At the 2015 Quartz Africa Innovators Summit in Nairobi, one of Kenya’s best known tech investors and activists, Ory Okolloh, spoke about how entrepreneurship was being promoted to the point of being fetishized in Africa. Referring to the lack of basic infrastructure and weak governance, she famously said, “You can’t “entrepreneur” around bad leadership, we can’t “entrepreneur” around bad policy.”

That sentiment was widely hailed at the time and since then and has become quite popular. But what if sentiments like that inadvertently delay progress by causing us to demand “rich-country institutions” that just can’t work? Or more importantly, what if it actually blinds us from seeing the critical role entrepreneurship plays in helping Africa overcome bad leadership?

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In the United States, as more people created wealth for themselves during the Industrial Revolution, their dissatisfaction with corruption and government mismanagement was taken more seriously. “Politically, the rage of victims counted for very little in 1840, not much in 1860; by 1890, it was a roaring force” is how Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Friedman put it.