₦airaland Forum

No.

Despite the crimes of the colonial era, Africa’s present poverty has relatively little to do with this part of its past. Colonial rule was a pretty brief experience for most of Africa - a mere 70 years or so. Nor was the impact that great day-to-day: an African could easily spend their entire life under colonial rule and never once see a white man. Europeans actually did far more damage in the pre-colonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade fuelled centuries of warfare in West Africa (while the Arabs did the same in East Africa). And the country that was colonised the longest, South Africa, is also the richest and most powerful today - not what you’d expect if colonialism bred greater poverty.

Africa is poor today for much the same reasons it was poor in the pre-colonial era - because of a political culture which colonialism did very little to change. Basically there is no loyalty to the state in most of Africa - nationhood is largely a fiction used to bolster the legitimacy of the self-serving elites that run (or claim to run) most African countries today. The nation state has simply never arisen in Africa in the way that it has in the rest of the world: instead, people are loyal to their family and their tribe. This absence of national feeling is present even among the politicians running most African countries, who feel no shame in looting their countries’ treasuries no matter how much it weakens the state they themselves run. Graft is so extreme that governments often barely function at all: basic infrastructure like railways is left to break down and disappear back into the jungle, with health and education provision even worse. Some governments even tolerate parts of their national territory slipping out of their control if there’s no loot to grab there (this is what led to the rise of Boko Haram in the impoverished north-east of Nigeria, far from the country’s oil wealth in the south). No government would stand for this in a country they felt a genuine sense of loyalty to - even if they lacked the strength to win they would still fight the rebels tooth and nail for control.

What African politicians do tend to spend money on is their own particular tribe (while ignoring all others) - particularly around election time. Kenyans call these kickbacks ‘eating’. Not surprsingly the excluded tribes don’t like this situation very much and this fuels tribal conflict, further undermining national unity. All too often it eventually leads to large-scale violence, hence the endless list of African civil wars.

Meanwhile at the individual level, strong family loyalties (and lots of children) mean that when someone does becomes wealthy the money is often shared out among a very large number of relatives. Everyone gets a little but it’s not really enough for anyone to buy a car, say, that could open up more economic opportunities for them in the future. This prevents the kind of virtuous circles beloved of capitalist theorists and helps to keep economic growth low. On top of that, stubbornly high birthrates ensure that even the less-corrupt countries are required to spread the benefits of growth thinly over a rapidly-expanding population.

Africa is a continent of countries that are not so much dysfunctional as fictitious. They exist on the map but not in people’s minds. While it’s true that their borders were largely drawn by colonialists with little regard for existing tribal structures, any other border arrangement would have the same problem of non-existent nationalism, the same vacuum of legitimacy (unless they were very small countries where everyone belonged to a single tribe, like Swaziland). Until a genuine sense of nationalism evolves, African countries are likely to remain plagued by negligent governments, bad infrastructure, civil unrest, patchy rule of law and a generally bad business climate. This will keep investment low and Africans poor, with family structures further lessening the impact of what growth there is.

On the plus side, this is something that Africans can change for themselves: even with unfair trade rules and predatory foreign corporations, it is still in Africans’ power to become wealthy regardless - all they need to do is change their way of thinking. Whether it will happen anytime soon is another matter of course.

https://www.quora.com/Is-Africa-largely-poor-today-because-of-the-colonial-legacy

The Tinubu that I saw during the coronation of the Pope was not up to 80 years old.

Somewhere in Johannesburg, Lagos, or Nairobi tonight, a graduate is folding a certificate into a drawer and walking out to sell recharge cards on the street. He did everything right. The system kept its promise to teach him. It broke its promise to employ him profitably. Multiply him by tens of millions, and you do not have a youth unemployment crisis. You have a curriculum catastrophe. Curriculum is a nation's engine and its operating system at once — get the engine wrong, and the car never leaves the driveway; get the operating system wrong, and every application built on top of it — jobs, industries, GDP — crashes.

THE CHINA SHOCKWAVE
Between 2021 and 2025, China's Ministry of Education revoked 12,200 undergraduate programmes and introduced 10,200 new ones — over 30 percent of the national curriculum rewritten in five years. Dead: arts, humanities, foreign languages, traditional management. Resurrected: artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, agricultural automation. Over that window, China's economy grew from $14.7 trillion to $19.5 trillion. Africa, with a comparable population, moved from $2.7 trillion to $2.82 trillion — essentially standing still. The difference is not luck, It is curriculum, treated as economic infrastructure in one place and ceremonial tradition in the other.
South Africa's youth unemployment hit 60.9 percent in early 2026. In Nigeria, over 80 percent of "employed" graduates are trapped in low-productivity informal work no degree prepared them for. The jobs are not missing — the WEF projects 170 million new global roles by 2030, and Deloitte estimates the semiconductor industry alone needs over one million additional skilled workers by 2030. Our youth are not perishing for lack of jobs. They are perishing for lack of relevant skill.

