Subscribe now

I: Intra-African air travel is insanely expensive (and yet African airlines barely make any profits)

Over the last year I’ve visited several cities in East, West, Southern, and North Africa; and let’s just say that it’s insanely expensive to travel by air within Africa. In addition, the connections often don’t make much sense (only 19% of intra-African connections have direct flights). For example, to fly to Rabat from Nairobi my best connection was through Paris. While there has been tremendous improvement with regard to intra-Africa visa waivers, a lot more needs to be done to ease costs and increase efficiencies in the regional aviation market. Consider this story from Bloomberg:

A 45-minute flight from Ghana to neighboring Lagos can cost $600. Flights to Dakar,Senegal, require a full day of travel with a four-hour layover in Abidjan, in Côte d’Ivoire. A roundtrip fare to Casablanca is about $1,800, while discount carriers reach the city from Spain for as little as €50($57). That’s without factoring in the frequent delays and breakdowns of small aircraft of varying quality.

What explains this? Lots of reasons. Bad infrastructure (especially on air navigation); high taxation per ticket (including airport facility fees and navigation charges); mismanagement of airlines (especially those SOEs operated as prestige flag carriers); blocked funds (when countries prevent airlines from repatriating earnings); high cost of capital (no doubt impacted by sovereign credit worthiness); maintenance and supply chain pressures (African airlines’ planes tend to be 5 years older than the global average — which means less fuel efficiency, higher frequency of maintenance, and costly aircraft downtime and delays); and low volumes (a function of economic under-development and little intra-African economic integration).

That’s before we even get into the fact that it’s mighty hard to run a successful airline anywhere in the world. Yet even with that it mind, the comparative data suggests that African economies are leaving a whole of cash on table.

This is plainly on account of bad policies borne of a lack of strategic awareness and related anti-development interest group politics. The inability to effectively coordinate on aviation policy across the Continent is yet another example of Pan-Africanism as summitry and protocols, and little more (and why we need to reconceptualize the operationalization of Pan-Africanism).

A combination of policy failures and industry economics forces African airlines to have very tight margins and to pass the high cost of doing business to customers. The IATA provides a useful summary:

Fuel prices: +17% higher, Taxes and charges: +12–15% higher, Air navigation charges: +10%, Maintenance, insurance, and capital costs: +6–10%.

…. Of the $41 billion in global net profit forecast for 2026 (3.9% margin), African carriers are expected to generate just $200 million profit, representing a 1.0% margin—the lowest of all regions. This equates to $1.3 in profit per passenger, compared to a global average of $7.9. [The average for the Middle East’s airlines is $28.60].

Despite all this, Africa (as a region) is projected to see 4.1% average annual growth rates over the next 20 years. That is massive growth, even before the region’s economies implement the reforms needed to make the aviation sector work better. Air travel simply must grow on Continent as its population pushes towards 3 billion over 30m square kilometers (more than three times the size of the United States).

Full implementation of commonsense policies (like SAATM) would reduce fares by 35%, and increase traffic by 51% to 141%. The IATA actually nails it when it comes to what African policymakers need to do to improve the aviation sector:

• Recognize aviation as a strategic economic enabler—not a revenue source—and avoid excessive taxes and charges.

• Invest in efficient, scalable infrastructure without passing unsustainable costs to airlines and travelers.

• Facilitate market access and competition by advancing the implementation of the Yamoussoukro Decision and SAATM.

• Improve affordability and strengthen connectivity to unlock wider economic and social benefits.

To these four I’d add one more recommendation: African economies should grow faster in order to firm up regional demand for air travel, cargo haulage, and related services. The confluence of high demand and resilient airlines (supported by the right policies) is the only way regional airlines — whether publicly-owned or private — can begin to catch up with the unforgivingly brutal economics of the airline business. Stated differently, good policies will achieve little if the region lacks large and reasonably profitable firms in the aviation sector.

II: On Africa’s many failed national flag carriers

As noted above, the problem of costly air travel in Africa isn’t just about politics and policy (although clearly both are a huge part of the problem). It’s also about the economics of Africa’s airlines as firms. At a fundamental level, it’s impossible to have decent connectivity across the Continent without well-run airlines. Therefore, it’s worth examining why many African airlines failed in the last 60 years.

At independence, lots of African countries established “national flag carriers” as prestige (as opposed to strategic) projects. These national carriers came at the expense of regional market consolidation, and the pooling of scarce capital as well as technical and managerial know-how.

