Thinking and Africa! Africa is behind because of inattention to, and very poor utilisation of thinking and mental resources.

In Africa, knowledge and knowledge-based academic qualifications are everything. People are judged largely based on their levels of education and their knowledge-based academic credentials. People are recruited into almost all sorts of positions based on knowledge-based qualifications and also "experience". This experience is often totally misrepresented, for example, by emphasising the period of time instead of specific incidents or events of practical action. To say one has fifteen years experience in a role means total nothing in most cases. If you have fifteen years in football playing but have actually kicked the ball for a total of 3 years during those fifteen years, you can have less experience than someone who has been in football in eight years and actually kicked the ball 5 years during the eight year period.

So in Africa, you have respect and attention if you talk about knowledge and knowledge-based qualifications and credentials. If you talk about thinking, and about thinking about thinking, you do not get much attention and respect even among many of the "educated folks". They do not think that thinking matters at all especially in the leading and managing their countries, companies, organisations, businesses and their planet and its resources.

I develop and deliver training, education and development programs as part of my strategic results management consulting. In addition to knowledge-based training programs in various areas such as business, strategy, leadership, marketing, management, sales, communication and presentation, training and education, strategic planning and strategic planning facilitation, I have also develop programs on thinking, thinking management and thinking applications. Very few smart business and organisational leaders take these courses for themselves and their teams. Most role their eyes when I suggest that they take this thinking courses.

I do not blame these people for their ignorance of thinking and metathinking. They are victims of some sinister underground society that invest in controlling, using and manipulating others. This society knows just how powerful and independent humans can become if they invested more focussing on improving their own thinking and in making the best possible use of their thinking assets including their brains.

You see, all these things that we call innovation and entrepreneurship are directly linked to thinking and not to mere knowledge. And by the way, knowledge is a product of thinking. All the knowledge that we acquire and then brag about having was produced by someone's brain through thinking and now through knowing. So if you want to control people, you produce and give them your knowledge and prevent them from thinking beyond the knowledge. Give them the knowledge so that they can get excited by the qualifications they get based on how much they have acquired and understood the knowledge and also so that they can use the knowledge to solve their basic problems and not go any further.

You see these universities that we have? Instead of being centres of intellectual and philosophical enquiry, exploration and discovery, they have been hijacked and converted into manufactories for humans than can work in industry and commerce. This is why you see that most people coming out of our universities today lack the mental qualities of true intellectuals and philosophers. By then way, philosophy means "love of knowledge" or "love of wisdom." These graduates of today no longer solve problems and no longer love knowledge. They have replaced thinking with knowledge. Rare are those who think in their disciplines beyond what they were taught at their schools and universities.

I take you back to the early days of universities, and of thinking and of philosophy. These are the days of the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Tartaglia, Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Carl Von Clausewitz, Nikolai Tesla, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Galileo, Niels Bohr, Mari Curie, Kekule Kekule and others. The days of polymaths! These were the days where true thinking was rife and also the days of massive and revolutionary discovery in virtually every field. It was a period where these people applied their best thinking to enquire, explore, discover and understand. The days of when the thinkers and philosophers developed theories to help understand that which could not be understood through physical interaction.

What we have now is a disaster in terms of thinking. Real thinking is now limited to a few individuals in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) who are pursuing research, invention, innovation and solutions development.

With the emergency of Artificial Intelligence, the thinking situation in our world is getting so bad that training and education in thinking and thinking management must be introduced in our formal education and in our countries, companies, organisations, businesses and economies with the fierce urgency of now.

Our knowledge has already become either obsolete or insufficient to solve the problems the world faces today. The more we invest in training, education and development, the more we are able to prevent creating the problems we are creating and the better we are able to solve the problems that we confronting.

Our thinking as humans is generally poor and inaccurate. This is one of the major reasons while most of our decisions are not the best that we could make. Understanding how we think as humans and then improving how we think and how we use our thinking assets is a extremely important in the quest to make sustainable development a reality.

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?Simon Bere, 2025