I have followed with keen interest the fiery and essential discourse sparked by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu, in his piece, “African Professors must stop counting publications — And start building nations.” His words, full of impassioned frustration, paint a vivid picture of a disconnect between our halls of academia and the pressing needs of our communities.
It is a frustration many of us share. In response, the equally esteemed Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim Karage offered a powerful and pained rejoinder, arguing, in essence, that the nation has failed its professors long before the professors could be accused of failing the nation.
As a scholar who has dedicated a lifetime to navigating these very contradictions, celebrating the brilliance of African minds while mourning the structural impediments that stifle them, I feel compelled to offer a perspective. This is not a rebuttal to either man, for in their impassioned declarations, both speak a profound truth.
Dr. Asiedu has correctly identified a symptom: a misalignment between academic output and national development. Dr. Karage has correctly identified the disease: a systemic and catastrophic failure of the state to provide the funding, infrastructure, and support necessary for any kind of meaningful, large-scale innovation.
We are standing at a critical juncture, while the debate, as it is often framed, of “publications versus products” is, I fear, a false dichotomy and a distraction. We are arguing about the type of fruit our academic trees should bear, while ignoring the fact that the very soil they are planted in is depleted, and the trees themselves are starved of water. The central issue is not a choice between a journal article and a prototype; it is one of resources, infrastructure, and, most critically, of intellectual and financial sovereignty.
This article, therefore, seeks to move beyond the binary of “commentators versus creators.”
It is a balanced rejoinder that attempts to synthesize these two valid, though incomplete, perspectives. We must first acknowledge the often-invisible legacy of African scholarship that has already shaped the world. We must then unblinkingly diagnose the root cause of our current paralysis, the crisis of funding and the “funder’s agreement” that you and must so wisely identified. Finally, we must chart a path forward, not by pointing fingers, but by defining the precise, interlocking responsibilities of the “Triple Helix” that must save us: our government, our private sector, and our academic community. The goal is not just nation-building; it is the construction of a sovereign African research ecosystem that can, at last, set its own agenda in the algorithm era.
The “Publish or Perish” Paradox: A Symptom, Not the Disease
Dr. Asiedu’s lament that our “libraries are full, but our laboratories are empty” resonates because it feels true. He challenges our engineering professors for importing the machines they teach about and our medical schools for relying on foreign diagnostic kits. This is a powerful critique, but we must, as scholars, ask the foundational question: Why?
The “publish or perish” culture is not a collective, spontaneous decision made by millions of African professors to become irrelevant. It is a rational response to a deeply flawed system, and Dr. Karage is entirely correct. In the global academic ecosystem, publications are the non-negotiable currency of legitimacy. They are the metric used for promotion, for tenure, for professional recognition, and, most importantly, for attracting the very next grant that keeps the lights on, however dimly in the lab.
When an African professor earns a promotion, it is rarely the government or a local corporation that foots the bill for their next research project. Instead, that professor must turn, cap in hand, to the global marketplace of funding. They write proposals to the World Bank, the MasterCard Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Union’s Horizon programmes, the NIH in the United States, or various other international bodies. These organizations, while often well-meaning, have their own strategic priorities. They are not interested in funding a bespoke cassava-processing machine for a village in Oyo or Kumasi. They are interested in a research paper that provides data on malaria prevalence across West Africa, which fits into their global health metrics.
This is the “funder’s agreement” mentioned earlier, and it is the crux of the problem, and the African scholar is bound by it. To secure the $200,000 grant, which is needed to buy reagents, pay graduate assistants, and (if they are lucky) repair the one functioning spectrometer, the scholar must align their research with the funder’s agenda. The deliverable for that grant is almost always a report and, yes, a publication in a high-impact international journal.
The scholar is not “chasing publications”; they are surviving. They are doing the only thing the system allows them to do to remain professionally active.
Dr. Karage’s points about the Nigerian context are, sadly, generalizable across much of the continent. How, I ask Dr. Asiedu, does a professor “invent” a new irrigation system when the university’s power supply is non-existent for twenty hours a day? How does an IT professor “create” local software when the campus internet bandwidth is insufficient to download a simple coding library? How do medical researchers “build” diagnostic kits when their labs lack running water, and their salaries; as Dr. Karage notes, are so meagre that they must take on three other consulting jobs just to feed their families?
