Africa Must Not Just Follow History; It Must Learn To Shape It

Interview with Colonel Samuel Kamé-Domguia, on Disruptive Strategic Thinking, the Blue Economy and Africa’s Future Leadership

1. You’ve spoken about your very humble beginnings as a “rats hunter in Baham”. How did that experience shape your worldview and your determination to become a “game changer” for Africa?

In the hills of Baham, a boy hunting rats does not know that he is being trained in strategy. He only knows that his family must eat. But look at what the hunt actually demands. You cannot succeed by force, so you learn to read terrain. You cannot command your target, so you learn anticipation — positioning yourself not where the rat is, but where it will be. You fail constantly, so you learn to treat failure as information rather than as a verdict. Patience, observation, positioning, foresight: I was practising the grammar of strategy years before I could have spelled the word.

I have never hidden that chapter of my life. I consider it one of my most serious qualifications.

It also gave me the distinction that has organized my entire intellectual journey. My village was full of intelligent people. What it lacked was not talent but a system capable of converting that talent into opportunity. Poverty, I understood, is not a deficit of intelligence. It is a deficit of conversion — the absence of an architecture that transforms what people have into what people need.

Years later, I recognized the same truth at the scale of a continent. Africa is not poor. A continent holding the world’s youngest population, immense mineral and agricultural wealth, and one of the largest maritime domains on Earth cannot honestly be called poor. It has been poorly organized to convert extraordinary endowments into lasting prosperity. The missing element has rarely been resources. It has been strategic architecture: long-term thinking, institutional continuity, the machinery of conversion.

Baham taught me one more thing. As a child I did not know the word “geostrategy,” but I understood instinctively that where you are born shapes what becomes possible for you. Nations obey the same law. Geography does not dictate destiny, but it defines the strategic possibilities that leadership either exploits or wastes. Much of my professional life has been an attempt to make Africa read its own map differently — to see, in its oceans, seas, lakes and waterways, not empty space but corridors of trade, platforms of innovation, sources of food, energy and geopolitical weight.

This is why I lost interest, early on, in treating symptoms. In the Cameroon Navy, at the African Union, alongside the Regional Economic Communities, I have always tried to replace one question with another. Not “how do we solve today’s problem?” but “what system keeps reproducing this problem, and how do we redesign it?” A project solves a problem for a season. An institution solves it for a generation. An idea, if it is deep enough, can solve it for a civilization. That hierarchy explains everything I have chosen to work on.

People ask how I remain optimistic. Because I have witnessed transformation from the inside. If a boy who hunted rats to feed his family could later contribute to continental strategy and sit with heads of state, then no African child’s starting point is a prophecy. My story is not remarkable because of who I am. It is remarkable because of what it proves.

And it proves this: the most dangerous poverty is not the absence of money. It is the absence of vision. Money runs out and can be replaced. A horizon, once lost, condemns everything.

2. You are credited as the “father of the geostrategic thinking with regard to Africa’s Oceans and Seas”. Can you walk us through the moment you first conceived the idea of the 2050 AIM Strategy and the “Ocean/Blue Economy” for the continent? What was the initial reaction to this groundbreaking concept?

Here is a paradox worth sitting with: Africa is the only great maritime continent that spent the better part of a century behaving as if it were landlocked.

Thirty-eight of its fifty-five states touch the sea. Roughly ninety percent of its trade moves by water. Its maritime zones stretch across the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. And yet, when I examined our strategic documents as a naval officer, I found agricultural policies, mining codes, road master plans — and, on the ocean, an almost perfect silence. Analysts call this “sea blindness.” I came to see it as something more precise, and more troubling.

The maritime infrastructure Africa inherited was never designed to serve Africa. Colonial economies needed our coasts for one function only: departure. Ports were built as exits for raw materials, not as gateways of power. Railways ran from mine to harbour, not from African market to African market. At independence, we inherited not only that physical architecture but the mental map that came with it — a map on which the sea appears as the edge of the world rather than the beginning of it. We decolonized the land, and forgot to decolonize the map.

The 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy, which I had the honour of coordinating and which African Heads of State and Government adopted in January 2014, was my generation’s attempt to redraw that map. Three design decisions made it something other than a policy paper.

