“If Africa strikes a pose, let Africa be the one to gaze at it — with insider eyes.”
Many of us have grown comfortable with a peculiar habit: waiting for the foreign gaze to interpret Africa back to itself. We love the reports from multilateral agencies, rankings from international consultancies, frameworks designed in boardrooms oceans away from home. These insights carry weight in our daily conversations in ways that homegrown analysis rarely does.
It is not that foreign perspectives are worthless. Global scholarship has given us tools, comparative benchmarks, and methods worth borrowing. But there is a difference between learning from the world and outsourcing our understanding of ourselves to it. Importing insight should never mean outsourcing ownership of the questions that matter most to us.
At its core, this is an old argument dressed in new clothes. Frantz Fanon wrote decades ago about how the colonised subject learns to see himself only through the eyes of the coloniser, objectified by a gaze he did not choose and cannot easily escape. Edward Said extended the idea, showing how entire regions and peoples could be studied, defined, and spoken for by outsiders who positioned themselves as the neutral, knowing observer while the observed remained silent. bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, later wrote of reclaiming the right to look back through what she called an “oppositional gaze” an act of agency in itself.
The through-line is simple: whoever holds the gaze holds power, the power to interpret, to define, and ultimately to decide what counts as true.
This essay argues that if we truly want homegrown knowledge, Nigerian organisations must stop treating postgraduate researchers as suspects and start treating them as partners.
Africa’s greatest asset, I have come to believe, is the capacity to name our own problems, interrogate them on our own terms, and build solutions that fit the shape of our realities rather than theories that have no alignment with them.
Self-agency is Hydra-headed. It does not live only in government policy or in grand declarations about “African solutions to African problems.” It lives in the small, everyday choices organisations make: whom they allow to study them, what questions they are willing to sit with, and whether they see scrutiny as a threat or as a gift.
And yet, look at how little most African businesses actually invest in research that could give them a competitive advantage.
Sponsorship of local academic inquiry is scarce. Partnerships between industry and universities remain the exception rather than the norm. The cliché captures the consequence well: he who pays the piper dictates the dance. When we consistently underfund the people who should be composing our own tunes, we should not be surprised when the music that eventually plays back to us feels foreign and engineered for contexts, incentives, and assumptions that are not ours.
There have been claims that some organisations in Nigeria frown on their employees responding to questionnaires from research students. Most of the studies in question are never frivolous. In organisational behaviour, they typically examine job involvement, organisational justice, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and organisational citizenship behaviour. These constructs sit at the very heart of what makes a workplace competitive or otherwise. This is precisely the kind of insight that should help any employer understand how its people actually experience work, long before turnover figures or productivity slumps force the conversation.
Ordinarily, one would expect organisations to embrace this sort of engagement between higher institutions and industry. A well-designed academic study is, at its core, a free diagnostic tool; rigorous, anonymised, and likely to be more honest than anything an internal HR survey could extract. Precisely because employees trust that outside researchers have no stake and cannot punish. Organisations that understand this hop on the ship gladly, curious to see what the data might reveal about engagement, morale, and the invisible frictions that erode performance.
If this were a one-off, it would hardly be worth a column. But it is not. It is a pattern that repeats itself across sectors, and it reveals a contradiction we rarely examine closely. We are, as a society, quick to clamour for homegrown researchers, quick to insist that African problems deserve African scholars working with African frameworks and African data, rather than conclusions from elsewhere. Yet in the very same breath, we make data collection an obstacle for the students and academics meant to engage.
How can we claim to want indigenous knowledge production while treating the very producers of that knowledge, our own postgraduate researchers, as suspicious outsiders to be managed rather than partners to be engaged?
It is the equivalent of demanding that a garden grow while refusing to water it, then complaining that the imported fruit tastes better.
Some of this reluctance is not simply institutional caution; it is cultural. Nigeria, like much of Africa, carries strong collectivist and hierarchical values, in which information is often treated as a form of power to be guarded rather than a resource to be shared. Deference to authority discourages the kind of open, bottom-up disclosure that good research depends on. Employees fear that honest answers might be traced back to them. Managers fear that unflattering findings might embarrass leadership or invite regulatory attention. Both instincts are understandable, even human. But culture is not destiny, and understandable is not the same as excusable.
In fact, transparency itself deserves to be studied as seriously as any other organisational variable, not merely lamented in op-eds like this one as an immutable national trait, but examined empirically. What predicts an organisation’s willingness to be studied? What incentives shift that willingness? What is lost, in measurable terms, when transparency is withheld?
The behaviour reminds one, oddly enough, of junior secondary school. You remember the type: the pupil beside you during a test who shields their exercise book with a curved arm, or worse, who deliberately whispers a wrong answer when you ask for help, protecting their own ranking at the expense of collective learning. It was petty then, and it remains petty now, except the stakes are no longer a classroom test but the credibility of an entire knowledge ecosystem.
There is a similar secrecy baked into how many Nigerian businesses relate to scrutiny — an instinct that recoils from openness as though transparency were a liability rather than a form of accountability, and indeed a form of confidence. Organisations that are secure in how they treat their people rarely fear being studied. It is often the ones with something to hide, or something to fix, that build the highest walls.
If we are serious about moving away from borrowed wisdom toward solutions that genuinely fit our problems, this culture has to change — and it will not change through goodwill or moral appeals alone. It requires deliberate policy: regulatory bodies, professional associations and universities should establish clear guidelines that make participation in legitimate academic research an expectation rather than a favour; ethics review boards should certify studies as low-risk and non-competitive; professional bodies could incentivise member organisations that open their doors to researchers; and business schools must build stronger, more structured bridges with industry so that research is understood as a mutual investment rather than an intrusion.
None of this requires organisations to surrender confidential or commercially sensitive information. Well-designed research protects identities, aggregates data, and anonymises findings as a matter of course. It requires only a shift in posture from suspicion to curiosity, from gatekeeping to genuine partnership.
Nigeria is not alone in this. Across much of the continent, similar stories repeat themselves: ministries that decline to release data that would embarrass no one but themselves, corporations that treat their own operational statistics as state secrets, and institutions that would rather commission a foreign consultancy to validate a decision already made than open their processes to a local researcher who might ask harder, more inconvenient questions. This is worth naming plainly, because the instinct to protect African data from African eyes, while remaining comfortable handing it to foreign auditors and multinational partners, is its own quiet contradiction.
That distrust deserves interrogation. Perhaps it stems from a fear that a local researcher, embedded in the same social and professional networks, is more likely to gossip, to leak, to use findings against a former employer or a rival firm. Perhaps it is simply inertia, an absence of established norms around research participation, so that “no” becomes the safest, laziest default. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: African researchers who need African data to answer African questions are left circling closed doors, forced instead to rely on smaller, less representative samples, or worse, to abandon locally relevant questions altogether in favour of ones that can actually be studied.
Africa cannot gaze at its own reflection with insider eyes if it keeps covering the mirror. We cannot build the homegrown scholarship we say we want while starving it of the very data that gives it life. Agency, in the end, begins with access, and access begins with the courage to be studied, questioned, and occasionally made uncomfortable by what the data reveals.
If Africa is serious about interpreting itself with insider eyes, our organisations must stop covering their books during the test and start letting African researchers read the pages.
