Essays on leadership and the long defeat — written for those who still choose to build here, in Africa.
As of 2025, I’ve made a few decisions about my life. One of them is simple but final: Ghana is home.
Not in the romantic diasporan sense — but in the grounded, sober way that says, this is where I’ll spend the rest of my foreseeable life. Unless something deeply convicts me otherwise, this is it.
Leaving has always lingered in my subconscious, even though I’ve often said I wasn’t interested. I knew it because the moment I truly decided that Ghana — and by extension, Africa — is home, I began to care differently. More deliberately. Like any reasoning person would for the place they belong to.
There’s no escaping it now.
And as advantageous as leaving can be, I’m not sure I want my daughter to grow up believing progress can only happen elsewhere. That belief is true for many, but I want to test it. I want to see if we can change it.
That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take to cause such a change — and what role I might play in it.
I think my role is leadership — to talk about it, write about it, study it, teach it, and hopefully model it.
I’ve always had a knack for gathering people. A well-functioning team gives me joy in ways I can’t fully explain. I’ve built a few in my life, and each time, it’s felt like watching order emerge from chaos.
But every time I look around, I realise the things that feel obvious about leadership to me are not obvious to those holding the positions.
And for better or worse, those people — our “leaders” — shape so much of our shared experience.
This is where I can make the most impact.
Is it audacious to think I can help shift something so large? Of course.
But this is my version of chasing a unicorn.
While many of my peers want to build companies valued at a billion dollars, I want to build leaders who can impact a billion people, alongside a few other things.
How?
By focusing on emerging leaders — for now.
The world is shifting. Wealth, power, and authority are all changing hands.
Some of the new players are simply babysitting what’s been built — milking systems they didn’t design, waiting for them to collapse.
But others carry this quiet dissatisfaction. Against all visible odds, they want things to change. Even if they doubt themselves, they still try — until their resolve fades.
Those are my people.
They have a chance to transform what exists and, more importantly, to set a new precedent for the generation behind them. We inherited most of what we have — our systems, our habits, our mindset. The question is simple: when it’s our turn to pass them on, will they be better or worse? Because nothing ever stays the same.
I choose to believe they can be better.
So these essays — however many they end up being — are written for that kind of leader.
The one who will dare to build what’s next.
I believe effective leadership requires both Soul and Systems.
The Soul is the part of you that believes, cares, and holds conviction.
The System, the part that designs, builds, and sustains progress.
It’s easy to favour one over the other — to be soulful but scattered, or structured but soulless.
But if you’re going to take on broken systems and hope to make them better, you have to hold both in balanced tension.
That’s what this series is about. I'm calling it The Hopeful African.
And here’s why.
It isn’t about capital. It’s not about market entry, fundraising rounds, or the glossy war stories of Africa’s unicorns.
Many of those exist already.
And honestly, I can’t pretend to know the half of it. I don’t have a Harvard degree. I haven’t sold a company. I’ve never been on the cover of a magazine.
I’m a 32-year-old dreamer. I believe Africa has potential — though by now, that’s not news. What worries me is that we might never reach that potential if we keep ignoring the root of what’s holding us back: leadership. Again, not new.
But maybe that’s exactly the problem. We’ve lived so long with the same old wounds that we’ve accepted them as permanent. Maybe we’ve stopped believing they can heal. So we go fishing — for easier problems, safer ambitions, things that don’t demand too much of us. But somehow, no matter how hard we work, we keep circling back to the same ghosts.
This series is an attempt to turn the lens of Africa’s next generation of leaders — to challenge what you think leadership means, to propose new ways to confront an ancient weakness, to redefine success, to awaken a holy unrest in your soul, and to call you to the kind of sacrifice real change always requires.