Over the next 30 years most of these carriers failed. The varied trajectories of these airlines offer important lessons on the process of economic development, including technological transfer, upgrading of human capital and managerial competence, the importance of exposing national champions to external competition, how young firms (fail to) manage external shocks, and how successful national champions navigate their domestic political economies.

For the most part, African airlines were simply not prepared to survive the brutal economics of the aviation industry. Nearly all failed due to indisciplined management, chronic under-capitalization, unfavorable macroeconomic conditions, and, to be honest, bad luck with external shocks (read your Mkandawire, people!)

Having been founded largely as state-owned prestige projects (as opposed as strategic enterprises), African airlines were routinely saddled with politically-exposed individuals without much experience in the industry; and who run the airlines like any standard SOE that officials could raid for cash or use as conduits for looting public resources. An infamous example is Cameroon’s “Albatross” scandal, in which CamAir was used to purchase an aging Boeing plane (masked as new), and which President Paul Biya used exactly once. Cameroon lost $31m. Beyond such scams, most African airlines were required to create lots of superfluous jobs, a requirement that ate into already thin margins. For example, Nigeria Airways went belly up with over 750 employees per aircraft. Similarly, at its demise in 2002 Air Afrique had 4000 employees operating a single aircraft. The industry standard is 95-160 for highly-efficient carriers; budget airlines do as low as under 50 employees per aircraft. Airline operations were not spared either. State officials routinely commandeered aircraft for personal use; or booked seats for friends and family and simply didn’t pay. Officials running late would delay departures without care.

Then there was the brutal economics of the aviation business. Volatile energy markets (especially after the early 1970s) and the macroeconomic crises of the 1980s proved fatal for most airlines — fuel costs make up about 30% of airline’s operating expenses, requiring expert risk management and regular capitation (and some luck). The proliferation of flag carriers serving fragmented small markets foreclosed on the possibility of building resilience through scale. West African Airways Corporation, East African Airways and Air Afrique should’ve been given a fighting chance. The resulting defensive protectionism of inefficient airlines operating in small markets only amplified the costs of poor umanagement and state interference.

The biggest challenge of all to African airlines was chronic undercapitalization. The economics of airlines is such that firms routinely need capital injections to weather shocks such as fuel price hikes, geopolitical crises that halt travel, disease outbreaks (see Ebola and COVID), terror attacks that diminish demand, and the like. This on top of the fact that the business is capital intensive. Airliners cost a lot of money. So if you are a poorly-run airline, operating in a tiny market, in an economy characterized by severe macroeconomic risks (including forex risk) and poor demand, and whose sovereign has awful credit, you’ll naturally struggle to raise cash in the credit markets (or do so at unsustainably high rates). It doesn’t help matters that the little cash that you accumulate will typically be raided by public officials that treat you as a cash cow.

Chronic low capitalization directly impacts operations. If you can’t buy new planes you’ll have to operate old ones that consume more fuel and require more downtime for maintenance (both bad for your bottomline). This gets worse if you lack enough engineering capacity in-house, and have to outsource your maintenance operations. Couple this with any delays in getting parts through supply chain disruptions (you’ll likely not be your manufacturers’ priority), and you can see how having an old fleet can severely strain operations (and lose customers, thereby increasing costs). And because of your risk profile, any leasing agreements will typically come with higher costs. The net effect is that you’ll have to charge higher ticket prices, accept losses, or find yourself in the terrible position of doing both. The point here is that this isn’t an industry for poorly-run SOEs; even relatively better run private airlines in bigger, richer markets routinely go bankrupt because of the brutal economics of the sector.

III: Can air travel in Africa be fixed?

The simple answer is yes — if African policymakers can figure out how to (1) coordinate on opening up the region’s skies; and (2) incentivize the emergence of well-run airlines that are resilient to shocks.

The all important resilience to shocks will have to be founded on large markets, diversified revenue streams, managerial excellence, and a deep capital base. Unfortunately, there is no set formula for getting these. For example, cross-country collaboration (which ostensibly secured large markets) did not spare Air Afrique and East African Airways from mismanagement before their collapse. Similarly, publicly-owned Ethiopian Airlines has done much better than Kenya Airways (which was privatized in the mid 1990s).

Everything will come down to whether airlines, qua firms, are robust to the brutal economics of the aviation industry, and resilient to shocks. It shouldn’t matter how they get there.

