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If you’re African, how many times have you heard the line “Africa just needs better leadership”?

My guess is…too many times.

This week, we’re diving into how that statement keeps us focused on the wrong thing.

Let’s dive in.

You've probably heard the line a thousand times. 

It assumes the continent is short on talent. 

But the evidence does not really agree.

Robert Mugabe held seven university degrees, including two earned by correspondence from London while he was in a Rhodesian prison. 

Thabo Mbeki, former South African president, has an economics degree from Sussex. 

Hastings Banda, the first president of Malawi, earned medical degrees in Tennessee and Edinburgh and ran a practice in London before returning to rule Malawi for three decades. 

The first prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, studied at Lincoln and Penn, while Julius Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, held a master's from Edinburgh and translated Shakespeare into Swahili in his spare time.

These were exceptionally credentialed men. Their countries are also case studies in what not to do. 

Mugabe, for example, printed Zimbabwe's currency into oblivion. 

Mbeki's AIDS denialism caused an estimated 330,000 deaths that could’ve been prevented.

Malawi spent three decades under a dictatorship. 

And Tanzania's policy of rural socialism (also called Ujamaa) collapsed agriculture across the country.

The pattern repeats in the next generation. 

The post-1990s technocrats showed up with international careers and Ivy League PhDs. 

And whether on purpose or not, many of them produced policies that read well on paper and broke in implementation, because in Africa…

Politicians in Africa don’t have a big reputation for having great ideas.

Some of them do, though.

But despite their best intentions, their plans often fail. Not by the (de)merits of their ideas, but because they were trying to implement them in Africa.

Let’s have a look at exemplary Africans who had pristine plans, were forced to fail, but went on to global fame.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is one of Africa’s most talented people.

At 21, she graduated from Harvard with a BA in economics. 

Then she went on to get her master’s and PhD from MIT.

She worked at the World Bank for 21 years before returning to Nigeria to serve as finance minister in 2003. 

By 2005, she’d negotiated a deal that wrote off 60% of Nigeria’s debt; roughly $18 billion at the time.

When power changed hands in 2007, she got kicked out. Her second stint happened in 2011, when she was offered her former job as minister.

This time, she had a tougher go.

She championed the fuel subsidy removal in January 2012, which triggered nationwide protests so fierce that it was reversed within ten days. 

The Sovereign Wealth Fund she helped design still struggles to receive consistent contributions from state governments. 

And her mom was kidnapped with demands that she resign from office.

She eventually left and became Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, where her impact is measurably clearer than it ever was in Nigeria.

There’s Okey Enelamah. 

He trained as a medical doctor in Nigeria before going to get a Harvard MBA.

Then he spent 20 years building African Capital Alliance into one of the continent's biggest private equity firms before becoming Nigeria’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment in 2015. 

He helped draft the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan. The plan read well. But in the real world, chaos was unfolding.

His tenure had seen Nigeria go through three recessions, a currency devaluation, and a border closure policy by the president that rendered his free trade policies useless.

He left in 2019 and went back to private equity.

Since then, his firm, Africa Capital Alliance, has grown into Africa’s most successful PE fund 

The story extends past Nigeria. 

Pravin Gordhan, a chartered accountant who fought state capture from inside South Africa's Treasury, was undermined for years and fired by Jacob Zuma in the 2017 midnight cabinet reshuffle. 

Kako Nubukpo was removed as Togolese minister for criticising the CFA franc with “too much honesty”. 

Tidjane Thiam, who held degrees from École Polytechnique and INSEAD and was Côte d'Ivoire's Minister of Planning at 31, fled to McKinsey after the 1999 coup and went on to run Prudential and then Credit Suisse.

There’s no shortage of talented Africans whose talents have yielded sorry results when put to use in public service.

So, one has to ask…

The first reason is that African institutions often choose form over function.

Thanks to colonisation, most African countries inherited the institutions of their colonisers.

But sadly, they hardly built the operational capacity to make them work.

Nigeria’s Central Bank was modelled after the Bank of England. The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) was modelled after the FDA in the US.

