Have you ever been home? Not your house in the suburbs or your apartment in the city. Home home. The place where you can trace your bloodline back through the ground itself. Where your grandfather's name means something. Where the language in your mouth is the language of your ancestors and not something you learned in school.
I haven't. I want to. I really do.
But I was born in Kigali.
I know two Rwandas. The first is the one the world celebrates — the Visit Rwanda campaign emblazoned on Arsenal and PSG jerseys, the NBA partnership, the gleaming streets of Kigali ranked among the cleanest on the continent, a parliament with more women than almost anywhere on earth. It is an extraordinary achievement of image, and the world has rewarded it with investment, standing ovations, and a seat at every serious international table. The second Rwanda is harder to see from a conference stage. It is the Rwanda where Paul Rusesabagina — the hotelier the world celebrated for saving lives during the genocide, the subject of a Hollywood film — was lured onto a plane and woke up in a Rwandan prison. Where Victoire Ingabire flew home from exile in 2010 to run for president and was arrested instead, spending years behind bars for words her government deemed criminal. Where Aimable Karasira built a YouTube following by speaking his mind, was detained, and died in custody on the day he was set to walk free — his family still waiting for answers. Where professionals with advanced degrees navigate entire careers around the invisible boundaries of what can and cannot be said out loud. Rwanda is both my past and my present. I want it to be my future. But until then, it cannot. The risks aren't just "manageable business variables." They are human lives. People too scared to speak up, too scared to say we deserve better. Because in this Rwanda, even that sentence can leave you dead or in a cell.
And before you ask — yes, there was a conference in Kigali in March. There is always a conference in Kigali. A fintech founder stood on a stage and spoke about unlocking Africa's potential. The audience applauded. Outside that conference room, a man imprisoned for running a YouTube channel sat in a cell, unaware he had only weeks left to live. This is Rwanda in 2026 — a country that has mastered the art of the compelling surface. A nation that builds gleaming convention centers and wins international development awards while, behind those walls, it does what authoritarian governments have always done — it makes people disappear, just quietly enough that the conference can continue.
Rwanda is not unique. It is instructive. Across the continent, a new grammar of authoritarianism has emerged — one fluent in the language its Western partners most want to hear. It speaks of innovation and investment, of leapfrogging infrastructure, of homegrown solutions and public-private partnerships. It builds the roads, hosts the forums, courts the development institutions, and sends its ministers to Davos. It has learned, with remarkable precision, exactly how much democratic performance is required to keep the money flowing and the questions at bay. I have worked inside the institutions that send that money. I have sat in the meetings where "political risk" gets weighed against "development impact" and watched the calculus resolve, reliably, in favor of engagement. What gets left out of that calculation has a face. It has a name. It has a YouTube channel that got it killed.
I had been so caught up in what the West was doing — which makes sense. I was educated here. The UN systems are headquartered in Europe and New York. Of course that's where my eyes were. Then RightsCon recalibrated my gaze entirely. Have you ever heard of a government that agrees to host a 2,600-person conference in its capital, signs the agreements, issues the invitations, publicly endorses it the day before — and then cancels it because of a phone call? Not a coup. Not a law. A phone call. From a government so accustomed to surveilling its own citizens, to controlling what they say and what they see, that it couldn't stomach the idea of that conversation happening in a city it couldn't control. So it reached across a border and made it stop. I was one of over 2,600 people who had to cancel. Activists lost funding they had spent months securing. Entire gatherings disappeared overnight. All of it gone because of a phone call on a public holiday from a government that couldn't control the room. And the irony — the almost unbearable irony — is that a digital rights conference got cancelled by one of the world's most repressive governments. This couldn't write itself even if it tried.
But I want to back up, because I didn't always see it this way. I believed in these systems. My mother worked inside them. I grew up watching what they made possible and I wanted to be part of that. I studied international relations in the United States, in the country where many of these institutions were built, and I showed up to the workforce ready to contribute. And then I got into the field. And I started recognizing the programs. Not because they were new. Because they were the same ones my mother had worked on twenty years earlier. The same problems. The same interventions. The same gaps. Why are there three generations of families still living in Dadaab? Why has nothing changed in Kibera after decades of NGO interventions and international attention and donor funding? Why did I read a BBC article about a father who couldn't afford one dollar to take his sick daughter to a doctor — and feel the full weight of what that meant, sitting where I was sitting, living how I was living? That gap. That specific, obscene gap. That's when I understood that something had gone very wrong. Not with the people doing the work. With the work itself.
I am not outside this story. I studied in the country that built these systems. I work inside the philanthropic infrastructure I am describing. But there is a difference between participating in a system and refusing to lie about what it has become. From where I now sit, I can see three distinct actors turning this wheel. The first is the West. The second is the East. The third is the hardest to name because it should know better.
I want to be honest about the West. Because honesty requires me to say thank you. I grew up in Eswatini watching what Western intervention made possible. Friends. Their families. People I know by name who are alive today because of ARV programs that arrived when their own government couldn't or wouldn't deliver. Where governments failed, the West stepped up. That happened. That was real. And it deserves to be said out loud before anything else. But at some point — and I think we are well past that point — you have to look at what you've built and ask whether it still serves the people it was designed for. Not whether it still exists. Not whether the funding is still flowing. Whether it still serves. Africans want to be seen as equals, not as people who need saving. We don't need saving. Not anymore. And the West's greatest failure isn't that it tried. It's that it never updated its idea of what trying should look like.
