Imported Models Cripple Africa’s Business Education – By Richard Ikiebe

The central failure of business education in Africa today is a failure of intellectual creativity, imagination and independence. The continent’s leading business schools and executive education providers have organised themselves around an imitative ideal: to become an African version of Harvard Business School, or perhaps a managerial equivalent of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

This ambition is usually presented as evidence of seriousness, although it often reveals the opposite; borrowed prestige is not originality.

No one contests that institutions like Harvard and the LSE are unworthy models. They are products of long historical development, embedded in societies with dense institutional infrastructures.

The main error lies in assuming that frameworks produced for one group setting can simply be transplanted into another. Unfortunately. This blunder is widespread in business education in Africa.

Across much of the continent, particularly in the fast-growing sector of “Executive Education”, what is being offered is marketable performance-driven seminars and the endless circulation of managerial jargon.

The mirror form is not management education in the serious sense, although it is usually familiar. Imported business education models are thin in material substance and detached from the conditions of actual economic life.

Beyond their constant pedagogical weaknesses, the models have become a symptom of a broader postcolonial habit of institutional mimicry. Many African states inherited administrative structures and the ingrained assumptions that knowledge becomes authoritative when it arrives from Europe or America.

In the university sector, we measure excellence by proximity to Western institutional templates. Business education has perhaps reproduced this tendency more faithfully than any other area.

The serious consequence is a profound mismatch between what is taught and the business world in which the students operate. For example, a business leader in Lagos does not navigate the same terrain as a corporate executive in London or New York.

The Lagos executive confronts currency instability, erratic infrastructure, informal retail ecosystems, regulatory uncertainties, low-trust institutions, and the constant need to adapt strategy to political and macroeconomic volatility.

By contrast, in most Western markets, management education often assumes institutional stability and asks how firms can maximise efficiency, capture market share, or improve governance processes. In many African markets, the question is more fundamental: how does one build durable organisations in environments where systems are weak, data is incomplete, and market behaviour is mediated by informal social structures?

The proliferation of two-day CEO programmes and weekend “leadership masterclasses” is a commodification of managerial learning. These are not designed to cultivate judgment, which is usually formed through repetition, historical reasoning and disciplined reflection on failure. Genuine business education requires time and encounter with real complexity. No serious leadership capacity is built through the rapid consumption of fashionable concepts.

Business education systems in Africa are producing a class of executives who are rhetorically fluent but strategically underprepared. They are conversant in the language of disruption, resilience, and innovation, yet insufficiently trained in the sociology of the very African markets they inhabit.

This failure is troubling because Africa possesses a rich body of business experience and extraordinary material that ought to form the backbone of its own case method. For instance, in Nigeria, the collapse of the post-paid telecoms model and the rise of prepaid architecture remain a foundational lesson in market adaptation, income volatility, consumer trust, and institutional realism.

There are other examples: the expansion of the MTN Group across multiple African jurisdictions presents a first-rate case in regulatory navigation and cross-border strategy. Dangote Group also offers lessons in scale, vertical integration, political economy, and industrial state formation, while Interswitch and Safaricom offer distinct but equally instructive models of financial infrastructure innovation.

These are all African examples with globally significant cases in strategic management under conditions of institutional asymmetry. Yet they remain marginal in too many curricula. This is the intellectual failure at the heart of the sector as Africa continues to teach itself through borrowed mirrors.

One is not unfamiliar with the counterargument that global standards matter; that international benchmarking protects against provincialism.

The call is not to reject the Harvard or LSE models. But while they are admirable historical institutions, they are not necessarily universal templates. No serious civilisation develops durable institutions by mindlessly imitating the prestige forms of another.

The way forward, therefore, is for African business schools to move from imitation to authorship and originality. They must build indigenous case libraries, grounded in African firms, markets, and regulatory histories. They must integrate economic sociology, institutional analysis and political economy into management education.

They must train executives in finance and strategy but also in how to understand systems – states, markets and trust networks. Above all, they must recover the confidence to produce knowledge rather than merely import it.

The impact of this issue stretches far beyond the arena of business education: how our elites are trained shapes how our economies are governed and in what direction they grow. If executives are educated in frameworks that misrecognise their environment, institutions will be designed poorly, capital will be allocated badly, and policy imagination will remain derivative.

What is at stake, then, is the quality of economic leadership in Africa, not the prestige of business schools. The continent needs institutions capable of thinking from Africa to the world; not clones from the West. When that happens, it will form the difference between education and certification, between imitation and sovereignty, and ultimately between economic administration and genuine development.,

Dr Richard Ikiebe is a Media and Management Consultant, Teacher and Chairman, Board of Businessday Newspaper