This is a dangerous question. And yet, the most dangerous questions are often the most necessary.
Can Africans think?
At first glance, the question may seem insulting. After all, Africa is home to world-class scholars, leading scientists, pioneering entrepreneurs, and bold artists. From Lagos to Kigali, Nairobi to Accra, Johannesburg to Dakar, Africans are shaping culture, technology, and ideas in ways that inspire the world. The African diaspora is an intellectual powerhouse. African youth are among the most innovative and adaptable anywhere.
But the question is not about the intelligence of Africans as individuals. It is about our collective intellectual posture as a continent. It is about our ability to think strategically as sovereign states, to build systems that work, to govern with foresight, and to act with unity and purpose in a turbulent global order.
Do we think? Or do we react?
The Trap of Eternal Potential
Africa is perhaps the only continent where “potential” is still discussed with the same enthusiasm decade after decade. We are always “emerging,” always “rising,” always “on the cusp.”
But potential is not destiny. It is a burden, if not backed by thought. We cannot eternally postpone the hard questions of governance, development, and transformation. We must ask: Why do countries with so much talent, land, natural wealth, and cultural energy continue to underperform at the level of the state?
Why are we still debating the basics — electricity, clean water, functioning schools, public safety, food security —when other regions, with fewer resources, have long since resolved them?
The answer lies not in fate or race or external conspiracies. It lies in a failure of deliberate, coordinated, sustained thinking.
Leadership Without Vision
Too many African governments operate in short cycles, driven by political expediency rather than strategic clarity. Manifestoes are filled with promises but empty of philosophy. Leaders emerge, win elections, and immediately become consumed with survival – staying in power, rewarding allies, managing crises.
There is rarely a national conversation about what kind of society we want to build, or what kind of citizen we are trying to produce. Without this foundational thought, policy becomes ad hoc. We move from subsidy to subsidy, from crisis to crisis, from headline to headline, without any sense of a long-term trajectory.
This is not governance. It is improvisation.
No nation or continent can develop without a theory of itself,a sense of direction that transcends election cycles, party politics, and personal ambition.
Bureaucracies That Don’t Learn
Governments that think well invest in institutions that remember. This is the purpose of a civil service, not just to administer, but to institutionalize thought, absorb knowledge, and guide implementation.
But in much of Africa, public bureaucracies have lost their intellectual mandate. Ministries are politicized. Expertise is sidelined. Agencies function without data, budgets are passed without impact analysis, and policies are copied from donor templates without localization.
The result is a persistent inability to learn. Reforms fail, but no lessons are drawn. Projects stall, but no one is held accountable. Each administration resets the clock, discarding the thinking (and mistakes) of the last.
How can a continent think clearly if its institutions are allergic to reflection?
Universities in Decline
In the post-independence era, Africa’s universities were centers of national pride and intellectual ferment. Today, many of them are shells, underfunded, overcrowded, and disconnected from public life. Professors are demoralized. Students are taught to memorize, not to question. Curricula are outdated. Research is rare. And most damning of all, the academy is often irrelevant to policymaking.
This is a betrayal of our future. No region can think its way into prosperity if it does not defend the integrity of its intellectual infrastructure.
China did not rise by outsourcing its mind. India’s IT revolution was seeded in its elite engineering institutes. Singapore’s transformation began with its investment in technocratic capacity.
Africa must treat its universities not as burdens, but as engines. If we want to develop, we must rebuild our intellectual sovereignty through funding, freedom, and firm ties between research and governance.
Economies Without Strategy
Africa’s economic trajectory remains painfully vulnerable. Too many countries still rely on commodity exports, external aid, and remittances. Industrialization remains elusive. Intra-African trade is dismally low. The private sector struggles with weak infrastructure, inconsistent regulation, and limited access to capital.
Where is the continental strategy? Where are the grand investments in rail, ports, digital connectivity? Where is the deliberate focus on value chains, regional manufacturing, agro-processing, and green energy?
Africa cannot copy-paste its way to prosperity. It must think carefully about where its comparative advantages lie and how to turn them into engines of inclusive growth. This requires long-term planning, coordinated leadership, and a culture of performance.
Markets reward clarity. Investors seek coherence. Development follows strategy.
Do we have one?
Security Without Foresight
Africa’s security architecture is riddled with contradiction. Peacekeeping missions abound, but conflict persists, from the Sahel to Sudan, from eastern Congo to northern Mozambique. Extremism is rising. Coups have returned. Civil-military relations are brittle. And yet, defense policy remains reactive.
We spend billions on arms but little on prevention. We invest in soldiers but not in state legitimacy. We respond to violence but ignore the structural drivers such as youth unemployment, broken education, land disputes, exclusion.
True security is developmental. It is based on trust in the state. And it requires regional coordination.
Without strategic foresight, Africa will remain trapped in an exhausting cycle: war, ceasefire, fragile peace, relapse.
The Global Stage: Passive or Strategic?
Africa’s weakness in global affairs is not numerical, it is intellectual. We have 54 countries at the United Nations, a continent of 1.4 billion people, trillions in resources. And yet, we often act as spectators rather than stakeholders.
When global rules are written on trade, finance, climate, digital governance, where is Africa’s voice? When decisions are made on conflict, migration, or technology, where is our common position?
Other regions caucus, coordinate, and negotiate. We fragment, react, and complain.
Strategic thinking would mean building strong diplomatic schools, training negotiators, pooling leverage, and setting clear continental priorities. The African Union could become a platform not just for rhetoric, but for real strategic influence.
But again, thinking is the missing link.
A New Intellectual Awakening
Despite these frustrations, there is reason for hope. A new generation of Africans is emerging, technologically savvy, globally aware, politically curious. Civil society is vibrant. Creatives are reshaping narratives. Startups are solving real problems. The Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a signal of regional ambition.
What is needed now is intellectual courage. Courage to challenge old models. Courage to prioritize merit over mediocrity. Courage to ask difficult questions about our own systems.
Above all, courage to think like a continent.
This requires building institutions that think, funding education that liberates, and cultivating leadership that listens. It requires moving from slogans to strategy, from improvisation to planning, from potential to performance.
It requires that we stop outsourcing our intellect to donors, to consultants, to think tanks abroad and begin to own our own problems, our own questions, our own answers.
So, Can Africans Think?
Yes. We always have.
The question is: will we allow ourselves to?
Because nations and continents do not rise by chance. They rise when they think, clearly, coherently, and collectively.
Africa will not be an exception.