And yet, there are glimpses of another path. Over the past three years, Namibia has quietly built a case for a different kind of sovereignty: a 2023 ban on exporting unprocessed critical minerals, so that value gets captured at home instead of shipped abroad; a 2025 pledge to subsidize tertiary education so heavily that university becomes accessible to a generation that couldn't otherwise afford it; and, this April, the final payment on its IMF loan — its balance brought to zero. Namibia remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. Unemployment remains staggering. Colonial extraction does not disappear overnight, and even the "free" education promise turns out, on closer reading, to be subsidized and means-tested rather than universal. But something has been building in these small, unglamorous decisions: a government choosing accountability over access, and long-term self-determination over the conditions of its creditors. That is not a solution. But it is a signal. And signals matter.
Because the truth is, Africa's frustration with the West did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged from decades of being told to wait. To liberalize. To privatize. To develop according to frameworks designed somewhere else by people who would never have to live with the consequences if they failed.
And that is what makes the East so compelling. I'll be honest with you, this one is harder for me. Because I understand the appeal in a way I can't dismiss. Where the West arrived with loans and conditions and charity, China arrived with something tangible. Roads. Bridges. Dams. Schools. Infrastructure that you can see and touch and use. Things the continent has needed for decades. I get it. I genuinely do. And I'm still learning what the long-term costs of that exchange actually are — the full picture is buried in confidentiality clauses and deals that governments signed without telling their own people what was in them. What I can tell you is what I can see. I can see a tailings dam collapsing in Zambia in February 2025, unleashing fifty million litres of acidic waste into the Kafue River, cutting off clean water to over 700,000 people. I can see a phone call made on a public holiday that cancelled a digital rights conference because the wrong people were going to be in the room. One phone call. And a government folded. That's not infrastructure. That's leverage. And leverage, in the wrong hands, looks a lot like the thing it was supposed to replace.
There is a word for what happens when the system fails so completely that the most ethical choice is to walk away from it. A family friend spent decades working for one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations — moving her children between cities, between countries, between school systems, giving everything the institution asked of her. She was stationed in Juba, South Sudan — a country with oil wealth significant enough to have built functioning hospitals, schools, and water systems for every one of its citizens. Instead, in 2024, nearly nine and a half million people required humanitarian assistance. Nearly five million of them were children. The government receiving that aid was actively lobbying against international scrutiny of the violence its own forces were committing. She watched. She documented. She filed reports. The mandate of her organization required neutrality — which in practice meant arriving after the massacre, not before it. She took early retirement. Not because she stopped caring. Because staying had started to feel like a complicity. The golden handcuffs, people inside that system call it. She is from Rwanda too. She does not go back.
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed. It just wasn't designed for the people it claims to serve.
At least not anymore. Times have changed. People have changed. Their needs have changed. But the systems have yet to catch up. Whether they want to or not, I honestly don't know.
And then there is the third actor. Harder to name because it should know better. It includes the African diaspora entrepreneur — educated in Western institutions, fluent in the language of innovation and Africa-first vision, building companies that promise to unlock the continent's potential. It includes Africa's own wealthy elite — the billionaires, the continental business leaders, the pan-African capitalists who built their fortunes on this soil, whose families still live here, who speak with genuine passion about African renaissance and continental solidarity. All of them are also in those rooms. Also at those tables. Also lending their presence, their capital, and their credibility to governments whose records they know intimately. This is not ignorance. The diaspora entrepreneur knows which country he is piloting in. The billionaire knows whose hand he is shaking. This is a choice.
I want to be careful here, because the accusation is not: you should have stayed home. Most people in these rooms do not have that luxury, and building something real inside a hard country is not nothing. I know families who take government contracts to build the roads and bridges a country actually needs, because the work has to get done and someone has to do it — and still refuse, in the same breath, to become complicit in what that government is doing to its own people.
They take the job. They do not take the photo.
No ribbon-cutting with the minister. No quote in a press release calling the country a model of progress. No panel where they vouch for a regime they know is jailing people for saying out loud what they themselves say at dinner.
Compare that to a consulting firm booking a conference room in Kigali and telling the world how clean, how developed, how investable the country has become. Same country. Same government. Different transaction. One version takes the work and leaves the government's story alone. The other takes the fee and tells the story for them.
Two truths can sit next to each other without contradiction: the road gets built, and the government building it alongside you does not get your silence as a bonus. The difference I am pointing to is quieter than presence or absence. It is whether your being there requires your silence, or your applause.
Operating inside a system is survival. Standing next to its president and calling it a success story is a transaction. The tell is simple: does staying require you to defend what is happening, or just to keep working despite it?
And it is perhaps the most painful version of the argument because it removes the last excuse. When the West fails Africa, you can point to distance and self-interest. When the East extracts, you can frame it as geopolitics. But when African talent, African capital, and African vision choose to legitimize rather than challenge — to engage without demanding accountability — the wheel keeps turning. And it does so with the blessing of the people best positioned to stop it.
Meanwhile the conferences continue. The applause continues. Rwanda is under sanctions and McKinsey is still booking the venue. The fintech founder takes the stage and speaks about unlocking Africa's potential and the audience nods and the deals get signed and somewhere a family is still waiting for answers about how their person died.
I'll be honest with you. I don't have the answer. I have spent years inside these systems — development, human rights, philanthropy — watching brilliant people apply enormous resources to problems that keep getting worse. I have sat with this long enough to know that anyone who tells you they have the solution is either naive, or selling something, or has never had to live inside the problem. But what I am offering is clarity. The trap exists. It has names and faces. It has a YouTube channel that got someone killed. It has a lawyer shot through his window while his children watched. And the people in the rooms where resources get allocated — the philanthropists, the foundations, the diaspora capital, the impact investors — can no longer say they didn't know.
That's not a small thing. Naming the trap accurately, from the inside, with receipts, is itself an act.
The solution isn't mine to provide alone. But the clarity is.