First, it refused to treat the sea as a sector. The maritime domain was framed as a strategic operating system — one framework connecting security, trade, industrialization, food sovereignty, energy, science and continental integration, at a moment when the phrase “Blue Economy” had barely entered international vocabulary.

Second, it carried a genuinely disruptive concept: the Combined Exclusive Maritime Zone of Africa, CEMZA — the idea that fifty-five fragmented national waters should ultimately be thought of as one continental maritime space. That single reframing converts a scattering of modest jurisdictions into a collective asset of global weight. It is the maritime equivalent of the continental free trade area, and in the long run perhaps more consequential.

Third, it changed language deliberately, because words build institutions before institutions build anything else. Speak only of protecting the sea and you create defensive agencies. Speak only of exploiting it and you create extractive ones. Speak of an integrated Blue Economy and you begin, almost inevitably, to design ecosystems of value creation.

The reactions? Honest scepticism, mostly. Some colleagues grasped the implications at once and became allies. Others asked, in good faith, whether the ocean deserved priority on a continent wrestling with poverty, health and education. My answer never varied: these are not rival priorities, because the sea is an enabler of every one of them. Cheaper transport makes industry competitive. Secure sea lanes attract capital. Efficient ports are what will make the African Continental Free Trade Area physically real rather than legally elegant.

The hardest resistance was never technical. It was the quiet settlement many of our states had made with a peripheral role — exporting raw materials in ships we did not own, under flags that were not ours, insured and financed elsewhere. Strategies can be drafted in months. Mental settlements take a generation to break.

Has it begun to break? Judge by what followed. The African Union proclaimed 2015 to 2025 the Decade of African Seas and Oceans. It instituted the African Day of Seas and Oceans on 25 July. In 2016 it adopted the Lomé Charter on maritime security, safety and development. Twenty years ago, none of this existed in Africa’s strategic vocabulary; today no serious conversation about the continent’s future can ignore the sea.

That, in the end, is how I measure a strategy. Not by how often it is quoted, but by whether it changes the questions leaders ask before they decide. We stopped asking only “how do we protect our waters?” and began asking “how do we create durable wealth from our maritime space?” Between those two questions lies an entire change of civilization.

3. The 2050 AIM Strategy introduced the concept of the Blue Economy to Africa. What has been the most significant challenge in shifting the mindset of African leaders and policymakers from viewing the ocean merely as a resource to seeing it as a core pillar of economic strategy?

One sentence summarizes twenty years of struggle: the ocean functions horizontally, and our governments are built vertically.

One ministry manages fisheries, another ports, another the navy, another environment, another tourism. Each performs its mandate honourably. None sees the maritime domain whole — and fragmented governance reliably produces fragmented outcomes. So the first battle was neither political nor financial but conceptual: persuading states that the sea is a single strategic ecosystem requiring integrated governance answering to the highest level of the state, not a set of files distributed among line ministries.

The second battle was harder, because it concerned perception itself. Nations defend only the wealth they can see. When African decision-makers count national riches, they instinctively count what is visible from land — mines, forests, oil fields, harvests. The sea is invisible capital, absent from the mental balance sheet. So I learned to make it visible with numbers that hurt.

Africans own barely more than one percent of the world’s shipping tonnage, while ninety percent of African trade travels by sea. Our cargo moves in vessels we do not own, financed by banks we do not control, insured by companies headquartered elsewhere, registered under foreign flags, classified by foreign societies. Every year, billions of dollars in freight, insurance and maritime services generated by African commerce are captured outside Africa. This is not a statistic to lament. It is a structural transfer of wealth, functioning silently, annually, like an invisible tax on the entire continental economy — and it is a strategic vulnerability, because sovereignty is indivisible. No nation is fully sovereign on land while structurally dependent at sea.

The third battle is against a misconception I still encounter everywhere: that the Blue Economy is a coastal agenda. It is not. A logistics firm in N’Djamena, a software house in Kampala, a bank in Bamako, a manufacturer in Kigali — all can capture value in maritime chains, because modern economies are woven together by transport, finance and technology. This is why I insist that Africa abandon the very categories of “coastal” and “landlocked” states and think instead of one continental maritime system in which every nation holds a stake. That is the deep logic of CEMZA applied to economics.

