By Chioma Amaryllis Ahaghotu
Africa-Press – Cape verde. Why money that refuses to become culture condemns a people to eternal dependency
African elites are wealthy, but they are not civilizationally rich.
Across history, true elites have never been defined merely by how much they owned, but by what they built that outlived them.
They understood something fundamental: money expires, but culture compounds.
Institutions, ideas, aesthetics, and values are the only forms of capital that survive generations.
This is where African elites stand apart, in the worst way.
Most of their wealth is defensive rather than visionary.
It hides, it flees, it whispers.
Money that cannot be named cannot endow universities.
Wealth that fears scrutiny cannot fund museums, libraries, or ideas that question power.
So instead of being converted into institutions, it is converted into silence, excess, and spectacle, convoys, champagne, destination weddings, private jets, and Instagram philanthropy that evaporates after the photos are taken.
Contrast this with Western and Asian elites.
The Rockefellers did not merely extract oil wealth; they built universities, medical research institutions, public health systems, museums, and foundations that still shape global knowledge today.
The Tatas used industrial wealth to fund science institutes, national airlines, steel towns, and philanthropic trusts that are deeply woven into India’s idea of itself.
Japanese elites embedded wealth into keiretsu, networks that aligned industry, education, and national purpose.
Singapore’s founding elite invested relentlessly in schools, housing, urban planning, and cultural discipline, turning scarcity into a national ethic.
These elites understood something African elites largely do not, that legitimacy is cultural before it is political.
You cannot rule a future you have not helped imagine.
African elites, by contrast, are mostly consumers of culture, not producers of it.
They wear Italian fashion but do not fund local design schools.
They build mansions but not public libraries.
They sponsor beauty pageants but not museums.
They bankroll election campaigns but ignore curriculum reform.
They donate to churches and mosques yet refuse to fund philosophy, history, or critical thought.
Even when philanthropy exists, it is often apolitical and antiseptic, scholarships without institutions, charity without systems, empowerment programs without intellectual backbone.
Nothing accumulates. Nothing endures.
This is not accidental.
Culture can be dangerous. Culture creates independent thinkers. It preserves memory. It defines standards of excellence. And standards eventually become yardsticks by which power is judged.
Insecure elites fear this.
So they prefer patronage to institutions, loyalty to competence, silence to debate. They want citizens grateful, not thoughtful.
A university can question you.
A film movement can expose you.
A historical archive can indict you.
So culture is avoided, underfunded, or deliberately kept shallow.
The result is catastrophic.
When elites refuse to shape culture, others step in.
NGOs write the moral language.
Foreign media frames African reality.
Western academia becomes the primary archivist of African history.
Development agencies define what “progress” looks like.
Pop culture, music, skits, virality, becomes the loudest and sometimes only form of expression left.
This is why Africa exports raw talent but imports frameworks.
Writers win acclaim abroad before being respected at home.
Artists are validated by foreign galleries.
Intellectuals must leave to think freely.
Even African myths, aesthetics, and philosophies are often curated, interpreted, and monetized elsewhere.
And still, African elites do not notice the danger, because they confuse wealth with relevance.
But history is unforgiving.
Elites who refuse to invest in permanence do not survive memory.
No libraries will bear their names.
No doctrines will trace back to their ideas.
No institutions will defend them after death.
Their children will inherit money but no legitimacy, privilege without respect, access without authority.
Meanwhile, the Rockefellers are remembered through universities, the Tatas through nation-building, the Medici through the Renaissance. Their wealth became civilizational infrastructure.
Civilizations are not built by the poor or middle class alone.
They require elites who understand that privilege carries obligation, not to charity, but to continuity.
Not to applause, but to authorship.
African elites will continue to remain rich individuals presiding over fragile societies so long as wealth is hoarded rather than institutionalized, power is exercised without stewardship, and money is divorced from meaning, dominant in the present, absent from the future.
By Chioma Amaryllis Ahaghotu
Source: The Zambian Observer – The Zambian Observer
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