50th Murtala Muhammed International Lecture & Leadership Conference On 12/02/2026

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KEYNOTE SPEECH BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, THE IMMEDIATE PAST VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE 50TH MURTALA MUHAMMED INTERNATIONAL LECTURE AND LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON THE 12TH OF FEBRUARY, 2026

PROTOCOLS

Let me begin by thanking the Murtala Muhammed Foundation for the very great honour done to me to speak today in honour of an undoubted icon and a person whose memory has served not only to propel great ideas on leadership, but also to propel integrity in leadership, General Murtala Muhammed.

I remember exactly where I was when the news came that General Murtala Muhammed had been assassinated. I was 18 years old, a first-year student of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lagos. I had just stepped out of a constitutional law lecture by the legendary Professor Abiola Ojo when the news struck like a thunderbolt: Murtala Muhammed had been assassinated in broad daylight on his way to work!

Gathered everywhere were students listening to the rambling broadcast of the coup leader, Lieutenant Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, ending with an announcement that had never been heard before in Nigeria’s history of coups. A daylight curfew, and I quote him, “has been imposed from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.” It was at this time, about 2.30 p.m.

The university erupted, shouts of aluta continuum rented the air. The students’ union immediately called a rally, and speaker after speaker insisted that Murtala had been eliminated. He dared to confront neo-imperialism because he had indicted the Western powers and their apartheid clients in South Africa, because he had boldly declared that Africa would not take orders from the West and would chart its own course.

Within an hour, buses were mobilised, and we marched toward the British High Commission and the U.S. Embassy at the time, chanting anti-imperialist songs.

In just six months in power, Murtala Muhammed had captured the imagination of the nation through the sheer clarity of his reforms. He purged the civil service to confront corruption and inertia. He probed military governors from the Gowan era at the time. He seized illicitly acquired properties. He cut military privileges and signalled a return to civilian rule. Ten days before his assassination on February 3rd, 1976, he created seven new states, bringing the total number of states to 19, and he initiated the relocation of Nigeria’s capital from Lagos to Abuja.

Yet it was his declaration that Africa had come of age that immortalised him. The speech that he made 34 days before he was assassinated, that speech echoed through the halls of residence in our university at the time, and many could recite it by heart, especially when he said, and I quote, “Africa has come of age. It is no longer under the orbit of any extra-continental power. It should no longer take orders from any country, however powerful. The fortunes of Africa are in our hands to make or to mar. For too long, we have been kicked around. For too long, we have been treated like adolescents who cannot discern our interests and act accordingly. For too long, it has been presumed that the African needs outside experts to tell him who his friends are, who his enemies are. The time has come when we should make it clear that we can decide for ourselves, that we know our own interests and how to protect those interests, that we are capable of resolving African problems without presumptuous lessons and ideological dangers, which more often than not have no relevance for us, nor for the problem at hand.”

When Murtala Muhammed said Africa had come of age, he, of course, wasn’t speaking of chronological age. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence, was only 18 years old at the time as an independent nation. He himself was barely 38 years old, so he was speaking of something deeper.

He was speaking of the awakening of responsibility, identity, and self-determination, and his context was the generational obligation of African leadership of his era to fight the viciousness of neo-colonialism, as those before them had fought colonialism.

He was summoning the high values of integrity, of dignity, and individual autonomy by virtue of which African people, like others, had a right and an obligation to determine their own destinies and who they chose to undertake that journey with.

Decades after his tragic death, the question is still being asked, with hesitation, sometimes with hope, often with doubt: has Africa come of age? It’s a question that is shaped by history, burdened by stereotypes, and too often answered with statistics that are themselves stripped of context.

In any event, coming of age is not a moment. It’s a process, and Africa is not emerging from adolescence. It is ascertaining adulthood. It is coming of age; if coming of age means perfection, then no continent qualifies. If it means the absence of struggle or the absence of problems, then history itself has not come of age.

But if coming of age means agency, if it means self-awareness, if it means confidence of purpose and the capacity to shape one’s destiny, then Africa is no longer emerging. It is in its moment. For too long, Africa has been described in the language of delay, in the language of catching up, lagging behind, still developing.

But this language is not merely inaccurate. It is demeaning, and it may well be intellectually lazy. It assumes that history moves in straight lines, that development follows a single script, and that progress must look the same everywhere.

It also assumes that there is only one story to tell about Africa. But the truth of the matter is, as Chimamanda said, there’s always more than one story. And Africa’s story has never fit neatly into such narrow frames, and today it is actively breaking free of them across the continent.