A tale of two airlines’ ambitious expansions

Here, it’s worth considering discussing concrete examples — the cases of Kenya Airways (KQ) and Ethiopian Airlines (ET).

KQ began operations in 1977 as an SOE following the collapse of East African Airways. After 15 years of losses, the airline emerged as one of the 45 prime SOEs for privatization in the early 1990s. In 1995 the government sold 26% of its shares to KLM (a Dutch airline), with a public listing of 51% of shares coming in 1996. The recovery after the 1990s restructuring, commercialization, and sale was such that 15 years later KQ embarked on a debt-financed $3.65b rapid expansion, with new routes and an almost doubling of aircraft under operations

That’s when the proverbial rain started beating KQ. Poor luck with the timing of external shocks and operational huddles (Ebola, terror attacks, fuel volatility and a hedging bet gone awry, a massive fire at its main hub, late delivery of Dreamliners) soon pushed the airline into the red. Suddenly, a growth strategy that was meant to catapult the airline to the next level looked like a careless bet that fundamentally misunderstood the industry. Accusations of corruption and mismanagement surfaced. CEOs came and went. Since 2011 KQ has gone through five failed restructuring strategies and had as many CEOs. Last year, it made a loss of $132.3m. Contributing to the loss was the grounding of three aircraft due to supply chain delays for parts and rising cost of fuel.

KQ’s failure to launch and perennial losses provide a sharp contrast to ET’s successes.

Ethiopian Airlines began operations in 1946 under an operational contract with America’s TWA (Trans World Airlines) — see the history here (Chapter 11) and here. Between 1946-1975 the airline went through a process of accumulating capabilities, from engineering know-how, operational competence, managerial excellence, and how to navigate the vagaries of the aviation sector. The decades under TWA enabled the airline to survive the Ethiopian civil war (1974-1991), especially the first five years of Derg rule (which came with significant managerial interference). In 1980 it got a new independent CEO and successfully resisted the Derg’s attempt to have it switch from Boeing to Soviet planes in the 1980s.

Following the war, ET focused on recovery, consolidation of its accumulate technical, managerial, and operational competence, and modest modernization. It also had to navigate a new political dispensation that came with its own set of management interferences. It took the appointment of seasoned insiders to determine the airline’s strategic organizational posture as an SOE that was nonetheless run commercially. This set the stage for its ambitious growth plans after 2000. ET’s growth focused on new equipment, a wider network of destinations, partnerships with other African airlines to unlock subregional connections, and diversification of revenue streams.

The diversification strategy would eventually yield the Ethiopian Airlines Group — a conglomerate that now includes the international airline, a domestic express service, airport ground services, a cargo and logistics business, catering and hospitality services, an aviation academy, and an MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) division. While these ancillary businesses initially served ET, they’ve since evolved into independent revenue streams that serve other airlines — therefore becoming a source of resilience. For example, during COVID, ET’s MRO division quickly repurposed passenger planes into freighters, a move that enabled the airline to unlock new partnerships and revenue streams at reasonable cost.

What explains the divergent paths of ET and KQ?

ET’s advantage derived from its founding as a strategic national asset, the decades of accumulated technical, managerial, and operational knowledge under TWA, and ability to execute its strategy of resilience through diversification (as well as some luck). Geography then conspired to keep politicians honest and committed to the idea of ET as a national asset. In the 1940s the logic was that air travel would connect the country’s far-flung regions before road/rain infrastructure came online. More recently, land lockedness has amplified the need for a working airline as the country doubles down on high-value exports.

All this meant that the airline’s growth over the years has been gradual; and mostly driven by a firm grasp of industry fundamentals as opposed to consultant-driven wishful thinking. Furthermore, as a national strategic asset, ET was enabled by the Ethiopian government to grow and build sources of resilience — especially the vertical integration with ground operations. Unusually for an SOE, throughout its history periods of mismanagement and negative state interference have been the exception rather the rule.

The same cannot be said for KQ. In many ways, KQ has been a victim of poor timing. Its founding in 1977 came a time when the Kenyan state had lost its strategic coherence and policymaking capabilities (which peaked in the early 1970s). By then the aging Jomo Kenyatta had delegated the running of the state to his kitchen cabinet, most of whom were focused on succession fights and diverting state resources. Barely four years later the economic crises of the 1980s hit. Even though KQ inherited the bulk of East African’s equipment and operational know-how, the new airline could have used more time getting absorbed as a strategic SOE before the 1980s crisis (plus it didn’t help that East African wasn’t a particularly well-run airline to begin with). The timing of the 2011 expansion drive was also inauspicious (although it also reflected an absence of prudent management).

