OPINION: When you look at why countries like China and India are towering among the world’s largest economies, it’s not just because they have massive populations. It’s because they made a deliberate choice to trust themselves to shape their education systems around their realities, to teach and work in their own languages, and to funnel money into science, engineering, and industries that could lift their people. They stopped waiting for validation from others.

Africa, on the other hand, still tells a different story. We produce brilliant companies like Flutterwave and Jumia, but when it comes to growth, many of them find their home base not in Lagos or Nairobi but in San Francisco or New York. Our stock exchanges should be filled with the names of African innovators, yet too often they’re empty, while Wall Street reaps the benefit. It’s as if our brightest children are born here but move abroad to live their real lives.

This pattern is not accidental it’s a reflection of what we value. Across the continent, billions of dollars flow into politics while our research labs starve. Campaign billboards shine at every street corner, but university libraries run out of basic textbooks. Politicians host endless rallies, while scientists and engineers can’t find funding to turn their ideas into solutions. And when our young people finally graduate, they look around and see no space for them, no ecosystem ready to absorb their talent. So they leave. The brain drain isn’t just numbers it’s the heartbreak of parents watching their children take one-way flights, it’s the silence in villages whose best sons and daughters are building futures elsewhere.

Our universities are stuck in a colonial hangover, producing degrees designed for international approval instead of local relevance. A farmer in Malawi should be seeing the results of Malawian agricultural research in her fields, not relying on imported seeds and foreign consultants. A student in Cameroon should graduate with skills to build industries in Douala or Yaoundé, not feel pressured to use their education as a ticket to Europe. Yet right now, too many of our institutions act like factories for export talent.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine an Africa where money poured into universities the same way it pours into politics. Picture laboratories buzzing with experiments on renewable energy made from African sun and wind, factories turning cocoa into premium chocolate before it ever leaves Ghana, or young engineers in Kigali building electric cars for African roads instead of waiting for imports. Picture a graduate in Nairobi choosing to stay because they see opportunity at home, not because they failed to get a visa abroad.

The African Union has the power to change this story. By creating research funds that rival campaign coffers, by harmonizing financial markets so African companies can raise capital at home, and by protecting industries until they can compete globally, it can signal to Africans everywhere that we do not have to go elsewhere to grow. It starts with political will: the decision to value knowledge and innovation as much as votes and rallies.

At its heart, though, this is not only about economics. It’s about self-belief. Too often, we have been conditioned to think the answers are “out there” in the West, in foreign universities, in imported goods. That mindset is our greatest poverty. China and India grew because they told themselves they could. Africa must learn to do the same.

The resources are here. The talent is here. The youth are restless, eager, waiting. What we lack is not capacity it is faith in our own potential, and the discipline to nurture it. The day Africa decides that its children don’t need to leave to matter, that its ideas don’t need foreign stamps of approval, and that its universities can serve its people first, is the day we stop leaking our future.

Africa’s story is still being written. The question is whether we keep letting others hold the pen or whether we finally pick it up ourselves.