And there is a final battle, perhaps the decisive one: preventing the Blue Economy from becoming a new label on an old pattern. I think of it in generations. The first generation recognized the ocean as an opportunity — that battle is largely won. The second must industrialize it. The third must innovate within it. The fourth must lead it technologically. If we stop at the first — more fish landed, more ships received, more licences sold — we will simply have repainted extraction and dependency in blue.

Because the future of Africa’s maritime economy will not be determined by the quantity of fish in our waters or the number of ships calling at our ports. It will be determined by whether we design vessels, manufacture equipment, master marine biotechnology, produce oceanographic data and build companies that compete globally. The twentieth century rewarded resource-rich nations, and even then unevenly. The twenty-first will reward knowledge-rich nations without exception. That is the mindset shift that remains unfinished — and it is the one I still fight for every day.

4. Based on your experience coordinating a continental strategy, what do you see as the most crucial role for African think tanks in shaping high-level policy like the AU’s 2050 AIM Strategy, and how can they become more effective “brokers of evidence” to ensure their research actually translates into actionable policy for governments and the AU?

Africa does not lack knowledge. It lacks a transmission system between knowledge and power.

Every year the continent produces thousands of studies — many technically sound, some genuinely brilliant — that never alter a single decision. They are launched, applauded, shelved. Knowledge that does not change decisions has not yet fulfilled its purpose; it is potential energy waiting for a mechanism. Building that mechanism is the real vocation of a think tank. Its mission is not to produce reports. Its mission is to change the quality of strategic decision-making. A think tank should not be a library of ideas. It should be an architect of public choices — and it should be measured accordingly: one study that changes a national strategy outweighs twenty that are merely cited.

Coordinating a continental strategy taught me why so much good research dies on arrival, and the reason is rarely quality. It is time. Policymaking and research run on different clocks. A minister decides within a ninety-day political window; a research programme matures over three years; an electoral cycle resets priorities every four or five. Evidence has a shelf life, and most of it expires in transit. The institutions that actually shape policy are those that synchronize their production with the moments when decisions are genuinely open — budget cycles, summit agendas, treaty negotiations, crises. Influence, I learned, is less a problem of intelligence than a problem of synchronization.

This is why I find the fashionable phrase “evidence broker” necessary but insufficient. What Africa needs are strategic translators — institutions fluent in three languages at once: translating science into political language, political priorities into research agendas, and continental visions into policies a finance ministry can actually budget. Whoever masters that triple translation sits, in effect, inside the decision.

And translation must be completed by what I call strategic engineering. A diagnosis, however rigorous, is decoration until it comes with an implementation pathway: institutional roadmap, financing model, legal reforms, indicators, risk assessment. Whenever I contributed to continental or regional strategies, this was my discipline — never describe a problem without designing the machinery of its solution. A strategy that cannot be converted into budgets, laws and institutions is not a strategy. It is an aspiration with a table of contents.

Beyond method lies architecture. Africa’s defining challenges — maritime security, climate, artificial intelligence, trade, transnational crime — ignore borders, yet our research ecosystem remains obstinately national. Imagine instead a permanent pan-African network of think tanks, universities and innovation hubs working on shared strategic priorities: collective intelligence at the service of the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities, exceeding what any single institution could produce. The challenges are systemic; the response must be too.

One more thing, often forgotten. Transformative ideas survive only when societies understand them. Research that circulates solely among experts is fragile; research embraced by entrepreneurs, journalists, teachers and young innovators becomes political demand — and political demand is what accelerates reform. A think tank that speaks only to ministers has half a voice.

The next generation of African research institutions should therefore not merely analyse the future. They should help design it — with enough intellectual courage to produce concepts the rest of the world studies, rather than forever annotating frameworks designed elsewhere. The world does not advance on repeated ideas. It advances when someone, somewhere, proposes a better paradigm. There is no reason that someone should not be African.

5. What are the biggest obstacles African think tanks face—particularly regarding reliance on external funding and foreign agendas—and what advice would you give them to become more sustainable, independent, and focused on generating homegrown research and innovation?

The deepest form of dependency is not financial. It is answering, brilliantly, questions you did not choose.