Once privatized, KQ was always going to struggle to build the same sources of resilience as ET did. This is for the simple reason that all those moves would’ve required scarce capital and managerial competency that a private company would view as wasteful and outside its core competency. It didn’t help that there was deep public distrust of the airline and its management after decades of losses and credible accusations that it was used as a conduit to loot public resources. For example, Kenyan legislators’ proposal to merge the airline business and airport operations into an “Aviation Holding Company” was met with little enthusiasm. The idea that KQ, in whatever form, would simply be used to loot state resources is a barrier to policymakers viewing the airline as a strategic national champion.

IV: Conclusion

One of the more exciting airline ventures on the Continent is ASKY, based out of Lome, Togo. The airline — which connects much of West and Central Africa — started life in 2010 under 40% ownership by ET (which has an operational contract to run it); as well as West African governments and private investors. ASKY has since grown to carry more than a million passengers, with 30 destinations in more than 27 African countries (served by 16 aircraft).

As argued above, ventures like ASKY are a reminder that there is no single formula for success in the airline business (e.g., state vs private ownership). What is important is that airlines are managed properly and made resilient against the brutal economics of the industry. Indeed, it is encouraging that the government of Togo has stepped up efforts to help ASKY bolster Lome’s stature as a regional hub. In this regard, ASKY may provide a model for future growth of the airline industry in Africa. If big countries insist on wasting money on poorly-run national flag carriers, relatively smaller countries can help create more efficient Pan-African airlines like ASKY. In Eastern African, RwandAir’s big bet with the new airport and collaboration with Qatar Airways is one to watch (I should also say that I am not so excited about the renewed efforts to build national carriers in the region. So far they all seem to be replicating the same SOE mistakes of the past).

Growth will also help a great deal. For example, the divergence in passenger numbers between India and African countries (see figure) is, to a large extent, a growth story. As African economies expand and household incomes rise, Africans will fly more, thereby boosting demand and (hopefully) the region’s airlines’ margins. This has been the Indian story over the last two decades:

In India and much of South Asia, aviation demand moves in tandem with economic growth. Rising incomes, upward mobility, and the emergence of a new middle class directly translate into higher air travel affordability and usage. Air travel demand in the region is shaped by several factors, including per capita incomes, foreign direct investment, flight frequencies, and jet fuel prices, but income effects arguably remain the most decisive driver. With a young population and household incomes expected to approach USD 35,000 by 2030, India's demand base is structurally strong. In this light, large aircraft orders and aggressive capacity expansion plans are not speculative; they reflect an aviation market where demand fundamentals and economic realities clearly add up.

All this to say that while a lot of attention about the difficulty and cost of air travel in Africa focuses on policy failures (and they are many), it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that African airlines and how they are run as firms are also an important part of the problem. Therefore, getting costs down and rationalizing connectivity will require more than just policy. The region also needs better managed airlines that are resilient to the brutal economics of the aviation industry, and whose demand is anchored on thriving economies.

Subscribe now

I: Getting serious about building the African state

My previous post discussed the need to…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Of jihadists and drones, and what it means for the new landscape of military technolog…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: What African policymakers need to know about the origins of modern economic growth

Modern economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the modern era, there was, relatively speaking, a lot less variation around the world in individual-level measures of development outcomes. The average person was illiterate, lived a life characterized by poverty, scarcely had any material possessions, and died young. As late as 1900 about 40% of all children born died before they turned five.

Then over a few decades in the 18th century something clicked in northwestern Europe and unleashed what we understand today as sustained modern economic growth and the extension of mass prosperity.

Well, that is one version of the story; and one that admittedly compresses economic history across space and time.

There’s another version of the story that is more variegated. In this rendering, modern economic growth did not just spring out of nowhere. Instead, it was the culmination of centuries of cumulative marginal improvements (in trade, finance, law, politics, governance, engineering, science, etc) that eventually came together and ignited the commercial and then industrial revolutions that we are now familiar with. Notably, these societies developed cultures of growth and progress that sustained these processes over centuries.

