Asher's Blog

Africa does not need more copies.

This does not mean we should refuse to learn from the rest of the world. Every serious country, company and leader studies what has worked elsewhere. Progress would be unnecessarily slow if every generation insisted on discovering every useful principle from the beginning.

There are things I would gladly copy from the West, China and other places that have produced remarkable development. I would copy the level of ambition, the drive to solve difficult problems and the possibility mindset that makes people believe they can build something which does not yet exist.

When you travel through different parts of the world, the countries are not identical. China is not the United States, and the United States is not Europe. Their histories, political systems, cultures and methods are different, but you can still observe a willingness to imagine a better future and organise people, institutions and capital towards it.

Each society has taken responsibility, in its own way, for what it believes it can become.

That is what Africa should copy.

We do not need to copy the finished appearance of another society while ignoring the ambition, discipline and years of deliberate work that produced it. We need to develop the confidence to decide what prosperity should look like for us and build the systems through which it can become real.

Copy the ambition, not merely the product

Too often, copying begins at the surface. Someone sees a successful application, company or public programme elsewhere and reproduces the visible parts in Africa. The language is similar, the interface is similar and the business model may even be similar, but the conditions that made the original work are missing.

The customer may have different purchasing power. Distribution may be informal and fragmented. Trust may need to be established differently. Infrastructure may be unreliable, regulation may be less predictable and the institution expected to enforce an agreement may move too slowly.

A copied solution can therefore be technically correct and practically irrelevant.

The deeper lesson is not that we should never reproduce a useful idea. It is that we should understand which part of the idea is universal and which part depended on a particular environment.

The ambition to make payments easier can travel. The exact payment infrastructure may need to change. The ambition to give every person access to quality healthcare can travel. The method must reflect where people live, how professionals are distributed and what patients can afford. The ambition to build modern agriculture can travel, but the financing, storage, transport and route to market must be designed around local realities.

We should copy the seriousness with which other societies pursue important outcomes, then design the solution for the place in which it must work.

Build around our own constraints

Africa’s constraints are not an excuse for low ambition. They are design requirements.

If electricity is unreliable, the solution must consume less power, operate through interruptions or contribute to solving the energy problem itself. If internet access is inconsistent, products should not assume constant high-speed connectivity. If businesses remain largely informal, distribution, identity, credit and compliance systems must meet people where they currently operate while helping them become more structured.

Ignoring these realities does not make a product more global. It simply makes it less useful to the people it claims to serve.

The same principle applies to government and national development. We cannot import policies created for institutions with different levels of capacity and expect the words of the policy to produce the same outcome. We must ask how the rule will be enforced, what incentives it creates, who benefits from avoiding it and what local institution can carry it consistently.

Our constraints should shape the design, but they should not determine the limit of our aspiration.

Build around our advantages too

Nigeria is often discussed mainly through its difficulties, but the country also possesses significant advantages. We have crude oil and large gas reserves, but our possibilities do not end there. We have gold, cocoa, extensive agricultural land and land suited to different kinds of production. We have a large population, an energetic informal economy and people who repeatedly demonstrate resourcefulness under difficult conditions.

The question is whether we can organise these advantages into productive systems.

Natural resources do not automatically create national wealth. Agricultural land does not feed a continent by itself. The country needs security, financing, infrastructure, processing, storage, transport, access to markets and institutions capable of protecting investment.

This is where ambition becomes practical. It should move beyond speeches about potential and become a decision to build the conditions that allow potential to produce value.

Nigeria could contribute significantly more to feeding Africa, but that possibility requires intentional work across the entire agricultural system. Farmers need to operate safely. Inputs must be available. Produce needs to move without unnecessary loss. Processing must add value locally, and businesses must be able to invest with confidence that agreements and property will be protected.

We already possess many of the raw ingredients. What remains is the disciplined organisation of them.

Security and justice come first

If I were identifying the most urgent constraints, security would be one of the first. People cannot farm, manufacture, travel, invest or build confidently when their lives and property are not protected. Insecurity raises the cost of every other ambition because businesses must spend privately on risks that effective public systems should reduce.

The next major issue is justice, including the corruption that weakens it. A productive society needs people to believe that agreements can be enforced, wrongdoing has consequences and influence cannot permanently place someone above the law.

Security and justice are not separate from entrepreneurship. They are part of its infrastructure. Capital flows more confidently where people believe they will receive fair treatment, and businesses take longer-term risks when success is not permanently vulnerable to arbitrary interference.

We need political leadership capable of strengthening these systems, but we also need entrepreneurial imagination around the tools, infrastructure and accountability mechanisms that can make them work better. Technology can improve visibility, speed and coordination, although it cannot substitute for moral courage or the willingness to enforce rules fairly.

If we make meaningful progress on security and justice, many other possibilities become easier to pursue.

Our distribution systems are not inferior; they are different

Africa’s informal sector is enormous, and products often reach people through relationships and channels that look different from those in more formal economies. This should not be treated only as a defect. It is also an existing distribution system that founders can understand and build around.

The market trader, cooperative, agent network, religious community, professional association and local business cluster may carry trust that a new digital platform does not yet possess. A company that ignores these networks because they do not resemble the distribution channels described in a foreign business book may struggle to reach the customers already organised inside them.

The better approach is to ask how trusted local channels can help useful products spread, while technology improves their efficiency, transparency and scale.

We do not always need to invent a new path to the customer. Sometimes we need to understand how products, information and trust already move, then build something that strengthens that movement.

This is how African businesses can become both local and ambitious. They solve for the reality in front of them while creating systems strong enough to expand beyond it.

Africa should hold its future in its own hands

Africa should depend less on handouts, giveaways and solutions designed elsewhere, then handed over as though our role is merely to adopt them. Assistance can be useful, and collaboration with the rest of the world will remain important, but no continent becomes great by outsourcing responsibility for its imagination.

We must decide what we want to produce, which institutions we need, what infrastructure will unlock our advantages and what standards we are willing to enforce. We should study other countries closely, borrow principles that work and avoid mistakes they have already made.

But the final design must be ours.

Africa does not need more copies because our problems, advantages, institutions and forms of distribution require original thought. What we need from successful societies is not permission to imitate their present condition. We need to learn the ambition with which they imagined something better and the discipline with which they built it.

Then we must apply that same seriousness to our own future.