Africa’s problem has never been intellectual capacity; the continent is full of first-rate researchers and analysts. The problem is the political economy of knowledge production. Whoever finances research influences which questions are asked, which issues receive attention and, sometimes, which conclusions are considered acceptable. This is a universal reality — no continent escapes it — but its consequences weigh more heavily on Africa because a large share of our research funding still originates outside the continent.

Let me be precise, because nuance is everything here. The problem is not external partnership; international cooperation has produced real value and will continue to. The problem is structural dependency — the threshold beyond which an institution can no longer set its own intellectual priorities. Accepting funding is one thing. Outsourcing agenda-setting is another. A continent cannot achieve strategic sovereignty without first securing intellectual sovereignty, and intellectual sovereignty begins with the sovereignty of the question.

There is also a wound we inflict on ourselves: the project mentality. Too many institutions live from donor project to donor project, perpetually reshaping themselves to fit the next call for proposals — productive in the short term, hollow in the long term. A think tank should not survive from grant to grant. It should build an enduring intellectual institution capable of shaping policy across decades, the way great schools of thought outlive their founders.

My advice is therefore a discipline, not a slogan. Call it a sovereignty rule: no single funder should ever hold a dominant share of your budget. In practice that means deliberately combining core public support governed by an independence charter; commissioned studies for a private sector whose competitiveness depends on good strategy; advisory services and executive education that generate revenue while compounding credibility; university partnerships; and — decisively — African philanthropy. This continent now produces entrepreneurs of global scale. Endowing African knowledge institutions should become their signature contribution to history, as it was for the industrialists who endowed the great research institutions of other continents. Financial diversification is not an accounting strategy. It is an intellectual freedom strategy.

The independence thus won must then be spent on the right kind of research. We have become the world’s leading experts in diagnosing our own underdevelopment — eloquent cartographers of insecurity, unemployment and governance deficits. Necessary work, but no longer sufficient. The twenty-first century will reward those who design solutions, not those who document problems. So the question must change: not “why is Africa behind?” but “which institutional innovations, technologies and policy instruments allow Africa to leapfrog?” I want to see think tanks operate as laboratories where Africa prototypes its future — testing governance models, industrial policies and financing mechanisms under rigorous conditions before they become national policy.

And invest in the young — seriously, structurally, now. We wait for researchers to accumulate thirty years of experience before entrusting them with strategic questions, while the technologies redrawing the world belong to their generation, not ours. Senior scholars should mentor without monopolizing. The objective is not to produce famous individuals. It is to build enduring African schools of strategic thought — institutions with succession, doctrine and memory.

Do all this, and African think tanks will cross the threshold that matters most: from importers of paradigms to exporters of ideas. Why should the next influential theory of sustainable development, maritime governance or digital sovereignty not be conceived in Dakar, Kigali or Yaoundé? That is not intellectual nationalism. It is intellectual confidence — and it rests on a truth every civilization eventually discovers: natural resources build economies, but ideas build civilizations.

6. You’ve previously highlighted the issue of foreign domination in Africa’s shipping industry, stating that ships should be “built by Africans, in Africa”. Where do think tanks fit into developing the local capacity and technology needed to achieve this vision?

Take any vessel berthed in any African port and read it as a document.

Its hull is a sentence about metallurgy. Its engines are a sentence about precision manufacturing. Its bridge electronics speak of software and satellites; its insurance certificate, of financial markets; its classification papers, of technical standards; its officers’ licences, of academies and examination systems. A ship is a floating X-ray of the civilization that produced it — the final product of metallurgy, naval architecture, digital systems, law, finance, universities and thousands of highly skilled professions converging in a single object. Shipbuilding is not an industry. It is the convergence of many industries, which is precisely why mastering it matters: a nation that learns to build ships has, in the process, learned to do almost everything else.

So when I say Africa’s ships should increasingly be designed, built and maintained by Africans in Africa, people hear “shipyards,” and they hear too little. I am describing an industrial civilization.

