Africa: Wake Up. The gods Will Not Build Our Factories

I believe Africa has reached that point when reverence for the past insults both the present and the future.

We cannot continue, in the twenty-first century, to live intellectually in the Bronze Age and then wonder why everybody else is racing ahead of us.

In 2026, it insults the intelligence to see millions of Africans who still believe the solution to problems created by human incompetence can come through supernatural intervention. The politician goes to church to pray for electricity. The unemployed graduate prays for employment. The sick man is told that his cure is a matter of faith. The poor (majority of us) are promised prosperity if only they sow enough “seeds.” Governments pray for rain, churches organize vigils against poverty, and entire populations are periodically invited to fast so that heaven might solve problems that human beings have stubbornly refused to solve themselves.

Meanwhile, factories remain closed, schools decay, roads deteriorate, power and water supplies remain erratic, and laboratories are empty.

Then somebody announces that Africa needs a miracle.

Robert Green Ingersoll would probably have regarded this spectacle with the same mixture of amusement and exasperation with which he regarded the supernatural claims of the Bible.

Ingersoll’s great offense was that he insisted upon asking questions. He wanted evidence where believers demanded faith, reason where they demanded submission, and moral consistency where they invoked divine authority. Thomas Paine did much the same thing in The Age of Reason.

Neither man was prepared to accept that an ancient story automatically became true because generations of people had repeated it.

That simple intellectual discipline would do Africa enormous good.

Consider the stories we are still expected to swallow without examination. The entire world is said to have been drowned in a flood, with Noah, his family, and a collection of animals saved aboard an enormous wooden vessel. Moses is said to have stretched out his hand and caused the waters of the Red Sea to divide, allowing an entire population to walk through the sea on dry ground. Water became blood. Frogs covered Egypt. Darkness descended. Firstborn children died (“When I see the sign of blood, I will pass over thee”). Manna allegedly fell from heaven. A bush burned without being consumed. Samson acquired supernatural strength and performed feats that would make the strongest modern athlete look like an infirm.

The Bible’s stories of extraordinary violence and supernatural intervention become still more astonishing when examined without the protective fog of reverence.

David, for example, is rewarded with a specified number of Philistine foreskins. Samson kills a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass. The dead are raised, the blind see, the lame walk, and the laws of nature are suspended whenever the narrative requires divine theatre.

And we in 2026 are expected to believe that these stories constitute an adequate intellectual foundation for people attempting to build a modern civilization.

Paine’s question remains devastating: how does a person know that something is a revelation? If he personally witnessed an event, he does not need revelation to know that he witnessed it. If he did not witness it, he possesses no firsthand knowledge. Somebody merely telling him that another person witnessed it does not magically transform the story into direct revelation.

Ingersoll applied the same common sense to the Biblical miracles. His objection was not merely that miracles were extraordinary. It was that the more extraordinary the claim, the greater the evidence required to establish it.

Yet religious credulity reverses the rule. The more unbelievable the story, the more passionately the believer is instructed to believe it.

This is how miracles become children of mendacity.

A natural event becomes a divine intervention. A legend becomes history. An exaggerated tale becomes scripture. A story repeated for a thousand years becomes “undeniable truth.”

And once the story has acquired enough sacred protection, asking for evidence becomes an act of rebellion.

Let us indulge the believers for a moment.
Suppose Noah really built his ark. Suppose the entire earth was drowned and the human race was reduced to one family. Suppose Moses really stood before the Red Sea and watched the waters rise like walls while the Hebrews marched across the seabed. Suppose manna actually fell from heaven. Suppose Samson really possessed supernatural strength. Suppose every miracle in the Bible happened exactly as described.

Now answer a simple question: of what practical use are these miracles to an African in 2026?

Will the Red Sea build a railway from Lagos to Kano? Will Noah’s ark manufacture vaccines in the Ebola-ridden East Africa sub-region? Will manna feed the children going to bed hungry in African villages? Will Samson’s jawbone generate electricity in Dumsor-infected Ghana? Will Joshua’s trumpet build a semiconductor factory in South Africa? Will Elijah’s chariot establish a university in Cameroon? Will the walls of Jericho teach African engineers how to construct earthquake-resistant buildings?

No.
And this is the central absurdity of our predicament. We are arguing endlessly about what happened thousands of years ago while failing to do what needs to be done today.

And, tragically, we do this with the passionate zealotry of the newly-converted.

The Chinese did not wait for the gods to build their factories. The Japanese did not pray their way into industrialization. The Indians did not wait for Krishna to manufacture their satellites. The Europeans did not sit in churches waiting for angels to invent the steam engine. They acquired knowledge, organized capital, built institutions, trained people, experimented, failed, corrected their mistakes, and tried again.

Africa must learn the same lesson.
The Yoruba have said it with a directness that requires no theological interpretation: Òrìṣà tí ńgbọ̀lẹ̀ ò sí; apá ẹni ní ńgbẹni. No god comes to the aid of the idle; one’s own arms are what sustain one. There is no mystery here. Nobody is coming to do your work for you.

