Ruben.O. Oboma,Rugambha

Capital in Wrong Hands. ======= Africa does not lack intelligent people. It lacks a system that puts capital in the hands of people who can turn knowledge into power. For too long, the money has gone to the broker rather than the builder; to the politician who can mobilise a crowd rather than the engineer who can mobilise matter; to the general who can command men rather than the scientist who can command technology; to the preacher of miracles rather than the inventor who can build a factory. This is not an attack on every politician, pastor or soldier. It is an attack on a system that rewards obedience, spectacle, access and control more handsomely than discovery, production and intellectual courage. Colonialism did not only remove minerals, crops and labour from Africa. It built an economy of intermediaries. It rewarded the people who could keep order, collect taxes, move raw materials out and bring finished goods back in. It had little use for Africans who designed machines, built industries, set standards, owned patents or challenged the arrangement itself. Independence changed the flag, but too often it did not change who controls capital or what capital is expected to do. The deeper problem is a subsistence mindset that has survived long after many of us left subsistence farming. A subsistence farmer works first to eat, to survive the season and to keep the household alive. That is rational when life is insecure. But we have carried this logic into business, government and public life. We work for the salary. We steal for the next meal. We tender for the next payment certificate. We import for the next margin. We build churches, houses and political careers for display. Even people with serious money often think one harvest at a time. Very little capital is deliberately placed behind laboratories, prototypes, difficult research, quality systems, local manufacturing, industrial design and institutions that may take ten years to bear fruit. Yet that is how societies become technologically independent. Innovation requires people who can afford to fail intelligently. It requires laboratories whose findings can embarrass powerful suppliers. It requires engineers who can say the imported system is not good enough. It requires entrepreneurs who ask why Africa should only mine, consume and admire what others make from its resources. Such people are rare, not because Africa lacks them, but because they are inconvenient. They disturb rent-seeking. They expose incompetence. They threaten those who profit from keeping Africa as a market rather than building it into a maker. So they are called arrogant, impractical, troublesome or unpatriotic. They are isolated until they learn to survive rather than create. Africa’s crisis is therefore not simply a shortage of money. It is a failure to direct money towards knowledge, production and technological sovereignty. A continent that gives capital to the obedient and hunger to the inventive will remain a buyer of the future. Decolonisation will begin when capital stops rewarding mere survival and starts backing those prepared to build what Africa has never built before.