But ambition without sequencing is rhetoric, and no maritime power in history began with supertankers. The realistic African ladder has rungs. First, capture the ship repair and maintenance market: thousands of vessels call at African ports each year and then sail elsewhere for repairs — revenue leaving the continent for want of dry docks and certified skills, the lowest-hanging fruit in the entire maritime economy. Second, move into ship conversion and the construction of smaller specialized vessels — fishing boats, ferries, patrol craft, offshore support ships — for which African demand already exists. Third, climb toward complex construction and, ultimately, naval design and engineering, where the highest value and the deepest autonomy reside. Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco already stand on different rungs of this ladder. The task is to climb it deliberately, together.

Where do think tanks fit? In four roles, each indispensable.

They must dismantle the fatalist narrative — the quietly accepted idea that sophisticated manufacturing belongs elsewhere, that exporting iron ore and importing ships is a law of nature. History testifies against that fatalism: every industrial power began with a deliberate political decision to master increasingly complex technologies. That decision has never been forbidden to us. It has merely never been fully taken.

They must map the knowledge ecosystem before governments announce projects. Shipbuilding fails without naval architects; naval architects do not emerge without strong universities; universities do not excel without research funding tied to industry; industry does not expand without finance; finance does not flow without predictable policy. Everything is connected, and think tanks are uniquely placed to expose these interdependencies and force coherence on ambitions that would otherwise remain press releases.

They must practise technological foresight. The maritime industry is being rebuilt before our eyes — autonomous vessels, digital twins, smart ports, additive manufacturing, green fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen. Because these technologies are young, Africa is not condemned to retrace the century-long industrial path of older powers; we can enter directly at the next generation. But leapfrogging is never spontaneous. It must be anticipated, and anticipation is precisely the trade of a serious think tank.

And they must think continentally, because here lies a truth with the shape of a paradox: no African country can build a globally competitive maritime industry alone — and all of them together cannot fail to. One nation has steel; another, engineering schools; another, deep-water ports; another, financial depth; another, digital talent. The missing asset is not capacity but strategic integration. Think tanks should design these continental maritime value chains — identifying complementarities, encouraging specialization — rather than blessing fifty-five parallel national ambitions, each doomed to sub-scale.

The end goal was never vessels for their own sake. It is a knowledge-based maritime economy generating high-value employment and strategic autonomy — a continent that defines itself no longer by what it exports raw, but by what it designs, builds and sells to the world. When the first ocean-going ship conceived, engineered and constructed entirely by Africans slips into the water, it will carry more than cargo. It will carry proof.

7. You’ve noted that the African Development Bank is committed to supporting the private sector in this field. How can African think tanks and policy institutes work with financial institutions to create a more conducive environment for investment in the Blue Economy?

Let us begin by correcting a myth. Capital is not afraid of Africa. Capital is afraid of incoherence.

Investors do not flee risk — pricing risk is their profession. They flee environments they cannot read: shifting regulations, fragmented licensing, opaque institutions, strategies that change with every cabinet. The first task, therefore, is not to attract money but to reduce uncertainty — and reducing uncertainty is intellectual work before it is financial work. That is where think tanks earn their seat at the financial table.

People assume development finance begins with money. It begins with ideas made bankable. Before any institution finances a port, an aquaculture cluster or a maritime industrial zone, someone must demonstrate that the venture is technically viable, economically profitable, environmentally sustainable and institutionally credible. That “someone” should increasingly be African think tanks — closing the knowledge gap between policymakers, investors and development banks, and helping financiers distinguish projects that are politically attractive from projects that are economically transformative. The two categories overlap far less often than official speeches suggest.

Africa’s chronic weakness in this dialogue is that we present projects when investors buy ecosystems. A port, by itself, is not an investment strategy. Neither is a shipyard, nor a fishing harbour. Capital wants to see the whole organism: where inputs originate, who supplies technology, how products reach markets, which rules apply, how risks are allocated, what returns are realistic over what horizon. Moving governments from a project-based to an ecosystem-based approach requires exactly the multidisciplinary intelligence — economics, law, engineering, environmental science, logistics — that a serious think tank exists to provide.

Second, work on the barriers before inventing incentives. Private investment in the Blue Economy is throttled less by an absence of capital than by regulatory uncertainty, weak maritime insurance markets, scarce long-term finance and shortages of certified skills. Removing structural obstacles routinely generates more investment than any subsidy. Governments do not create innovation; entrepreneurs do. Governments create — or destroy — the conditions in which innovation becomes possible.