Stated differently, societies that were able to quickly adopt and domesticate the organizational forms (especially polities, firms, and family units), technologies (with emphasis on scientific mastery of the physical world), and human habits (in personal, professional, and civic life) that are necessary to sustain modern economic growth and development were decidedly different from those that did not. With this in mind, to understand contemporary variation in the distribution of national incomes one must first understand (1) the origins of modern economic divergence over centuries; and (2) why certain countries or regions of the world have failed to engineer quick catch-up growth since the advent of modern economic growth.

And what were those differences that produced divergence? There are countless bad explanations out there of economic divergence over the last 500 years — ranging from hand-wavy essentialist takes on identity and culture, to heroic extrapolations across entire regions based on well-identified but narrow social scientific studies. There are also some very good academic debates on the topic — especially among works that explore the divergence between China, the Muslim world, and Western Europe (see here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example).

For policymakers interested in a practical understanding of the origins of modern economic growth, I’d advise them to rely on established patterns within literatures (as opposed to individual studies); take real histories of real places seriously; and to privilege parsimony over ornate stories that are little more than descriptions of symptoms and not fundamental causes of economic divergence across time and space.

This leads me to two factors that policymakers (as opposed to academics) should consider to be important for catalyzing and sustaining modern economic growth: stateness and elite hegemony (these should broadly be viewed as necessary but not sufficient conditions).

Centralized polities created the possibility of organizing (competitive) commerce at scale within and across well-defined territories. They provided security and other important public goods necessary for commercial flourishing, allocated and protected property rights, facilitated the scaling up of individual-level innovations, and through competition with other states provided strong incentives for economies to stay competitive and at the cutting edge of emerging innovations (i.e., stateness facilitated catch-up development). And following the advent of the modern era, states also became important vessels of national politics and policies — especially social policies that massively upgraded the quality of human capital. This, in turn, enabled both voluntary (e.g., stable wage labor) and coerced (e.g., taxation) redistribution of the benefits of commerce at scale — thereby enabling mass prosperity in a select set of prosperous polities.

Of course, stateness also facilitated the pillaging of less powerful states and peoples throughout the world, in addition to the benefits outlined above. But that’s no reason to dismiss the role of states as powerful platforms for beneficial collective action towards improving human welfare.

Organized elite hegemony was equally important. Here, what I mean by “organized elite hegemony” are religious, cultural, academic, and political elites who had the authority (and qualifications) to set (aspirational) standards and organize societal effort towards specific ends. Such elites had sufficient influence over the general public to coordinate social, political, and economic life; in addition to pursuing their own self preservation in ways that were generally consistent with the advancement of society at large (or at least as they understood it). Consequently, they were able to spawn and maintain cultures of progress, mechanisms for disciplining elites (religion, science, rational organization of civic life), and a sense of continuous improvement.

Importantly, the existence of organized elite hegemony facilitated change without societal collapse. Sometimes this slowed down progress, as when incumbents sought to protect their privileges (especially against mass interests). But in general, it enabled societies to change — as all societies must —on their (elites’) own terms, rather than being yanked about like rudderless vessels at sea by the forces of history.

Notice that the operative mechanism here wasn’t social stratification as an end in itself, or anything special about the specific elites who were in charge.

Rather, it was specialized sets of elites and their networks as a technology for coordination at scale and entrenching habits of continuous personal and social improvement. Some scholars have characterized this definition of elite hegemony as “institutions.” Unfortunately, such characterizations tend to be ahistorical and project contemporary institutional qualities and ends to earlier periods — almost as if the people-centric antecedents were destined to yield modern institutional forms and practices. I prefer to emphasize the role of proto-institutional elite formations in part because institutions tend to be as good as the people staffing them, in addition to their underlying logics and norms. The point here is that merely adopting “successful” institutional forms isn’t enough.

With this in mind, it is (or should be) clear how the confluence of strong states and organized elite hegemony gave some societies an advantage over their contemporaries; and prepared them to both engineer and exploit the benefits of modern economic growth.

How does this framing apply to our understanding of economic growth and development in contemporary African states? To that we now turn.

II: Why are African countries relatively poorer than most parts of the world?

In How Africa Works, Joe Studwell starts off by attempting to explain why African countries are poor today. It’s worth dwelling on this question since the many stylized explanations of the persistence of poverty in Africa out there fall well short; and because you can’t solve a problem that you don’t understand. Studwell lands on three main explanations that deserve close attention.

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Has industrial policy become the new development fad?

