What Africa Needs From Its Educated Class

During one of the lockdown months, with nowhere to be and nothing scheduled, I found myself reading about war strategy, the kind of material that has nothing obviously to do with Ghana or Africa or anything I was working on. One idea from it stuck and would not let go: strengthen what already works rather than constantly trying to fix what does not.

I turned that idea on myself first, almost by accident. I had spent years assuming my actual strength, the long form thinking I did naturally, the writing I kept doing on my WhatsApp status that disappeared after twenty four hours anyway, the essays I genuinely enjoyed completing for school assignments, did not really count as a talent. Where I grew up, talent had a fairly narrow definition. It lived in your body. Singing, dancing, football, performance you could point at and applaud immediately. If you could not do one of those things, you went looking for the version you could do and kept trying to force it into that shape.

I had been doing that for years, trying to be talented in a register that was never actually mine, while the thing I was already good at sat there, unclaimed, because it did not look like talent the way I had been taught to recognise it.

I think a version of this happens at the level of the whole continent, not just individuals. We have an enormous number of educated people, trained, credentialed, genuinely capable. A large share of them spend that capability narrating the continent's problems from a distance, in the diaspora, in think pieces, in conference panels, in detailed plans for the help they will provide once they have left. That is not nothing. Remittances and diaspora networks are real and valuable. But narrating a problem well and building a solution to it are different skills, and I think we have rewarded the first one more visibly than the second for a long time.

Patrick Awuah is the example I keep returning to, not because his story is unusual but because it is so plainly available to copy. He had a stable, well paid career at Microsoft. He left it to open a university in Ghana with thirty students in a rented house, no guarantee it would work, on the simple premise that not trying meant failing by default anyway. Ashesi exists now, with actual graduates, because he treated his own education as material to build with rather than as a credential to deploy somewhere more convenient.

What I think Africa actually needs from its educated class is not more analysis. We are not short on sharp diagnoses of what is wrong. What is rarer, and more valuable, is the willingness to take a credential earned partly through scholarship, partly through sacrifice from people back home, and spend it building something that did not exist before, in the actual conditions that exist here, rather than exporting the credential to a place where the conditions are already easier.

I do not think every educated person owes the country that. People get to decide what they owe themselves. But for the ones asking what they could actually contribute, I think the honest answer starts with the same reframe that changed something in me. Stop trying to be talented in the register everyone already applauds. Look at what you are actually good at, and what is actually in front of you to build with, and start there.