The truth is, producing a publication, which requires little more than a brilliant mind, a laptop, and time, is often the only form of output available. It is an act of intellectual defiance in the face of material collapse. To frame this as a moral failure of the professor, rather than a structural failure of the state, is to blame the victim. The publication is not the end goal; it is a signal flare, a desperate message to the world that “we are still here, and we are still thinking,” sent in the hopes that someone will see the light and send a rescue boat in the form of a grant.
Africa’s Legacy of Impact: A Rebuttal to Invisibility
The narrative that African scholarship is disconnected from solutions ignores the profound, world-changing contributions African scholars have made, often against these very odds. Dr. Asiedu’s call for an “Einstein Africa needs” is inspiring, but it overlooks the Einsteins we have already produced and are producing. Dr. Karage rightly lists several Nigerian luminaries like Professor Oye Gurejo in mental health and Prof. Mayowa Owolabi in neurology, whose “Afrocentric Stroke Riskometer” is a perfect example of the innovation Dr. Asiedu calls for. But let us widen this lens, for the story is continent-wide and note that we are not a continent of “commentators.”
When the world faced the terror of Ebola, it was the foundational, decades-long work of Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was on the front lines of the first-ever outbreak in 1976, that informed the global response and the development of effective treatments. His publications were not mere “counting”; they were field reports from a war, and they saved, and will save, innumerable lives.
In South Africa, the husband-and-wife team of Professors Salim Abdool Karim and Quarraisha Abdool Karim, through their Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), conducted the groundbreaking CAPRISA 004 trial. Their research, published in Science, demonstrated that a tenofovir-based vaginal gel could prevent HIV infection in women. This was not just a “paper”; it was a revolutionary moment in global health, a tool of liberation for women, and a product of rigorous African-led science.
When we speak of agriculture, the narrative of a hungry continent belies the work of institutions like the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) at the University of Ghana. Founded with a vision to train African plant breeders in Africa for African problems, WACCI has graduated scores of PhDs who have returned to their home countries and developed dozens of new, high-yield, drought-resistant varieties of cowpea, maize, cassava, and yams. This is nation-building at its most fundamental.
Let us now speak of history and identity. Was the work of Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop, whose rigorous research in physics, history, and anthropology radically re-centered Africa as the cradle of civilization, not nation-building? It laid the intellectual foundation for post-colonial pride and self-conception. Was the work of the late Malawian intellectual Thandika Mkandawire on development, economics, and structural adjustment not a form of “building”? His scholarship provided the critical framework for understanding why previous nation-building projects had failed. And what of the late Professor Thomas Odhiambo of Kenya? He was a scientist who looked at a local problem, insect pests devastating crops, and dreamed of a world-class solution. He founded the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi. He did not “build” a simple machine; but an institution that has become a global leader, producing decades of cutting-edge research on food security and disease vectors like malaria and tsetse flies.
These scholars, and thousands like them, did not see a conflict between publishing and building. While their publications were the blueprints, their research was the foundation. The problem is that their work is the exception that proves the rule, it succeeded despite the system, not because of it. The problem is that for every WACCI or CAPRISA, there are a thousand university departments starved of the very resources that would allow them to replicate this success.
The Sovereignty Imperative: Funding Africa, for Africa
This brings me to the core of our paralysis: the crisis of funding and the path to research sovereignty. Let us know this: an academic agenda, a national agenda, is set by those who pay for it. For as long as African research is overwhelmingly funded by external bodies, our research will, by definition, serve external priorities. This is not a conspiracy; it is a simple fact of economics. The solution, therefore, is not to tell professors to “stop publishing,” but to build an ecosystem where they can choose what to research and how to publish or productize it, based on African needs.
This requires a radical, non-negotiable shift in the attitudes of our own governments and our own private sector.
The Role of Government: From Consumer to Primary Investor
Dr. Karage’s righteous anger at the state is where we must begin. The paltry 5-7% of national budgets allocated to education in many African nations is not just insufficient; it is an act of national self-harm. The African Union’s own “Lagos Plan of Action” (1980) and its repeated declarations (such as the 2006 Khartoum declaration) urged member states to commit at least 1% of their GDP to R&D.
