Asher's Blog

A city teaches its people what is possible. It teaches through more than speeches, slogans and development plans. It teaches through the condition of its roads, the quality of its schools, the speed of its permits, the reliability of its electricity, the ambition of its construction and the kinds of people who are able to build there.

Every day, residents receive a lesson from the environment around them. A working train says movement can be predictable. A functioning public library says knowledge belongs to everybody. A well-designed industrial district says production is welcome here. A clean and safe public space says ordinary people deserve beauty and dignity. A digital government service says the citizen’s time matters. A university connected to companies and capital says an idea can leave a laboratory and become a global institution.

The opposite lessons are also taught. A road that remains broken for years says nobody is responsible. A school that awards certificates without learning says appearance matters more than capability. An entrepreneur who waits indefinitely for an approval learns that ambition will be punished with uncertainty. A flood that returns to the same street every rainy season teaches residents that planning ends where inconvenience begins.

Cities are not passive backgrounds to human ambition; they are teachers of ambition.

What I felt in the Bay Area

I recently spent time in the United States, including San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. I also visited the area around Stanford University—the place I was trying to remember was Palo Alto, although the university is formally in the neighbouring unincorporated community of Stanford.

You can feel innovation there. It is visible in the companies, the research, the conversations, the founders and the assumption that a difficult technical problem may be the beginning of a business. People speak about things that do not yet exist as if they can be built. A student can meet a researcher, an investor, an engineer and a founder within a relatively small geography. Ideas move quickly because the people and institutions needed to develop them are close to one another.

It would be too simple to say that this happened because California created a few startup-friendly policies. Silicon Valley emerged through decades of accumulated advantage: Stanford and other research institutions, federal research and defence spending, semiconductor companies, immigrant talent, venture capital, experienced employees, professional services, successful founders who reinvested, and a culture in which leaving a stable job to build something new became understandable.

The city and the ecosystem kept teaching the same lesson: this kind of ambition belongs here.

Stanford’s own account of its relationship with Silicon Valley reflects a long connection among research, entrepreneurship and the surrounding region. The important point is not that every city needs a Stanford. It is that innovation rarely emerges from a motivational campaign. It emerges when education, capital, infrastructure, regulation, talent and social permission reinforce one another.

The Bay Area also has serious problems: housing is extremely expensive, inequality is visible, public disorder can be distressing and regulation can make building difficult. A city can teach possibility in one domain while teaching exclusion in another. We should learn from what works without turning any place into a myth.

Still, the concentration of ambition is real. When a young person repeatedly encounters people attempting difficult things, difficult things begin to feel normal.

Order creates room for experimentation

If a city is in constant chaos, most of its intelligence is consumed by survival.

People need safety before they can remain late in a laboratory. They need dependable electricity before they can run equipment. They need roads, transit and broadband before talent can collaborate. They need courts and enforceable contracts before capital can take long-term risks. They need schools capable of producing people who can understand and extend the technology.

This does not mean innovation waits for perfect conditions. Africans innovate precisely because our conditions are difficult. Some of our most useful businesses exist because public systems failed to meet an obvious need. Constraint can produce creativity.

But we should not romanticise unnecessary hardship. A founder who spends half the day solving for power, payments, transport and government approvals has less time to solve the customer’s problem. Resilience is admirable, but a city should not require every entrepreneur to become an infrastructure company before building the company they intended to build.

Basic order creates the surplus attention from which experimentation grows. This is what governments sometimes miss when they speak about becoming a technology hub. Innovation policy is not only a tax incentive, a conference or a building called an innovation centre. It is also drainage; it is housing. It is education; it is immigration. It is transport; it is safety. It is procurement. It is the time required to register property, resolve a commercial dispute or connect to power.

A technology ecosystem rests on many things that do not look like technology.

Construction is a declaration about the future

I was also in Dallas recently, and the amount of construction was striking. It made the city feel as if it expected more people, more companies and more economic activity to arrive. Similar ambitions have shaped Austin’s effort to attract technology companies and talent from more established centres.

