The next revolution must be fought against incompetence

The next revolution must not be fought against one another. It must be fought against corruption, incompetence, and the failure of the African state.

That line was published as a feature quote, and it has been read back to me more times than anything else I have said in public. It is worth explaining what I meant by it, because it is easy to hear it as cynicism about Africa. It is the opposite.

The enemy is not each other

Every generation is handed a fight. The generation before mine fought colonial rule and then fought for the shape of the state that replaced it. Those were fights against an external power and then against each other. Both were necessary. Neither is the fight in front of us now.

The fight in front of us is administrative. It is whether a clinic has reagents. Whether a research grant is disbursed in the financial year it was awarded. Whether a graduate with a good idea can register a company in a week rather than a season. These are not glamorous battles and they do not produce heroes, which is precisely why they get postponed.

Competence is a form of patriotism

I work in a laboratory. In a lab, incompetence is not a moral failing that can be argued about — it is a result that does not reproduce. You find out. That discipline is what I want more of in public life: not louder argument, but the habit of checking whether the thing worked.

• A policy that is announced but not measured is not a policy.
• An institution that cannot say what it did last year cannot be improved.
• A partnership with no named owner on either side is a photograph, not a partnership.

What young Africans already have

The diaspora is often discussed as a loss — a stock of talent that left. That framing is out of date. A Zimbabwean researcher in Seoul, a Cameroonian engineer in Berlin and a Ghanaian founder in Toronto are not absences; they are a distributed institution that has never been asked to act like one.

That is the work: making that distributed institution legible enough that a ministry, a university or a funder can actually contract with it. Not appeals to sentiment. Structure.