In the aftermath of banking sector clean-ups across Africa, regulators must delicately balance enforcing accountability for misconduct with preserving incentives for prudent risk-taking that are integral to financial intermediation, innovation, and long-term financial deepening. Across emerging markets, recent financial sector clean-ups have restored order after periods of regulatory laxity. Banks have been closed, licences revoked, and founders sanctioned. Such interventions

In many of the world's most rigorous academic settings, it is common to hear a professor begin an answer with a disclaimer: "This is not my area of expertise." The phrase is not an admission of inadequacy. It is a signal of discipline. In such environments, knowledge is treated as bounded. Authority is respected precisely because it acknowledges its limits. The statement functions as a marker of seriousness: it tells the listener that what follows will be careful, conditional

This essay examines why a generation that inherited functioning institutions failed to transmit them to the next. It argues that Africa's current crisis is not primarily demographic, but generational: a failure of stewardship that occurred when external constraint eased and policy choice returned. The judgment is delivered calmly, but it is delivered.

Ghana's financial system works, and often impressively so. Payments move in real time. Mobile money has become second nature. Interoperability, once aspirational, is now routine. To many observers, this looks like a system that has arrived. But systems do not fail because they are unused. They fail because they are unfinished. Over the past decade, Ghana has done an admirable job regulating financial products: wallets, transfers, agent networks, lending models, and foreign-ex