And the Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, Sub-Saharan Africa’s first university, was modelled after Durham University in the UK.

While they copied these institutions in how they look, how they’re staffed and structured, and the goals they have, African governments are often unable to replicate how they work.

Some researchers at Harvard studied this, documenting that low-income countries often adopt the outward form of Western institutions without building the capacity to make them work.

They called it Isomorphic Mimicry, after the biological trick where a hoverfly looks like a wasp but cannot sting. 

The Nigerian central bank has the same organisational chart as the Bundesbank. 

The procurement codes look like those of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 

The anti-corruption commissions hold press conferences. 

The function the form promises depends on a thousand small things the form cannot legislate, and those things tend to be missing. 

These researchers found the same pattern in Bangladesh, Bolivia, and the Balkans.

The second reason is that the state itself is built around something other than service delivery.

Many countries operate a form of politics that French political scientist Jean-François Bayart called the Politics of the Belly. 

It goes like this. 

The same dynamics show up in post-1991 Russia, in the Philippines under Marcos and Duterte, and across much of Latin America.

But there’s a third reason, and it’s structure.

Society can be structured in one of two ways.

It can either be a limited access order, where the elites control resources and access to them, or an open access order, where the rules are supreme, and everyone has an equal shot.

Most countries in the world start as the former.

Even the richest (and seemingly functional) ones today had to move from being limited-access orders to open access.

Britain took two centuries to make the transition. 

The United States really only completed it after the Civil War. 

African states are doing what most political systems have done throughout human history. 

Asking why they have not become like Denmark, an example of an open access order,  misses how rare Denmark is.

So if the problem is really deeper than a mere lack of leadership…

The reasonable response is that talented people should save themselves. 

Tidjane Thiam did. He took his École Polytechnique training and ran two of the largest banks in Europe. 

Strive Masiyiwa built Econet without ever entering government. 

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala ran the World Trade Organisation with a lot of success.

Nobody owes the public sector a career. The math is unkind. 

A decade in government will earn you less, frustrate you more, and produce less measurable impact than a decade in business. If you have the option to opt out, opting out is rational.

The catch is that the private sector that everyone wants to build runs on infrastructure that only the state can construct.

Lagos works as a tech hub because Lagos State works as a city. 

M-Pesa exists because Bitange Ndemo, sitting in Kenya's ICT ministry in 2007, made a regulatory decision that allowed Safaricom to operate the service. 

Flutterwave processes payments because the CBN built licensing rails that someone had to design. 

Every Sub-Saharan founder you admire is sitting on top of state decisions she did not make. 

If all the talent leaves, there will be no good rails for people to build upon.

The literature on building open access orders is much weaker than the literature on diagnosing why they do not exist. Nobody has a turnkey solution.

What history does suggest is three things. 

The first is that pockets of effectiveness matter more than wholesale reform. 

Singapore's Economic Development Board, Rwanda's RDB, and Lagos State Internal Revenue Service under Tunde Fowler all worked because they had narrow mandates, long-serving leaders, and political cover. 

All three picked one agency and made it work.

Secondly, federalism can create isolated labs for policy 

Lagos under Tinubu and Fashola produced a measurably different state than Nigeria as a whole. 

Indian states show wider variation in governance quality than most African countries do. 

The path to a better national government often runs through better subnational ones.

And finally, coordinated entries work better than solo ones. 

Park Chung-hee built Korea with the Economic Planning Board cohort. 

Lee Kuan Yew built Singapore with a small group of trusted technocrats who entered together and protected each other. 

One reformist Finance Minister gets digested. But 20 reformists who hold to each other are harder to swallow. The black hole is real. Some people have escaped it. 

So, next time you hear someone say “Africa just needs better leadership”, remind them they’re oversimplifying the problem. 

Africa doesn’t lack leadership talent. Sometimes, it lacks the right environment, systems, and structure to make change really happen.

The question for the future is how talent can enter public service with a thesis, a coalition, and a structure that allows these better systems to be built.

What do you think about the African black hole?

Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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