The Leapfrog Myth

For two years, every conference in Nairobi has repeated the same seductive story: "Africa will leapfrog the Industrial Age."

The logic goes like this: We skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones. We skipped credit cards and went straight to M-Pesa. Therefore, we will skip factories and roads and go straight to the Knowledge Economy.

This is The Leapfrog Myth. And it is dangerous because it ignores a fundamental law of reality: You cannot eat software.

The Physical Debt

We have over-indexed on Bits (Software, Fintech, Apps) and under-indexed on Atoms (Roads, Cold Chain, Manufacturing).

• We have excellent E-commerce apps, but the delivery motorcycle is stuck in traffic because the road is bad.

• We have sophisticated AgTech platforms, but 40% of the harvest rots because there is no cold storage.

You cannot "Leapfrog" physics. The Digital Layer can optimize the Physical Layer, but it cannot replace it.

The "Hard Tech" Correction

The last decade was about "Soft Tech" (Fintech, Media, Services). The next decade belongs to "Hard Tech."

The biggest opportunities for the Diaspora investor are not in another payment app. They are in Logistics, Energy, Warehousing, and Processing.

The illusion of the Leapfrog made us lazy. We thought we could code our way out of poverty. We can't. We have to build our way out.

The "Quiet Authority" knows: The App is not the product. The Infrastructure is the product.