Comment: “It’s time for African entrepreneurs to start figuring things out and to stop sitting on the fence waiting for governments to provide solutions. Governments can support later, but the momentum and direction must first come from African entrepreneurs.”
My Response: To address this, it is important to classify entrepreneurs into two groups: typical entrepreneurs and pioneering entrepreneurs. Typical entrepreneurs are the everyday businesspeople who populate our markets and there are millions of them. They run restaurants, repair shops, retail stores, logistics services, and tech agencies. They are essential, but they require economic platforms to operate. Those platforms are roads, clean water, electricity, security, postal systems, digital infrastructure, and functional public services. These platforms are the responsibility of governments, because only governments can coordinate and finance them at scale. Once these platforms exist, typical entrepreneurs can thrive.
This is why countries like the United States continue to subsidize their foundational systems. The U.S. Postal Service has not made a profit in two decades. Amtrak has never made a profit since its founding in 1971. Yet these systems are preserved and funded because they serve as economic and social platforms, enabling millions of businesses to function. No modern economy thrives without such base infrastructure.
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However, history also shows that governments sometimes lack the capacity to build these platforms on their own. When that happens, states transfer portions of their sovereign rights to pioneering entrepreneurs, men and women who build systems, not just businesses. In the U.S., the eminent domain rules empowered railway pioneers like Vanderbilt to lay the foundations for the national railway grid. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Mellon built industries that became the scaffolding for America’s economic rise, and government actively supported them because they were building platforms, not just companies.
The same pattern continued into the digital age. When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, an untested, pioneering ecommerce platform, America gave it a structural advantage: Amazon was not required to collect sales taxes for years. That policy alone made Amazon’s prices significantly cheaper than physical stores and accelerated its dominance. Without such deliberate “goodies,” Amazon would not be Amazon. Tesla revenue was juiced via EV credits financed by America’s taxes!
So, the comment is partially correct, but incomplete. Africa needs pioneering entrepreneurs, yes. But typical entrepreneurs cannot function without platforms, and those platforms must be built first, either by governments or by pioneers empowered by governments.
You may ask: Why must it be that way? Because nation-building follows the laws of economic gravity. What the U.S. Congress did for Amazon would be condemned as cronyism in Nigeria, yet those incentives seeded a trillion-dollar economic platform.
My summary: for development to happen, platforms must be built. Either governments build them, or governments empower pioneering entrepreneurs to build them. But platforms must exist, because without them, no nation has ever unlocked prosperity, and no army of typical entrepreneurs can create sustained growth on a foundation that does not exist.
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We are not emotionally and culturally mature for this kind of conversation. The biggest of things are done by few people first, before the crowd can enter and take their chances. We have only one big pioneering entrepreneur in the person of Aliko Dangote for now. If he can control plenty oil wells, then it will be comprehensive end-to-end in the Oil and Gas industry, the crude supply is still the weak link. We cannot have regular electricity supply at scale until another pioneering entrepreneur capable of owning GenCos, multiple Discos and half Transmission assets, with its subsidiary producing meters, and another arm into gas processing. You cannot leave any critical piece in the value chain to another entity, else you will fail here.
Platforms are not built by crowd or poor people, you let few super wealthy and capable people to build them, then regular entrepreneurs can move in to build on those platforms, that way wealth can be scaled.
Economic development does not require a referendum, just pick few ultra capable people, hand them things, they will make plenty money but they will build the critical infrastructures. If not, poverty will continue to scale at tremendous pace, just like Nigeria is.