solutions, and from simply participating in the global economy to having a meaningful influence over the terms on which it participates.

We must also stop measuring progress by how many foreign dignitaries attend our conferences and start measuring it by what changes in the lives of ordinary Africans. A development workshop is not development. A strategic framework is not development. A communiqué is not development. A memorandum is not development. A foreign investment pledge is not development. Development is when the factory is built, when the young person gets the job, when electricity becomes reliable, when the farmer earns more, when the hospital works, when the child receives a quality education and when a country begins to produce more of what it consumes and consume more of what it produces. We have spent too much time discussing development and not enough time doing it.

Perhaps it is time to retire some of the language that has become the permanent vocabulary of African underdevelopment. Perhaps we have had enough of being sensitised. Perhaps we have attended enough capacity-building workshops. Perhaps we have produced enough roadmaps. Africa does not need another consultant to tell us that our youth need jobs, our industries need power, our farmers need markets and our governments need accountability. We know these things. What we need is the political courage to act on what we already know.

Africa also needs to reclaim its intellectual space. We need African universities producing ideas that influence the world, African companies developing technologies that compete globally, African scientists solving African problems without waiting for foreign validation, and African governments employing experts who understand both the world and the interests of their own countries. We need to stop outsourcing our imagination along with our infrastructure, our technology and our capital. There is nothing inherently wrong with learning from other countries, but there is something deeply wrong with believing that every serious solution must first come with an international stamp of approval.

We should welcome the world into Africa, but we must not surrender Africa to the world. There is a difference between cooperation and dependence, between partnership and subordination, between learning and being permanently instructed. We can cooperate without becoming subordinate. We can learn without becoming dependent. We can receive investment without surrendering sovereignty. We can accept expertise without assuming that wisdom always arrives from somewhere else. Most importantly, we can engage the world without allowing the world to define us.

The next generation of African conferences should therefore look very different. Instead of another hall where Africans sit in rows while somebody from somewhere else explains Africa to them, let us have rooms where African leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, academics and citizens have already decided what they want to build and are inviting the rest of the world to participate on terms that advance African interests. Let us put our resources, our markets, our talent and our ambitions on the table and say clearly what Africa needs, what Africa can offer, what Africa will accept and what Africa will no longer accept.

Africa does not need to stop listening. It needs to start speaking with its own voice and, more importantly, acting on what it says. After decades of being told how we should develop, perhaps it is finally time for us to decide how we intend to do it. We cannot remain permanently seated in the classroom while others outside the room decide what our future should look like. At some point, the student must become an equal participant in the conversation, bring his own ideas to the table and have the confidence to challenge the teacher when the lesson no longer serves his interests.

Africa has spent enough time being taught. It is time for Africa to begin defining the lesson.

Hf Dauda MoiSoro ~ October 8, 2026