Something remarkable is happening. Africa is no longer content to be a passive participant in global affairs or a supplier of raw materials to fuel other people’s prosperity. Africa is building systems, shaping markets, and asserting its voice, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, but with increasing confidence.

Look at trade. We have signed the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement. It is the most ambitious economic integration project in Africa’s modern history, and arguably the most important structural reform since independence.

The FTA brings together 1.4 billion people across 54 countries, with a combined GDP of over 3.4 trillion US dollars. More than 50 countries have ratified the agreement now, and official trading began in 2021. By membership, the FTA is now the largest free trade area in the world.

For the first time, the continent has made a deliberate choice to reshape its economic future around a simple but powerful idea that trading more with itself, adding value to what it produces, and industrialising from within, should be the way forward. The FTA’s guided trade initiative was recently concluded, and 39 countries have indicated completion of key domestic processes to actually trade using the FTA’s rules. This is no small feat.

Already, the FTA is commercial, particularly in the agri-food industry. Real products are moving across borders. Rice is moving from Nigeria to Ghana under FTA rules.

Cocoa products from West Africa to North Africa are under the same rules. Sesame seeds from Nigeria to Egypt. Uganda is exporting dairy products to Kenya, and Kenya is exporting dairy products to Rwanda.

South African citrus fruits are going to Zimbabwe and Zambia, and Ghana’s poultry and frozen foods are going to Togo and Côte d’Ivoire. Kenya is selling Exide batteries to Ghana.

The message is unmistakable; the FTA is no longer theoretical. Real goods are moving, real money is changing hands, and real jobs are being created. And there’s a deeper shift underway.

We are moving from exporting goods to exporting food systems. And this is why an exclusive fixation that you find sometimes on Africa’s modest share of global merchandise trade obscures the more revealing story unfolding within the continent itself. Inter-African trade is becoming more sophisticated and industrial in character.

Today, 41 percent of Africa’s machinery exports are traded within Africa, alongside 35 percent of biopharmaceutical goods and 30 percent of industrial chemicals traded within Africa. Now, these are not primary commodities; they are the building blocks of modern industrial economies.

Equally transformative are the institutions that are enabling this shift. Africa is not waiting any longer for external systems to integrate its markets. Afrexim Bank, a proudly African development finance institution, has developed the Africa Trade Gateway and has operationalised a continent-wide digital ecosystem, including the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, PAPS, for cross-border trade in local currencies.

They’ve also established MANSA, a customer due diligence repository that actually reduces compliance barriers. And they’ve established a trader club which provides trade intelligence and regulatory transparency. These are not aspirations; they are functioning platforms quietly rewiring how Africa trades with itself.

At the national level, innovation has been equally transformative. In Kenya, M-PESA has reshaped financial inclusion, bringing millions of previously unbanked people into the formal economy. Today, M-PESA stands as the largest mobile money platform in the world, a reminder that Africa is not merely adopting innovation, but that we are actually defining it.

In the era of electric mobility, our ecosystem is emerging with remarkable speed. Companies such as Ampersand in Rwanda, Max here in Nigeria, Bordewijk in Uganda, Ark in Kenya, Agility in South Africa, all largely founded by young African entrepreneurs, are manufacturing electric motorcycles. They are retrofitting conventional ones.

Firms like Kira Motors in Uganda are converting buses and light trucks into electric vehicles. In Nigeria, between 2015 and 2019, amidst two recessions, entrepreneurs under the age of 35 built six unicorns, technology companies worth over a billion dollars each. And this is not an anecdote; it is a signal. These developments demonstrate that Africa’s entrepreneurial, technical and manufacturing capabilities are real and scalable, with the right policies, with finance and infrastructure.

The same pattern of African problem-solving was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowing that Africa had low vaccination rates tells very little of the actual story. What mattered more and what history will remember is that through collaboration between Africa’s CDC, PanaBIOS and AfroChampions, the continent designed and deployed the world’s first interoperable digital vaccine passport. The PanaBIOS platform digitally connected laboratories, port health authorities, and pathogen genomic centres across 20 African countries. This was African innovation operating across global frontiers.

Consider minerals and energy; Africa’s historical share of rare earth supply may have been marginal at some point, especially compared to China’s dominance. But static snapshots missed the dynamic trajectories that are taking place. Africa’s projected supply growth is among the fastest globally, with the continent expected to account for 10% at least of global output of rare earths in the near term. More importantly, Africa holds 30% of the world’s critical mineral reserves, including cobalt, lithium, manganese, graphite, nickel and ammonia.

