We Inherited the Machine

When conversations about Africa begin, they often begin with failure.

Weak institutions.

Poor governance.

Corruption.

Slow development.

And the proposed solutions usually sound familiar: better leaders, better policies, stronger institutions.

These things matter.

But I wonder if we often begin too late in the story.

Before asking why our institutions struggle, perhaps we should ask a more fundamental question:

Who designed them, and what problems were they originally designed to solve?

Before Colonialism

Before colonialism, African societies were already building systems of governance.

They were far from perfect.

They experienced conflict, inequality, oppression, and political failures.

But like every civilization, they were engaged in a continuous process of institutional experimentation.

The Oyo Empire developed constitutional checks on the Alaafin through the Oyomesi council.

Many Igbo societies governed through assemblies, age grades, and dispersed authority rather than centralized kingship.

The Asante Empire built sophisticated administrative institutions that managed taxation, diplomacy, and military organization.

These systems were different from one another because they evolved to solve different problems.

No successful society inherited a finished blueprint.

Its institutions evolved over generations.

The Machine We Inherited

Then colonialism interrupted that process.

Between roughly 1884 and 1885, European powers met at the Berlin Conference and divided much of Africa into colonial territories with virtually no African representation.

Borders were drawn, administrations established, and legal, educational, and economic systems imposed across societies with vastly different histories and political traditions.

Colonial governments introduced institutions designed primarily to administer territories, maintain political control, collect taxes, and organize the extraction of labour and resources — not necessarily to help those societies flourish on their own terms.

Then independence came.

Flags changed.

Governments changed.

Leaders changed.

But much of the institutional architecture remained.

The borders remained.

The bureaucracies remained.

The legal systems remained.

The centralized state remained.

In many ways, new operators entered the control room while the machine itself stayed largely the same.

Perhaps we inherited countries before we had the opportunity to design societies.

Beyond History

But colonialism ended decades ago.

So another question becomes unavoidable.

What is stopping us now?

History explains part of the story, but it cannot explain all of it.

Part of the answer is that institutions create beneficiaries.

Systems distribute power, resources, and influence.

Even imperfect institutions often work well for those who control them, making meaningful redesign difficult.

Another part of the answer is that we have become very good at imitation.

When education struggles, we search for the world’s best education system.

When economies struggle, we study Singapore, China, Europe, or America.

Learning from others is not the problem.

Every civilization has borrowed ideas.

The problem begins when borrowing replaces understanding.

When our first instinct is to ask, Who has solved this before?, rather than, What problem are we actually trying to solve, and what would make sense in our own context?

The opposite of imitation is not isolation.

It is adaptation.

And adaptation requires understanding.

You cannot build institutions for a society you do not deeply understand.

How do our communities actually solve problems?

How do people build trust?

How do informal economies function?

How do citizens navigate institutions that fail them?

These are not peripheral questions.

They are the foundation of institutional design.

Recovering the Confidence to Redesign

Yet Africa spends relatively little on research and development compared with the global average.

If societies do not consistently invest in studying themselves, they become increasingly dependent on ideas produced elsewhere.

This is where I believe our universities, researchers, governments, and think tanks have an enormous responsibility.

They should not simply produce graduates or policy reports.

They should help societies understand themselves well enough to design institutions that fit their realities.

Perhaps that is what we have neglected.

Not simply stronger institutions.

But the ability to imagine better ones.

Maybe one of colonialism’s longest shadows is not only that institutions were imposed upon us, but that we gradually came to see institutions as things to inherit rather than things to redesign.

That does not mean rejecting everything we inherited.

Some institutions should remain.

Some should be improved.

Some should be combined with local knowledge.

Some should be replaced entirely.

But we cannot know which is which unless we are willing to study ourselves honestly, experiment courageously, and accept that building institutions is an ongoing process rather than a finished achievement.

There is no perfect system.

Successful societies are not those that found one.

They are societies that continuously question, adapt, and rebuild their institutions as new challenges emerge.

Perhaps that is the unfinished work before us.

Not simply governing inherited systems more efficiently.

But recovering the confidence to imagine better ones.

We inherited the machine.

The question is whether we will spend the next century learning only how to operate it — or finally learning how to redesign it.