Construction does not automatically mean progress. A city can build the wrong roads, encourage costly sprawl, neglect public transport or create buildings disconnected from what residents need. The United States itself has major infrastructure weaknesses; the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s infrastructure an overall C grade in its 2025 report. Developed countries also struggle with maintenance, affordability and planning.

But construction still communicates something important: somebody believes the future will require more capacity.

A crane is a forecast made visible. A rail line is a bet on future movement. A university laboratory is a bet on future discovery. A drainage project is a bet that the district is worth protecting for decades. A city becomes ambitious when it turns its forecast into physical and institutional capacity before the demand overwhelms it.

Many African cities do the reverse. Population grows first, informal settlements expand, congestion becomes severe, flooding becomes routine and government responds after the crisis is already expensive. We allow the future to happen to us, and then we call emergency response a plan. The better approach is to happen to the future.

African cities are approaching a decisive period

Africa’s urban population will continue to grow dramatically over the coming decades. That movement can produce enormous productivity because cities allow people, markets and ideas to meet. It can also produce congestion, exclusion and fragile settlements if growth is unmanaged.

The World Bank’s report Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World argues that African cities have often become crowded without achieving the full economic benefits of density. Fragmented development, weak transport links, difficult land markets and poor infrastructure prevent firms and workers from connecting efficiently.

This is an essential distinction. Density alone does not create a productive city; people must be able to reach one another. Land must be used sensibly; businesses need reliable services. Housing must exist near opportunity. The city’s physical form can either multiply interaction or turn every interaction into an expensive journey.

Lagos illustrates both possibilities. It has extraordinary energy, markets, finance, culture, technology and entrepreneurial density. It teaches people that almost anything can be sold, built or imagined. At the same time, traffic, flooding, power costs and uneven planning teach a second lesson: success will require you to overcome the city as well as use it.

That contradiction is not sustainable. Lagos should become a city in which energy is amplified by infrastructure, not consumed by it.

The same challenge applies across the continent. Nairobi can build on its technology and financial ecosystem. Kigali can translate administrative order into deeper productive capacity. Accra can coordinate growth, mobility and housing before congestion hardens. Cape Town can connect innovation with broader inclusion. Secondary African cities can plan early enough to avoid copying the failures of megacities.

Every city has a different starting point. What matters is that each chooses what it wants to make possible.

A budget is a statement of imagination

Government ambition is visible in how money is raised and spent. A city that wants innovation cannot fund only recurrent administration and ceremonial projects. It must invest in the systems that expand future capacity: basic education, technical training, research, transport, power, broadband, water, resilient drainage, housing and public safety.

Revenue generation also matters. Government cannot execute ambition with slogans. It needs a broad, credible revenue base and the discipline to convert revenue into public value. But taxation should not become extraction from the easiest formal businesses while large leakages remain untouched. The city should help more businesses become productive and formal so that revenue grows with prosperity.

The relationship should be visible: citizens and companies contribute, and the city returns capability.

When taxes rise while roads decay and approvals remain arbitrary, people experience government as a cost. When revenue produces faster movement, safer communities, reliable services and better-skilled workers, government becomes part of the productive system.

Budgets also reveal time horizons. Maintenance spending says existing assets matter. Research funding says knowledge created today may produce value later. Early-childhood investment says the city is thinking beyond the next election. Climate adaptation says leaders understand that the physical assumptions of the past may not survive the future.

A government’s true imagination is often clearer in its capital plan than in its speeches.

Education determines what residents can notice

A city cannot be more ambitious than the capabilities it continually develops. Education is not simply a social service adjacent to economic strategy. It determines whether residents can participate in the future the city claims to want. If a government announces an AI strategy while schools fail to teach literacy, mathematics, scientific reasoning and digital confidence, the strategy is disconnected from its people.

An innovative city needs different layers of talent: researchers who extend knowledge, engineers who build systems, technicians who install and maintain them, designers who make them usable, entrepreneurs who organise resources, managers who scale operations and public servants who regulate intelligently.

