2024 Man of the Year, Dr. James Orleans-Lindsay’s keynote speech at the Africa Rising Symposium at the London School of Economics and Political Science

It was not an ordinary morning at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The room had all the signs of ritual: tailored blazers, sharpened minds, chairs filled not just by bodies but by intention. Dr. James Orleans-Lindsay walked unto the  stage, not with the swagger of the decorated, though he had every right to it, but with something rarer: the quiet weight of someone who has done the work, and carries the burden of knowing how much is left to do.

He stood, the newly crowned EMY Africa Man of the Year, and began not with a list of achievements, but with a story. A boy from Cape Coast raised on the wisdom of his grandmother, who once spoke of a man named Philip Quarcoo; a forefather, a reverend, a scholar dispatched to Oxford in 1796 to study theology. And yet, rather than stay cloaked in the comfort of empire, Quarcoo returned to the Gold Coast and opened a school. The first of its kind. His inheritance wasn’t wealth, it was will.

There was something poetic, and almost defiant, in Dr. Orleans-Lindsay’s invocation of that name. As if to say: Africa has always had the minds. It has always had the vision. The tragedy isn’t in our lack, but in our waiting. Too much talk about potential, not enough talk about performance. “We are paralysed,” he said, “between what is and what should be.”

The speech had no frills. No PowerPoint slides or over-rehearsed crescendos. Just a man talking plainly and urgently about the need to move. He spoke of his daughter, Diamond. Six years old, luminous and sharp. “Papa,” she asked him, “if you’re building cities, why do others still live in slums?” The question landed like a stone in the stomach. And it stayed there. Not as guilt but as fuel.

What followed was not a speech so much as a reckoning. A dismantling of the quiet excuses we clothe ourselves in. The myths we repeat in our proverbs and our policy: that lawlessness is culture, that obedience is virtue, that profit is purpose. These myths, he argued, have calcified into our systems. We ask our youth to solve problems, yet raise them to stay silent. We cheer entrepreneurial success, but rarely ask what it is in service of. We write laws, then hire men to apologise for them.

The words weren’t angry. They were precise. Wounding, because they were true.

And yet, for all the critique, there was no room for despair. Dr Orleans-Lindsay is not a man interested in lament. He is a man preoccupied with doing. He spoke of planting 500,000 economic trees to offset the timber used in his housing developments, not as charity, but as logic. He spoke of building hospital wings in memory of his late mother, not as philanthropy, but as a promise. 

Then came the announcement: a new urban experiment. A city in Greater Accra. Walkable, breathable, self-contained. A model city, one where the old equations of sprawl and neglect give way to dignity and design. The kind of place, you felt, that Diamond might one day walk through and smile.

He spoke as a builder mid-project. A man already knee-deep in blueprints and deadlines. And then, almost in passing, he delivered another line that stilled the room once more. As Chancellor of the Cape Coast Technical University, a position he holds with both pride and urgency, he is spearheading the establishment of a new medical school in the Central Region in the next twenty-four months.

The goal is sharp: train more doctors. Staff under-resourced facilities. Give young people from the region the tools and the permission to serve. This, he said, will not just be a school, but an instrument of equity. Of capacity. Of consequence.

And it was only a part of a wider constellation of projects. He mentioned other ventures such as youth mentorship through grassroots associations but the thread that stitched it all together was unmistakable: a stubborn, almost sacred belief that action is the highest form of patriotism.

And as the speech drew to a close, there was a stillness. The kind of stillness that follows something honest. He closed with gratitude to the platform that had named him Man of the Year. EMY Africa, he said, “is not interested in empty platitudes. It is interested in what shapes the future.”

And as he stepped away, the air in the room had changed. He final words kept ringing like a drumbeat. “Africa needs doers not talkers. Keep your eye on the ball. But first, make sure you have a ball. Your ball is Ghana. Keep your eye on Ghana.”

It wasn’t an instruction. It was more of an invitation. Because the truth is this: Africa has never lacked potential. It has always had its Philip Quarcoos, its Diamonds, its men and women with the audacity to think, dream and build. The only thing left now, is to do.