Today, nearly half a century after the Lagos Plan, most African nations invest a fraction of that, often below 0.5% of GDP. By contrast, South Korea and Israel invest over 4.5% of their GDP in R&D, and this is not an abstract number, and it is the difference between a continent that creates and a continent that consumes.
What can governments do? First, they must meet the 1% pledge. This is the paramount objective. This funding must be used to establish, or massively capitalize, National Research Foundations (NRFs), as seen in South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt or Kenya as the case may be. These NRFs must be more than just pots of money, they must be professionally managed, shielded from political patronage, and given a dual mandate. This may include funding “blue-sky” fundamental research that expands human knowledge, and to issue “Grand Challenge” grants targeted at specific, tangible national problems, such as “develop a cold-storage solution for tomatoes that requires no external electricity” or “create a water-purification system for rural communities.”
Second, government must fix the fundamentals, and in this regard, Dr. Karage is right. You cannot ask for 21st-century inventions in 19th-century conditions. Stable electricity, high-speed internet, and functional-infrastructures for universities are not “luxuries”; they are the basic tools of the modern mind.
Third, government must become the first customer for African innovation. Our ministries of health, agriculture, and industry must stop the default practice of hiring Western consultants and importing foreign technology. They must be mandated to issue contracts and commissions to their own local universities. When the Ministry of Agriculture has a problem, its first call should be to the Faculty of Agriculture in any the nations Centres of Excellence, not to a consultant in Paris. This alone would create the demand-pull that Dr. Asiedu craves.
The Role of the Private Sector: From Extractive to Innovative
At this point, we must address the “big African companies”. From my perspective, for too long, the African private sector, particularly our largest conglomerates in banking, telecommunications, and extractive industries, has operated with an extractive or service-based mentality. They import their core technology, they rely on foreign expertise for their high-level challenges, and they remit their profits, and are in large part absent from the R&D ecosystem.
Where is the Dangote Centre for Cement and Materials Science? Where is the MTN Institute for 6G Research? Where is the Safaricom AI and Data Lab? Where is the Standard Bank Institute for Financial Modelling? These companies profit enormously from African markets, and they must, in turn, become co-builders of Africa’s intellectual future.
This is not a call for charity; it is a call for good business. What can they do? First, they can fund research chairs and entire laboratories at universities, focused on their own industry challenges. Second, governments should create “Innovation Tax Credits” that make it far more profitable for a company to fund a local university research project than to import a foreign solution. Third, these companies must build their own world-class R&D centres on African soil, employing African PhDs. This creates the local, high-skill “pull” that stops the brain drain and gives academics a tangible, well-paid alternative to a purely academic career.
The Researcher’s New Compact: From Commentator to Co-Creator
Forging a New SynthesisSo, must African professors stop counting publications? No. A scholar who does not publish, who does not participate in the global exchange of ideas, is a scholar who is intellectually isolated, and doomed. Publications are the seeds of global knowledge. But must they start building nations? Yes, unequivocally, but they cannot do it alone, and they cannot do it without tools.
The fiery debate between Dr. Asiedu and Dr. Karage is not a conflict, but two halves of a single, tragic truth. We are a continent of brilliant minds, trapped by broken systems. Dr. Asiedu has given us the “what”; a continent of creators and innovators. Dr. Karage has given us the “why”; a system that, through neglect and starvation of funds, prevents this vision.
The path forward is a new “Triple Helix” model, a new social contract. Our governments must see R&D not as a line-item expense, but as the single most critical investment in our future sovereignty. Our private sector must evolve from extracting value to creating it, by becoming partners and funders of local innovation. And our scholars must become connectors and translators, bridging the gap between their brilliant minds and the communities they serve.
We do not need to choose between publications and prototypes. We need an ecosystem that understands that the first is the blueprint for the second. Let us stop the blame and start the building. Let us fund our laboratories as robustly as we staff our libraries. Let us reward the professor who patents a new water filter as highly as the one who publishes in Nature. When we do this, we will not need to ask our scholars to build nations; they will, at last, be empowered to do so.
I come in peace.
