Systems & Power
Read the Street Before the Masterplan
Plan is a declaration of intent, and the street reveals what the system can achieve. Urban interventions often fail when streets are redesigned before they are properly read. The master...
Systems & Power
How to Read African Cities: Intro
This handbook focuses on a method for reading African cities before any interventions.It does not accept everything that exists as positive but rejects the...
Narrative Control
The Danger of Africa’s Copy-Paste Development
A nation that builds by copying will always arrive late. Africa's mistake is trusting that it can import development.For decades, the continent learnt...
Systems & Power
Education Is Dead in Africa
Education in Africa still exists as an institution, but its system is dead. The curriculum is designed for recall, not reasoning. The classes are one-way....
Systems & Power
Hyper-Focus or Drift
I’ve drifted before. I have seen many people move without vision or direction, just reacting. I realized that reaction is what happens when you...
Systems & Power
Why Leaders Love Towers, not Networks
Leaders are usually judged by output, not by foundations they silently build. A tower stands tall and gives an illusion of progress, but a network...
Systems & Power
System Builders vs. Strongmen
"Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions", Obama told Ghana’s parliament in 2009.A few years earlier, Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana, once a...
Systems & Power
The Right Levers
A week ago, I needed a simple authentication stamp on a Certificate from the Woreda office in Addis Ababa. Getting a simple government service...
Personal Authority
At the Mercy of Gatekeepers
I noticed that my father worries whenever I sit on the computer for a long time. He often studies my screen, my hunched body,...
Systems & Power
Division Urbanism: How Cities Were Quietly Engineered to Separate Us
Title originally written in 2015. Lightly edited in 2025.This essay was my first attempt at naming something I felt but couldn’t yet fully articulate—that...