Third, Africa needs financial instruments engineered for the ocean’s particular risk profiles and long time horizons. The Seychelles proved the point in 2018 by issuing the world’s first sovereign blue bond — an African state innovating financially at global level. That logic deserves scale: blue bonds, blended finance, guarantee facilities, blue carbon markets, venture capital for ocean technologies, and above all dedicated project-preparation facilities. For the true bottleneck in African infrastructure finance is rarely capital; it is the scarcity of well-prepared, bankable projects. Think tanks can evaluate these instruments, adapt global experience to African conditions and become, in effect, strategic partners in de-risking — through sectoral risk assessments, technology evaluations, scenario modelling and regulatory reform proposals.

One principle must govern everything: finance follows strategy; it never replaces it. Too many governments reshape their priorities to fit whatever funding window happens to be open. The order must be reversed — define the long-term strategic objective first, then mobilize capital to achieve it. Without strategy, finance is reactive. With strategy, finance becomes transformative.

The division of labour, in the end, is clean. Financial institutions provide capital. Governments provide leadership and predictability. Entrepreneurs create value. Think tanks connect the three through evidence, foresight and design. When those four forces align, investment stops being a transaction and becomes what it should always have been: an instrument of structural transformation — the financing not of projects, but of a vision of an Africa that produces, innovates and competes from a position of confidence.

8. Looking ahead, what are the next frontiers for the African maritime and Blue Economy agenda beyond the 2050 AIM Strategy’s initial framework? What new challenges or opportunities should African think tanks be researching right now?

A strategy is not a monument. The 2050 AIM Strategy was an opening move, never a destination — no document written in one decade can anticipate every technological, geopolitical and climatic rupture of the next four. Its authors’ deepest hope was always that a following generation would find it insufficient.

That moment has arrived, and I can name the frontier: after the Blue Economy, the Blue Intelligence Economy — an economy in which data, knowledge and technology become more valuable than the physical resources themselves.

Consider how maritime power has been counted across history. For centuries, in ships. In the twentieth century, in ports, fleets and naval tonnage. In the twenty-first, it will be counted in information. Whoever controls maritime data will influence maritime trade. Whoever masters ocean observation will govern marine resources in fact, whatever the law says. Whoever leads in artificial intelligence will optimize logistics, fisheries, offshore energy and security. And here a new dependency is forming before our eyes, silently: most data about African waters — vessel movements, fish stocks, seabed topography, ocean-climate dynamics — is today collected, processed and owned outside Africa. In the twentieth century, nations drew maritime boundaries on water. In the twenty-first, the decisive boundaries will be drawn through data. Maritime data sovereignty must therefore be treated as seriously as territorial sovereignty — and think tanks should be attacking this question now, while the rules are still liquid.

The research agenda this implies is not futurism; it is near-term decision support. How will autonomous vessels transform African ports — and port labour? What legal regime should govern underwater drones operating in our Exclusive Economic Zones? What position should Africa take on seabed mining, as the continent whose critical minerals the global energy transition covets most? How should our states approach blue carbon markets and the new governance of high-seas biodiversity, so that we shape those rules rather than inherit them? Every one of these questions will determine investment flows within a decade.

Climate is the second frontier, and it demands reframing. For years the conversation was about protecting coastlines. The real task is to redesign coastal development for a changed climate: offshore renewables, climate-resilient ports, nature-based infrastructure, blue carbon ecosystems managed as economic assets rather than mourned as vanishing scenery. Defence is a posture; redesign is a strategy.

Food is the third. A continent moving toward two and a half billion people will not feed itself by land alone. Marine aquaculture, algae cultivation and biotechnology must enter national food-security planning now — before necessity makes the decisions for us.

But the deepest frontier is institutional, and here is the mechanism I most want African researchers to understand: technology moves in years; institutions move in decades; and dependency is manufactured in the gap between the two. If our maritime administrations, legal frameworks and universities fail to adapt at the speed of the technological wave, Africa will once again consume innovations designed elsewhere — not because we lacked talent, but because our institutions arrived late. Institutional innovation therefore deserves as much research investment as the technologies themselves: how ocean governance, maritime education and public-private partnership must be rebuilt for the age of artificial intelligence.