Not everybody needs to become a software engineer. A future city still needs excellent nurses, builders, electricians, teachers, accountants, lawyers, mechanics and artists. The purpose of education is not to force every child into one fashionable industry. It is to give people the foundational capability to learn, adapt and contribute as technology changes work.

The strongest city ecosystems also connect education to application. Students work on real problems. Universities collaborate with industry without becoming controlled by it. Companies invest in apprenticeships. Government publishes problems and data that researchers and founders can use. Successful professionals return as mentors, teachers and investors. The city becomes a classroom whose graduates keep teaching it.

Policies should make ambitious behaviour easier

If a city says it wants entrepreneurs, its processes should reflect that claim.

Can a business be registered without visiting several offices? Can an honest founder understand the taxes and licences that apply? Can a construction permit be tracked? Can public procurement create a fair path for young companies? Can a foreign expert or returning member of the diaspora relocate without months of uncertainty? Can a failed but honest entrepreneur start again?

These are not small administrative matters; they determine who attempts what. Policy teaches through friction. If every step requires a personal connection, the city teaches networking with officials rather than serving customers. If regulation changes without consultation or transition, it teaches founders to remain small and invisible. If government buys only from familiar large contractors, it teaches innovators that the public market is closed.

Good policy does not mean no regulation. Innovation without safety, accountability or public interest can damage the same society it claims to improve. The task is intelligent regulation: clear rules, proportionate requirements, rapid feedback, regulatory sandboxes where appropriate and firm consequences for genuine harm.

Government should be able to say both “try” and “this is the boundary.”

Cities need a shared picture of the future

One reason execution becomes slow is that leaders are not united around a sufficiently concrete future. Different ministries pursue disconnected projects; a road is built without considering housing. A technology programme is launched without power; a new district appears without transport. Education trains people for work that the economic plan is not creating.

A city needs a shared picture with measurable commitments. What industries can it credibly lead in ten or twenty years? How many people will live there? Where will they live? How will they move? What climate risks must be managed? What skills will employers need? What infrastructure must be built now because it takes a decade to deliver? Which regulations prevent useful experimentation? What public assets can attract private capital without surrendering public value?

The plan should survive individual leaders while remaining open to new evidence. It should identify owners, timelines, financing and outcomes. Residents should be able to see progress and understand delay.

Ambition without execution becomes advertising. Execution without a coherent future becomes activity; the city needs both.

Build the city that gives permission

People are influenced by what surrounds them. A young person who sees only abandoned projects learns not to trust grand plans. A founder who watches serious companies emerge nearby begins to imagine that theirs might be next. A child who enters a beautiful, functional public school receives a silent message that society expects something from their future.

This is why city-building is partly psychological. Infrastructure gives permission. Reliable power gives permission to manufacture. Safe streets give permission to remain outside and exchange ideas. Efficient transport gives permission to work with people across the city. Fair regulation gives permission to invest. Excellent universities give permission to pursue difficult knowledge. Visible construction gives permission to believe that tomorrow may contain more capacity than today.

Nigeria and Africa do not lack ambitious people. Our cities already produce remarkable founders, artists, professionals and traders under conditions that should have defeated their ambition. Imagine what they could produce if the environment stopped taxing every attempt.

I do not want African leaders merely to talk about becoming the next Silicon Valley. A city should understand its own advantages and build something appropriate to its history, geography and people. The lesson from the Bay Area is not to copy the surface. It is to coordinate the deep conditions that allow ambition to compound.

The lesson from fast-growing places such as Dallas and Austin is not that all construction is good. It is that the future requires advance capacity and that cities can compete deliberately for people, companies and ideas.

We can continue allowing the future to happen to us, responding to population, technology and climate only after they become crises. Or we can decide what kind of life and enterprise our cities should make possible and begin building backwards from that future.

A city is always teaching. The question is whether it teaches its people to endure, to escape—or to build.