Aji Bayo Chibuzor

Africa's problem is far greater than Africans simply returning home 1. I understand the sentiment behind the statement, "Go back to your ancestral home and fix it." 2. Indeed, I share the conviction that Africans must eventually take responsibility for rebuilding their ancestral lands. 3. But there is a tragedy we must first understand: you cannot rebuild a civilisation merely by returning its people to the ruins of their inheritance. 4. Africa's predicament is not simply a shortage of educated people. 5. It is the inheritance of systems that have, for generations, weakened our capacity for independent thought, invention and collective progress. 6. Consider religion. 7. When brothers are taught to distrust one another because one worships in a church and another in a mosque, cooperation becomes difficult. 8. When children grow up hearing that everything is vanity, that their Heavenly Father will provide as He provides for the birds of the air, and that their rewards await them in heaven, some begin to substitute expectation for enterprise. 9. Then consider education. 10. We produce engineers who have never built machines, agricultural graduates who have never cultivated farms, and scientists without functional laboratories. 11. We manufacture certificates faster than we manufacture solutions. 12. We have educated the mind to recite, but not sufficiently trained the hands to create. 13. And now we tell these people to return home and rebuild Africa. 14. Rebuild with what? 15. Without the necessary industrial infrastructure, technical experience, investment and institutions, patriotism alone cannot manufacture prosperity. 16. China offers an instructive lesson. 17. Its industrial transformation required decades of technical education, manufacturing, infrastructure development, adaptation and deliberate investment in productive capacity. 18. Africa must undertake a similar transformation, suited to its own circumstances. 19. We must reform education to produce builders rather than certificate collectors. 20. We must challenge religious teachings that discourage human agency, while building societies where differences in belief do not prevent cooperation. 21. Otherwise, we may return millions of Africans home, only for them to resume arguing about who owns the biggest mansion, whose wife is more beautiful, whose pastor is more powerful, and whose ancestral spirits are responsible for another man's misfortune. 22. The problem is not merely geographical. It is institutional, intellectual and psychological. 23. A man whose hands have been denied tools and whose mind has been conditioned to surrender its agency cannot suddenly become a builder merely because he has crossed a border. 24. So yes, Africans must rebuild Africa. 25. But first, we must begin rebuilding the systems that produce Africans. 26. For returning home is a journey of the body. 27. Rebuilding a civilisation requires the liberation of the mind.