I started writing a blog post to resist the urge of doing a thread on this topic but...

...there have been conversations in twitter this morning that makes me want to to weigh in with a thread as the basis of my post titled ”There are no Africa Experts.” It is a fraudulent term.

There are also no Nigeria experts. There are people who know narrow areas of Nigeria and Africa a bit better than others but there is no real expertise if data is still a mirage. There are many knowledge gaps and jigsaw pieces strewn around. Some fit to give part of the picture.

@Jessetheranter said this below today and he is right. Media alone has shown how fragmented Africa is. If you can't find a critical mass with enough interest in specific African content to become a sustainable market, it says two things:

1. We don't have enough data

2. See 1. https://twitter.com/jessetheranter/status/1307976845099503616

The media should be about data first. It shouldn't just provide data, it should be built on data and keep generating data.

Do we have our models wrong? Perhaps. Did we fall into a trap set by precious fraudulent experts? Most certainly.

@TimeyinPI said something that struck me recently.

Before 2014 when the Nigerian economy was rebased, many people and institutions were making decisions and resource allocation based on flawed data.

As an investor, it is alarming but serves us right. We didn't do the work.

About 10 years before 2014, I saw this gap while working for the IFC on Socketworks. I depended on secondary data that also depended on the data of other sources. It was a company that had tried to build a database of Nigerian tech from import data and some limited usage data.

I decided to trust this source more than the regular suspects everyone depended on at that time for African technology market data. That source was a South African company that is is now gratefully defunct. Those people were spewing out rubbish and many people bought it.

Many people ”annoint themselves” with African expertise after they manage to aggregate some data from questionable sources through desktop research. Very few people ever question the sources of these ”respected experts” as they have ”credentials” typically read as ”foreign.”

Africans almost always believe what non-Africans who are not on ground tell them about Africa because...”they have to be correct as they are not biased”. This perception of lack of bias has always been wrong. They typically have had a bias towards an agenda and perception.

I have been asked a number of times to do research to prove a perception that has been formed. Take the term "financial inclusion" for instance, I have always asked what it meant? Did it mean that we didn't do finance before our "benevolent masters" came to teach us about it?

The Igbo apprenticeship system of Imu Ahia probably existed centuries before any of the vocational guilds in Western countries and has also been a well-organized entrepreneurship finance and retail distribution platform. Because it wasn't known, it was termed "informal".

I have an Igbo bias as it was my first language. I also have a market bias as I started trading at age 11 and saw this model work from firsthand experience. I didn't know what it was called until I put two words in Google as an adult "Igbo and apprenticeship" then saw research.

The sad thing is that this research was done by an Igbo man with intimate knowledge of this system he had lived in but it was buried until a white person who heard it mentioned here did his own research and had a TED talk.

That experience taught me a lesson about validation and owning our narrative by basing it on data and not anecdotes. The reason we have so many anointed "African Experts" from the West is that they at least try to gather some data.

In the absence of contrary opinion, these Western authors become "authorities" and Africans once again start quoting them to gain relevance without realizing that they never got the full picture. It was the same people who gave us the size of the Nigerian economy before 2014.

I really don't blame these people as we made them "experts" because of the perception of information scarcity. Each media reporter is a data-gathering resource but somehow very few of them do this properly. They have become subjective opinion sources or rumor amplifiers.

Analysts should analyze data but we end up analyzing each other's opinions and perceptions. This whole thread is also an opinion not based on data and I am the first to admit that I am NOT an expert. We are all just hacks but we can start the process of creating real experts.

@StearsBusiness and @sbmintelligence are on the right path. We need many many more like them.