An Evolution in Education

In the wake of liberation, Africa had a paucity of formal education on every level. At independence, no colony had more than 60 percent of the elementary school–age population in school, and most had less than 30 percent; the percentages were even lower for high school and tertiary education. On the day of liberation in the Congo, a country of fifteen million, ⁹ there were exactly fifty university graduates.¹⁰

Today, many Africans in both public and private leadership positions have studied abroad. That history can be seen in a few of the business leaders who participated in this book. In chronological order, Sam Jonah went to the Camborne School to study mining, Phuthuma Nhleko to Ohio State to study civil engineering, Funke Opeke to Columbia to study engineering, and Dalberg’s James I. Mwangi^* went to Harvard to study economics.

At the generational level, Phuthuma observed that increased levels of education changed not only the quality of African leadership, but its very sense of purpose and identity:

You must remember that Africa was, in a number of respects, stuck in the vestiges of a colonial time warp until the early 1990s. The dominant leadership in Africa post-independence was quite understandably revolutionary and radical in its thinking in what was then a less complex bi-polar world. The newly independent African countries sent young people overseas, some of them to the best colleges in the world. After the early ’90s, Africa began to reap the full benefits of this act as the returnees entered into government and started businesses. Some of them went to the likes of Stanford and Harvard and other prestigious universities in Western and Eastern Europe. Invariably, the more educated younger generation of African leaders hold a different worldview from the prior generation. So when a multinational corporation enters Africa and says, “Listen, we can do this and that for you, ” the African governments they’re engaging are exceedingly more sophisticated with a more educated management class than thirty years ago. The governments will retort that “actually, this is what we want and this is how you should provide it.”

Today the executive branch in many African countries is being staffed by thirty- and forty-year-olds who have been out in the world. As an example, Mozambique has a significantly more educated and sophisticated civil service corps than at liberation, with people who are committed to changing Mozambique’s prospects for the better. They operate with a much stronger sense of how they see themselves in the world. They feel that global companies must come and talk to Africans on our terms. It’s not us being totally grateful for them coming in, and saying, “I’m going to do this and that for you or for the benefit of your Head of State. Be eternally grateful for that.” That attitude of being eternally grateful for the multinationals’ mere interest in the country is a mind-set that is no longer prevalent and is only evident in limited circumstances.

James I. Mwangi has a similar perspective. He sees the opportunity to study abroad as not only having expanded his horizons but as a small part of a more fundamental generational shift in Africa:

When I went to the U.S. consulate to say I wanted to apply to universities in the U.S. they gave me some brochures for perfectly good state schools. When I told them I wanted to apply to Harvard and the like, they said they were unaware of anyone getting into those schools from Kenya. Now, I don’t expect an official sitting in Nairobi to know every admission into U.S. schools. It was, though, consistent with a mind-set many Africans have even of themselves, of limited possibility and sort of knowing your place. The truth is that Kenyans have been going to Ivy League schools for decades and we are now there and returning in meaningful numbers. It’s part of a much larger story of Africans recognizing larger ambitions, because there are proof points of what is possible. It changes the expectations of ourselves and our governments.

Africa has also been educating its population better at home. Africa is investing in education, with 20 percent of government spending going to education, almost twice the OECD’s 11 percent. This investment is beginning to pay dividends, with primary school enrollment increased from 62 percent in 1999 to 76 percent in 2008.¹¹ Secondary school enrollment went from 25 percent to 35 percent over the same period.¹² Completion rates for primary education in Africa are rising faster than anywhere else in the world.¹³

One proud product of African schools is entrepreneur and philanthropist Tony Elumelu. Tony built United Bank of Africa into a nineteen-country powerhouse. He is now chairman of Heirs Holdings, a proprietary investment company, and of Transcorp, a publicly traded conglomerate that this year entered into a memorandum of understanding with GE to revamp Nigeria’s largest power plant. Tony relied on African schools for his own education, and draws his team largely from today’s graduates, as he explains:

The standard in university in Nigeria was very high. The expectations were high. You had people who were going out in the world from those schools and excelling at the IMF, in literature, and in business, like me. We used to laugh a little bit, actually, at people who went to the U.S., because they were taking the easy way out. Today most of the people I work with are locally trained and meeting or exceeding expectations. There are challenges in the schools, of course, but we are working on them, with training and cultural change.

Neville Isdell, who moved to Zambia with his family at the age of ten, went on to become the CEO of Coca-Cola. He can trace the change in education of the professional class from his youth to today. “The colonial era had left behind very few well-educated people. There had been a deficit of education, ” Neville recalls. “That’s three generations ago. Today, it is totally different. I recently addressed a group of 150 young professionals, all under forty-five, in Dar es Salaam. I recall thinking ‘this is a great, substantive dialogue.’ If I’d closed my eyes, I could have been anywhere in the world. It would not have been better than there in Dar.”

The expanding set of educated Africans does not go unnoticed by those negotiating with them. Aidan Heavey is the CEO of Tullow Oil, a company focused on Africa with a string of exploration finds that is the envy of the sector worldwide. Aidan’s are among the highest-stake negotiations on the continent. “I’ve noticed in the last thirty years a huge difference in the education system in Africa and the people that you’re dealing with, an enormous difference, ” Aidan reflects, “Today you’ll be sitting across the table from somebody and learn the man’s been to Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard and speaks six languages. I barely speak English.”

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