When the Expert Leaves, Who Do We Ask?

“So ask the people of knowledge if you do not know.” ~Surah An-Nahl, 16:43

The Quran draws a line between two conditions that modern culture routinely treats as the same. Not knowing is the human starting point; it is not a failure. Refusing to seek is the failure. The verse does not instruct believers to become experts in everything. It instructs them to find those who know and ask them genuinely. That instruction is the foundation on which every professional institution humanity has built rests: medicine, law, engineering, governance. Each of these fields exists because tacit knowledge accumulated over time in specific people cannot simply be downloaded from a text.

Michael Polanyi, the philosopher of science, identified this quality precisely. He called it tacit knowledge: the expertise that cannot be fully written down, only transmitted person to person through supervised practice, correction, and mentorship. A surgeon learns from a surgeon. A judge learns from a judge. The accumulated judgement of a trained professional contains layers of pattern recognition that no certificate captures. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist whose research on expertise underpins much of what we understand about elite performance, demonstrated that expert mentorship is the most reliable mechanism through which exceptional competence is produced. The mentor does not just teach content; the mentor calibrates the learner’s judgement against a standard that only lived experience can supply.

Ghana is losing this knowledge at a rate that should alarm anyone responsible for public health. In 2025, only two out of 25 medical doctors reported for duty in the Oti Region. The remaining 23 had either migrated or declined to take up rural postings. A 2023 study found that 63 per cent of Ghanaian health workers intended to migrate, mostly to OECD countries. What leaves with each doctor is not just a qualification they earned and its face value or earned identity. Rather, It is the years of tacit clinical knowledge about the disease patterns, community contexts, and resource constraints of Ghanaian healthcare settings. That knowledge cannot be recovered by recruiting a replacement from a different country or a different context. When a community loses its experienced clinicians, it also loses the mentorship pipeline that would have trained the next generation of Ghanaian practitioners to a Ghanaian standard. Polanyi’s insight explains why this loss compounds: each departure removes a node through which tacit knowledge would have passed. The inspirational value to the young in society, they constitute, does not come into play yet.

Globally, the crisis runs in a different but related direction. Misinformation and disinformation rank as the second most severe global risk over the next two years, after geoeconomic confrontation. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report describes them as an accelerant that makes every other risk worse. The mechanism is specific: fabricated authority has replaced genuine expertise in enough spaces that citizens can no longer reliably identify who the people of knowledge actually are. Fake experts are not simply wrong; they occupy the position the verse describes as the destination for a genuine question, and they return harmful answers dressed in the vocabulary of authority. When the space where expert knowledge should sit is filled with manufactured credibility, the Quranic instruction becomes structurally difficult to follow. Not because people have stopped seeking, but because seeking now requires the prior skill of discerning who is genuinely worth asking.

This is why the verse’s instruction remains urgent in both directions. Ghana needs the conditions that retain its people of knowledge long enough for Ericsson’s mentorship pipeline to function. The world needs the epistemic infrastructure that allows people to find genuine expertise and trust it. Both are political problems. Both have institutional solutions. Both begin with taking seriously the idea that knowledge held by specific, trained, experienced people is a public good; and that a society which allows that good to drain away or be drowned out by noise has not made a neutral choice. It has made a costly one.

Today, identify someone whose knowledge exceeds yours in an area that matters. Ask them a genuine question. The verse treats this as a duty. Ericsson’s research confirms it is also a method. Polanyi’s philosophy explains why it cannot be replaced by any other.

Issaka Sannie
Zongo Caucus Coordinator for the NDC UK and Ireland Chapter.