And there is another Yoruba admonition that should be permanently nailed to the walls of African homes, schools, and government offices: Orí olórí kì í báni gbéru - another person’s head will not carry your burden.

We cannot permanently outsource the responsibility for our civilization to somebody else’s intelligence, somebody else’s money, or somebody else’s institutions.

The Yoruba have another wonderfully unsentimental proverb: Òṣìṣẹ́ lọ́tá òlẹ. The industrious person is the enemy of the idle.

This is precisely the mentality Africa needs: not the mentality of the supplicant but that of the builder.

Bob Marley understood the problem when he sang, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.”

Those words are more revolutionary than many political manifestos because they identify the prison from which Africa must first escape. Political independence without intellectual independence is merely replacing one set of masters with another. If Africans remain psychologically dependent upon supernatural intervention, foreign charity and external rescue, the flag may change, but the dependency remains.

We must therefore emancipate ourselves from more than colonialism. We must emancipate ourselves from intellectual laziness.

We must stop believing that prayer is a substitute for competence. It is not. Prayer may comfort a frightened person, but it cannot replace the electrician who understands the power grid. Faith may sustain a sick person emotionally, but it cannot replace the surgeon, pharmacist, laboratory scientist, or public-health system. A prophecy may give somebody hope, but it cannot replace an agricultural extension officer teaching farmers how to increase yields.

And certainly no amount of shouting “Amen!” will manufacture a tractor.

This is where the African religious establishment deserves uncomfortable questions. Why are so many Africans being encouraged to pray for prosperity instead of being taught how to create wealth? Why are unemployed young people told to sow financial “seeds” instead of being taught marketable skills? Why are low-income families persuaded that their poverty is principally a spiritual problem while the institutions that produce poverty remain untouched?

There is a particularly cruel irony in asking desperately poor people to give money to wealthy religious institutions in the hope that God will reward them with money.

That is not economic development. It is economic alchemy.

Africa does not need more prosperity theology. It needs prosperity-producing institutions.

It needs schools that teach children how to think, not merely what to recite. It needs universities that produce engineers, scientists, physicians, agricultural experts, mathematicians, and entrepreneurs. It needs vocational institutions that produce electricians, plumbers, mechanics, welders, machinists, and builders. It needs factories. It needs research laboratories. It needs functioning courts. It needs disciplined public servants. It needs politicians who understand that government is not a pulpit for distributing promises but an institution for organizing public resources toward measurable results.

Above all, it needs discipline.
My Yoruba people have always understood that character is the foundation upon which a community rests. Ìwà l’ẹwà - character is beauty. The civilization that Africa needs cannot be built by clever thieves, fraudulent contractors, dishonest officials, and religious hypocrites who loudly invoke God while quietly stealing from the public treasury.

In Yoruba epistemology, rectitude is not an old-fashioned luxury; it is the infrastructure.

A country where contracts are honored, measurements are accurate, engineers do not falsify specifications, doctors do not counterfeit records, judges are not bought, and public officials do not steal public money possesses something more valuable than another cathedral: it possesses civilization.

And there is yet another Yoruba wisdom that speaks directly to our addiction to talk without achievement: Ọ̀lẹ kì í mọ ọgbọ́n - the lazy person does not understand wisdom. It indicts a society that can spend twelve hours praying for prosperity but cannot spend twelve hours acquiring the skills required to create it.

This is why Ingersoll remains relevant. His challenge was ultimately not about Moses. It was about the human mind. He objected to the surrender of reason to authority. Paine’s Age of Reason made essentially the same demand: examine inherited claims. Do not believe something merely because somebody powerful has told you to believe it. Do not mistake antiquity for truth. Do not confuse tradition with evidence.

Africa needs that intellectual revolution desperately.

We have spent too much time asking whether God will save us and not enough time asking what we are doing to save ourselves.

Let the theologians argue about the flood. Let biblical scholars debate whether the Red Sea parted. Let believers settle among themselves whether Samson’s strength was supernatural. Let them debate the number of animals aboard Noah’s ark until the end of time.

But while they are arguing, let Africa build.

Let somebody teach a child mathematics. Let another train an apprentice. Let a farmer learn irrigation. Let an engineer design a better machine. Let a scientist discover a drug. Let a manufacturer produce something Africa currently imports. Let an entrepreneur create employment. Let a government build a power station and keep it working. Let our universities begin to produce knowledge that can be converted into productive capacity.

Let us finally understand that the greatest miracle available to Africa is not a sea parting before Moses. It is an African child acquiring knowledge, discipline, and confidence and using them to build something that did not exist before.

Let me end this with this Yoruba proverb: Apá ẹni ní ńgbẹni. Our own hands must sustain us.

Africa, wake up.
The gods are not coming to build your factories.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com

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