Africa relies on foreign contractors for infrastructure while overlooking homegrown innovation already happening locally. The speaker argues Africans need to stop waiting for Western solutions and build context-specific answers themselves, moving from perpetual catch-up to real ownership.
It makes me wonder about our own mindset and about how we think about things. Because even now, we have so many more people, but we don't have the infrastructure, the skills. We're always trying to copy someone else or wait for someone to show us or give us or do it for us. Chinese, come and build us a bridge. The Turkish, the Polish, the who? Yet we need our own solutions. And yet when you look around in Africa, there's so many Africans doing such interesting things, innovative things, progressive things, things that even haven't been done in other countries. But we never look within ourselves for the solution first. We always have this attitude attitude of like, let's wait on the Western world to come and tell us what to do, or let's wait, they'll decide what we want. At least now they're involving us in the discussions, but still it's not coming from our side. And we're going to continuously be playing catch-up if we're always waiting for someone else or copying their solutions and implementing them here. I wonder, why can't we have our own solutions to the challenges that we have here?
