Education

America spends four times more on its military than it does on education. China spends four times more on education than it does on its military. That’s why China has high-speed rail, a booming middle class, and a seat at every global negotiating table—while America has student debt, crumbling schools, and Donald Trump pacing a courtroom like a TikTok anti-hero.

Kenya—and Africa more broadly—is not even in the same conversation. We don’t just copy colonial education systems—we also photocopy failing ones. We emulate the West’s worst habits while ignoring the strategy behind them. And instead of innovating new frameworks in a shifting world order, we are busy choosing sides and retweeting slogans.

Worse still, we’re obsessed with elections that function more like ethnic censuses, where the masses are goaded into choosing their own wakora—the local patron they will spend the next five years defending, complaining about, or nostalgically comparing to the wakora of the previous regime. Even the five-year term limit is a copy-paste job, borrowed from someone else’s democracy and sold to us like a constitutional handbag.

America may have defunded education, but it weaponized public relations and marketing to sustain its global dominance. It built its economy—and its ego—on a carefully curated myth of exceptionalism. Netflix, Marvel, Ivy League syllabi, even generative AI—all of it, designed and trained on a dataset that looks suspiciously like White America in 1984 with better lighting.

Hollywood didn’t just entertain; it exported ideology. As Edward Bernays, the father of PR, argued, the conscious manipulation of public opinion is a necessary tool of modern government. The U.S. didn’t just build fighter jets. It built dreams. And when the factories left, the fantasies remained.

This is what Joseph Nye later called soft power—the ability to influence others through attraction rather than coercion. But as America’s education system crumbled and its cultural contradictions intensified, it became less of a soft power superstate and more of a reality show with nukes.

China, on the other hand, understood something Africa still doesn’t: you can’t market what you haven’t made. While it too uses PR—Confucius Institutes, panda diplomacy, state-backed media—it never relied on narrative alone. It paired every image with infrastructure, every slogan with a satellite.

While the West was debating gender, race, and cancel culture, China was mass-producing engineers, expanding its university system, and underwriting AI, biotech, and clean tech revolutions. It may not always be admired, but it is increasingly imitated. Why? Because it builds.

This is soft power backed by hard foundations—what international theorist Robert Cox would call “hegemony through consent and capability.” In short: you respect China because it gets things done, not because it asks you nicely.

Africa isn’t just behind. We are out of the race entirely because we still treat education as an afterthought, not an engine. We scramble to please donors with pilot projects, curriculum reforms, and exam result PR while ignoring the strategic role of education in national identity, industrial policy, and intellectual sovereignty.

We don't build pipelines for talent—we build holding cells for unemployed graduates. And now, as the world fights over AI, rare earths, and trade blocs, we’re busy electing tribal bosses with British accents and Swiss bank accounts.

We treat elections as the height of civic duty, even though most of our electoral systems are imported templates with local chaos sprinkled on top. We obsess over the ballot, not the blueprint. We build drama, not direction.

The new global divide is not East vs. West. It is between nations that think for themselves and nations that borrow thoughts. Africa has spent decades importing development models, leadership training manuals, and donor-funded “roadmaps” written in Geneva conference rooms with no Wi-Fi.

We must invest in epistemic sovereignty—the right and ability to generate our own knowledge, define our own priorities, and imagine our own futures. As Gramsci noted in his theory of cultural hegemony, the real power lies in shaping what people believe is possible. And that power is built in classrooms—not in ballot boxes or at campaign rallies.

Africa doesn’t need to become the next America or the next China. But we must stop being everyone’s understudy. We need to become a continent that thinks, makes, teaches, and tells.

Because in the end, true power doesn’t lie in who you vote for. It lies in what your schools teach, what your people build, and whether your children are graduating with ideas that serve your interests—or someone else’s.

Gem Musings is a seasoned International Relations and Public Affairs Strategist with extensive experience in global diplomacy, communication, and policy analysis.