THE DIASPORA MIRROR
And lest anyone blame Africa's economy alone, follow the graduate abroad. Land him in Toronto, London, or Houston — remove every excuse about local jobs — and the pattern repeats. Indian and Chinese graduates arrive in the same cities and, within a generation, are disproportionately the ones opening businesses: Indian Americans alone now own roughly 60% of the hotels in the United States, among the highest rates of business formation of any immigrant group in the West. African graduates, trained in the same universities the diaspora produces, too often arrive with degrees built for job-seeking, not wealth-creation — and end up driving for Uber or staffing care homes, not owning the platforms or the facilities. This is not a verdict on the graduate's ability. It is a verdict on what his curriculum trained him to become: an employee, not an owner. Twenty years in a classroom should not conclude with a steering wheel and a ride-share app. That is not a diaspora failure. It is a colonial curriculum, still teaching Africans to seek a master's payroll instead of building their own.

THE THREE-TIER FIX
Tier 1 — the technical core: AI, semiconductors, embedded systems, robotics, new materials, biotechnology — the hard infrastructure of the coming economy.
Tier 2 — the human operating system: critical thinking, complex problem-solving, communication, creativity, collaboration, leadership, and entrepreneurship — mandatory for every student, every discipline.
Tier 3 — the Taipei model: academia must stop designing curricula in isolation. Taiwan builds courses the way Taipei Tech and TSMC build them — jointly, reviewed annually, with industry empowered to kill any course that has stopped producing value.

THE CALL
To governments: stop funding ceremony. Treat curriculum as infrastructure. If a programme keeps producing unemployed graduates, revoke its accreditation. To universities: open your gates. Co-author your courses with industry, every year, or keep training for an economy that no longer exists. And to parents; you are partially responsible for the depression most youths are suffering from today: stop sending your children to study DEAD DEGREES!

THE PhD RECKONING
The reform must reach the summit of the academic pyramid, because the crisis is not only undergraduate — it is at its most absurd at the doctoral level. Africa is producing PhDs by the thousands, many parading titles that add zero value to society: theories defended before five examiners and then buried, never touching a farm, a factory, a hospital, or a policy desk. China does not confer its highest degree this way. No African university should either. From today, no doctoral topic should be approved unless it is bound, in writing, to producing or innovating something the nation can point to — a technology built, a yield increased, a disease addressed, a system fixed. A PhD must be a contract with the nation, not a private meditation rewarded with a title. If it cannot name what it produced, it should not be conferred.

WELCOME TO THE CHIP CIVILIZATION
Every smartphone, every fighter jet, every AI model runs on semiconductors — and Africa is absent from that table. New Horizons Africa Group is changing that. This academic season, we launch Africa's first Semiconductor Knowledge Transfer Program, in direct partnership with Taiwan — the home of the modern chip, birthplace of TSMC, the island that turned technical education into a national security asset. African undergraduates will train in semiconductor design, engineering, and fabrication, with the opportunity of an internship inside a semiconductor factory in Taiwan, before they even graduate — taught by the ecosystem that actually builds the world's chips. Not a theory of semiconductors. The thing itself, transferred directly from source to soil. The verdict has been written: Africa must kill the dead degrees, or the dead degrees will kill Africa.
We are pulling up a chair to the table — and bringing the tools to build at it.

PREPARING HUMANS FOR SPACE
One more frontier deserves the same honesty. Humanity is moving toward becoming a multi-planetary species — SpaceX alone has poured over a decade and tens of billions of dollars into that goal. Whether it arrives in one decade or three matters less than this: the skills for it — closed-loop life support, off-world energy, autonomous robotics — are being built right now, in curricula from Beijing to Austin. Not one African university has asked what it will take to keep a human alive on another world. A continent that cannot enter that conversation has already conceded the century before it begins. The hour is late. The inertia is unaffordable.

Universities are factories of human capital, and no sane factory manufactures without first securing a market. China builds its curriculum backward from the job —she treats curriculum as a means, employment as the end. Africa builds its curriculum forward from tradition, and calls the certificate itself the end

Or are you still wondering why Africa's curriculum produces 60 percent youth unemployment?

Share this if you believe it is time to disrupt Africa's educational status quo

Tim Akano is an Educationist, Public Intellectual, and Technopreneur, writing from Lagos.
Founder, Almajiri-to-Tech Foundation, One Africa Academy & Tim Akano Foundation.
CEO, New Horizons Africa Group
www.timakano.com