Minerals are essential to renewable energy technologies and low-carbon value chains. What is changing is not just extraction, but also value creation and value addition. Across the continent, battery-grade manganese, nickel, lithium-ion batteries and vanadium electrolytes for flow batteries are already being processed.

Yes, Africa was long positioned as a destination for raw commodity extraction, but today, over 42% of African countries outside of North Africa have laws that restrict the export of unprocessed ores, mandating beneficiation and local processing before export. This represents a fundamental shift in development philosophy.

How about the production and export of low-carbon fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen? Fuels that will be important in decarbonising hard-to-electrify sectors, such as steel production, fuelling trucks and ships and other heavy vehicles. And also balancing grids, especially those that are supplied primarily by renewable sources of energy, which can experience intermittent disruptions.

The past five years have seen tremendous growth in the blue and green hydrogen industry. Our green hydrogen economy in Africa is advancing with landmark projects, shaping energy and industrial futures. Namibia’s Hyphen Hydrogen Energy Project is a planned green hydrogen and ammonia complex and is progressing towards implementation now. It is expected to produce about 2 million tonnes of green ammonia per year once it is fully operational.

The project also aims to generate thousands of local jobs and avoid roughly 5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually through wind and solar power production. In Angola, strategic partnerships are developing, also building renewable hydrogen facilities, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of green ammonia annually for export to global markets, including Europe.

These initiatives signal Africa’s emerging role as a key supplier of low-carbon industrial fuels.

South Africa is also aggressively scaling its hydrogen ecosystem with national targets of between 10 to 15 gigawatts of renewable electrolysis capacity by 2040. This is positioning the country to produce up to 13 million tonnes of green hydrogen and derivatives annually by 2050.

While building its domestic industry and export potential, other countries, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, and Mauritania, have set ambitions for green hydrogen and renewable energy goals, collectively positioning Africa as a strategic global player in the clean energy transition and as a supplier of climate-aligned industrial inputs. The largest single-line refinery in the world is here in Nigeria, the Dangote refinery, and it is refining products not just locally, but it is also exported to Europe. This kind of dynamic knowledge is what prepares the mind for the real opportunities that Africa presents, not static shares, but shifting trajectories.

The same applies to tourism and services. Africa’s share of global aviation is sometimes said to be around 2%, and tourism receipts around 3%. Yet these aggregates conceal the momentum that we’re actually experiencing.

Between 2022 and 2033, quarter-on-quarter growth in South Africa’s domestic tourism exceeded 30%. Between 2005 and 2013 and now, international tourist arrivals in sub-Saharan Africa increased by 55%, outperforming every other region and every other continent. True insight into Africa’s transformation lies in designing the patterns within the patterns, the powerful undercurrents beneath the surface.

And as the world confronts unprecedented turbulence from climate change to ​Artificial ​Intelligence to ageing populations and emerging pandemics, Africa’s role is becoming not optional but central. By 2050, one quarter of the global workforce will be African, and over 40% of the world’s young people will live on this continent.

What is less appreciated is what the research shows, and it shows that by simply sustaining current development momentum, we could actually raise Africa’s GDP growth by 15% through demographic dividends alone, before accounting for anything else.​ Before accounting for a vast arable land, our low population density, the low population density in the world, immense renewable energy resources, and untapped capital. An energetic youth force such as we have, augmented by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, combined with Africa’s natural and geoengineering advantages. There is a new growth frontier out there at a time when old models are getting exhausted.

How about Africa’s pivotal role in resolving the climate crisis? In September 2023, the African Union endorsed climate-positive growth as a paradigm for Africa’s economic development. By endorsing climate-positive growth, the African Union made one thing clear: that the battle for global climate change will be won or lost here in Africa. For centuries, economic growth has meant rising emissions, and that is the model that has made today’s very wealthy nations rich and has pushed the planet to the brink.

If Africa were to follow that same carbon-intensive path, we would be pumping into the atmosphere 9.4 gigatons of emissions each year, and we would account for 75% of global emissions by 2050, making net zero impossible. So Africa faces a stark choice: we can become the world’s climate solution or its climate nemesis.

Climate-positive growth is how Africa becomes that solution. Our low industrial base and small carbon footprints are strategic advantages, allowing us to leapfrog polluting legacy systems and to build clean industries from the ground up. With 60% of the world’s renewable energy potential, the youngest workforce on the planet, and vast natural assets from arable land to critical minerals, Africa can build the world’s first green industrial civilisation.