And I would leave think tanks with a change of question, because questions shape destinies more surely than answers. Not “how does Africa catch up?” but “in which maritime sectors can Africa lead the world?” Not “how do we adapt to future technologies?” but “which technologies can Africa invent?” Not “how do we respond to global trends?” but “which global trends can Africa initiate?” The first generation of maritime strategies taught Africa to look seaward. The next must make Africa one of the world’s producers of maritime knowledge, technology and strategic concepts — a continent exporting not only marine products but solutions. The abundance of our oceans is settled. The boldness of our ideas is not.

9. You’ve had a long and distinguished career in the Cameroon Navy and the African Union. Reflecting on your journey, what advice would you give to young Africans who aspire to be “game changers” and contribute to the continent’s strategic development?

Be suspicious of the phrase “game changer.” It has become an ambition, when it should be a consequence.

History is not changed by people who seek recognition. It is changed by people who accept responsibility — who decide to solve problems others have filed under “inevitable.” So my first counsel is almost austere: do not aspire to be influential; aspire to be useful. Influence is the shadow cast by usefulness. Chase the shadow and you catch nothing; build the substance and the shadow follows you everywhere.

My second counsel concerns preparation. Everything I later contributed — from the Navy to continental strategy — rested on competence built long before the opportunity appeared. Positions are temporary. Titles change hands. Institutions evolve. Competence, character and ideas remain. So master your field with real depth. Read beyond your borders. Understand history, technology, economics, geopolitics — because the future belongs to those who can read complexity and convert it into action. Every question I have answered in this conversation is, if you look closely, the same question: how does a civilization consciously build its own long-term strategic power? Preparing yourself is simply that question asked at the scale of one life.

Then comes a choice, and I want to state it plainly, because in an era when technology, geopolitics, climate and demography are all accelerating at once, humanity is dividing into three categories.

The first are the permanently surprised. They wake one day to discover the world has changed — new technologies, new balances, new rules — and they spend their lives on the platform, watching the train of history pass, complaining about its speed.

The second understand that change is underway and board the train. They adapt, acquire new skills, participate honourably in transformations designed by others. This is already an achievement. But it is still someone else’s train.

The third category makes the train move. They do not react to change or merely ride it; they cause it. They imagine possibilities before they are obvious, build institutions, found enterprises, propose concepts, design new models of society. Consciously or not, they are the architects of the future.

Change itself is not the question — change is inevitable. The only question is your relationship to it. Choose the third category, and choose it consciously. Africa does not need a generation that documents inherited problems with eloquence. It needs a generation with the courage to redesign systems.

But know the price of that choice. It demands humility, because real leaders serve a mission larger than themselves. It demands patience, because historical transformation is measured in decades, not news cycles. It demands courage, because every new idea is greeted first with resistance. And it demands integrity, because talent without character is not an asset. It is a hazard.

One barrier remains, and it must fall in your generation: the inherited belief that innovation, advanced technology and strategic thought belong elsewhere. That belief is the last colonial infrastructure still standing — and it stands in our minds. Dismantle it. The next great scientific discovery, the next transformative governance model, the next global strategic concept can come from this continent, but only through young Africans convinced they have the right not merely to join the future, but to author it.

When I look at Africa’s youth — the youngest population on Earth — I do not see a problem to be managed. I see the continent’s principal strategic asset, and the responsibility of my generation is not to lecture that asset but to build the ecosystems in which it can flourish. No generation changes history because it inherits perfect conditions. It changes history because it decides to transform imperfect conditions into new possibilities.

So do not wait for tomorrow to arrive and then ask where you fit. Study the forces shaping it. Prepare. Position yourself. And choose to be among those who make tomorrow possible — because the ultimate measure of a generation is not what it received from the past. It is what it had the courage to create for the future.

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• Colonel Samuel Kamé-Domguia is the Vice Chair & CEO of the Pan-African Think Tank KANU. A retired senior naval officer, international strategic adviser and author, he is recognized as one of the principal architects of Africa’s maritime strategic doctrine, having led the intellectual development of the 2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy (2050 AIM Strategy) and championed the Blue Economy as a cornerstone of Africa’s long-term development. His work spans geopolitics, strategic foresight, maritime governance, technological innovation and the engineering of long-term public policy for Africa.