This is growth without emission. This is development that powers prosperity, that cleans the atmosphere at the same time, and decarbonises global value chains. Climate positive growth means, for example, that we will process 110 million tonnes of bauxite domestically using renewable energy, avoiding 1.3 to 1.5 gigatons of CO2e annually.

It means delivering annual energy, universal energy access, reaching 600 million Africans at 30% lower cost, and 90% lower emissions per kilowatt than current trajectories. It means taking advantage of our comparative advantage in the production and early processing of some electric vehicle parts, such as battery precursors. The AFDB commissioned a project sometime in 2021.

The study found that if we manufacture battery precursors in DRC, Congo, of course, they have plenty of lithium and cobalt, it will be three times cheaper than in the U.S, in the EU, or even in China. And manganese will be needed, and it will be sourced from other African countries, from Zambia, from Tanzania, from Gabon, and from South Africa. All of this requires a grand bargain.​ Achieving any of this will require a grand bargain.

African countries must articulate clear, science-based national strategies for climate-positive growth, tied to the measurable net negative contributors to global emissions. In return, the international community must mobilise investment at scale, reform trade rules to reward emissions production, and accelerate fair and functional carbon markets.

Africa has one-sixth of the world’s remaining forests, one-sixth of the forests that are left in the whole world. Three of Africa’s large marine ecosystems rank among the four most productive marine ecosystems in the whole world. The Congo-Basin rainforest is the world’s primary tropical carbon sink.

Its net sequestration in the Congo-Basin rainforest is more than the entire Amazon and Southeast Asia forests combined. The Rift Valley, the Zululand Basin, the Ruvumo Basin, and Ethiopia’s Blue Nile region are optimal for carbon capture technologies, more optimal than any other region. These natural wealth sources today are never accounted for in traditional national accounts.

Africa’s forests, peatlands, rivers, biodiversity, minerals, etc., are invisible when you look at our national accounts, the traditional accounts that we prepare. Countries appear poor despite the vast natural wealth, and this affects our creditworthiness. There is now an urgent drive by several African leaders for natural capital accounting, that is, measuring and valuing natural assets systematically so that even our calculation of GDP takes natural wealth into account.

Our forests are recognised as carbon sinks, our mangroves are recognised as natural storm barriers, and our peatlands are recognised as climate regulators. When these assets are properly accounted for, they become bankable for green bonds, for conservation bonds, and for debt-to-nature swaps. Some African countries are already taking the lead.​ Botswana, for example, is using water and mineral accounts to guide pricing and extraction. South Africa is already incorporating biodiversity accounts into development planning, and it’s attracted private conservation finance. Liberia and Uganda are also piloting wetland and forest valuation with support from UN partners.

This work is not a luxury; it is essential for turning wealth into sustainable financial strength, and Africa holds a decisive key to global development, climate, stability, and future growth.

So, back to the question, has Africa come of age? Some will lay out all the challenges, and there are many: debt, low economic indices, corruption, slow industrialisation, etc. But that is precisely what coming of age is about. It is not the absence of the problems.​ It is about dealing with the issues with courage and creativity. It’s about knowing that each generation owes a duty to itself and to the next generation to lighten the burden and make the path to happiness and prosperity easier.

When Murtala M​uham​med made that iconic speech, it was his courageous, insightful and farsighted answer to a letter written by the then American President Gerald Ford to African heads of state​ to support UNITA in Angola, a group known to have betrayed the Angolan Independence struggle to apartheid and Western powers. His refusal to do so and instead, his support for the revolutionary struggle of the Angolan people through the MPLA, was catalytic in the restoration of independence to Angola, and it weakened the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Murtala Muhammed showed Africa how to stand boldly on principle, how to assert our hard-earned sovereignty. In the end, Africa’s destiny will depend on informed, patriotic, values-driven leadership.

Murtala’s declaration that Africa has come of age was a charge to the next generations of African leadership. It was not merely a statement of fact to do what is expected of those who have come of age. It is to serve our nations and continent with dedication and passion, and to refuse to avert our gaze when the powerful countries of the world threaten to destroy us if we do not bend to their will. It is to husband our God-given resources for the benefit of our people.

Has Africa come of age? Yes, not because the journey is complete, but because the direction is clear. Africa knows who it is, it knows what it has, and increasingly, it knows what it must do. The age of asking whether Africa will rise is over; the age of engaging with Africa as a co-author of the global future has come. Murtala Muhammed’s challenge spoken to the ages has gone to a new generation of Nigerians who are now coming of age, many of whom are here today. You also cannot afford to fail.

Thank you very much.