The March 31, 2026 release of a World Bank policy research report s…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: A long war is very likely on the cards; and its (negative) impacts will have long lags

…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: What explains the …

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Important lessons from the last commodity boom (2000-2014)

An important driver of Afric…

Read more

Subscribe now

Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making and of the Ugandan State, consists of three tightly interwoven strands of inquiry. First, Mamdani uses his biography to explore themes related to the Asian Question in postcolonial East Africa as well as Uganda’s political and economic development. Second, the book offers an interesting meditation on leadership and the dilemmas of postcolonial state-building. Finally, Mamdani contrasts the roles of Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni in midwifing Uganda’s political and economic underdevelopment. This review discusses each of these strands in broader perspective.

I: Idi Amin Dada beyond the headlines (making sense of 1970s Uganda)

I recommend Slow Poison to readers for one simple reason: it asks us to reconsider how we view leadership on the Continent. Instead of the standard shallow moralizing about African leaders that is prevalent in academia and the media, Mamdani asks us to carefully think through how personal background, domestic political and economic incentives, as well as the international environment interact to shape African leaders’ policy choices.

Such analysis is needed for us to make sense of African states’ current predicament and the best way forward. For example, despite their many failings, Africa’s Independence Generation did so much with so little. On average, these men and women were of a much higher calibre than Africa’s invariably complacent contemporary leaders. Their successes and failures provide important lessons for our times.

Mamdani is spot on when he writes that it was “at precisely their moment of triumph [that these leaders] lacked the resources to translate their vision into reality.” They lacked socio-cultural and political hegemony. They lacked control over their economies and the terms of their integration into the global economy. They lacked the human capital needed to run while others walked. And perhaps most importantly, they inherited terribly weak states that stood little chance in the face of neocolonial meddling and the many economic crises of the long decade from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Many are yet to reach Nkrumah’s proverbial political kingdom. Faced with these challenges, satisficing became unavoidable. And many leaders made (mostly understandable) mistakes.

Despite this general understanding, Mamdani’s subject, Idi Amin, is a really hard case to think through.

It’s relatively easy to analytically understand the actions (and mistakes) of leaders like Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, Sekou Toure, Ahmed Ben Bella, Houphouet Boigny, or Kwame Nkrumah. It is much harder to do the same for leaders of Amin’s ilk. Yet Mamdani asks us to go there (and most readers will struggle with this, at first). And, on balance, I think his difficult ask is justified on the merits — even though I agree with Wallace Kantai that the Amin/Museveni contrast is sometimes overdone (more on this below).

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Wallowing in nostalgia is not a strategy

Early last year I urged us all to quickly move…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Economics

(1) African economies will register strong nominal growth in 2026. But m…

Read more

Subscribe now

To close the year, this post reviews the calls I made early this year in my “Africa i…

Read more

Thank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates on new posts along with over 31,000 other subscribers. All new regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

Subscribe now

In The Second Emancipation, Howard French delivers a masterful exploration of the global political history of Africa in the first two thirds of the 20th century. French’s vessel is the biography of Kwame Nkrumah, which he uses to guide readers through a captivating and readily accessible journey through the rapidly changing world in which the former Ghanaian president lived.

I strongly recommend the book for the deeply-researched (intellectual) history of Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, the global decolonization movement, and the well-rounded interrogation of Nkrumah the man and politician. It’s easily my favorite book of the year.

This review will focus on what we can learn about leadership and development policymaking from Nkrumah’s tenure atop Ghanaian politics.

I: The wages of postcolonial decline and collapse of the quality of African leadership

A striking feature of contemporary Africa is the almost total lack of historically-aware and self-consciously strategic leaders. To be blunt, most African countries are led by two-bit rent-seekers with astonishingly low ambitions. The same leaders are fairly comfortable being at the bottom of the totem pole of global elites. You see this in how they unthinkingly batter away their countries’ natural resources, human capital, and market access for the proverbial trinkets. Too often you get the sense that they are simply not interested in addressing their societies’ problems.

In this post — and with reference to the life of Kwame Nkrumah — I argue that leadership matters, and that things weren’t always this bad on the Continent. There was a time when many (admittedly imperfect) African leaders were intrinsically motivated to be ambitious and willing to deploy whatever little leverage they had to expand their own agency, policy autonomy, and strategic independence — all with a view of improving their citizens’ living standards and their nations’ standing in the world.

My aim herein is twofold. First, it’s to shed some light on how we ought to define “good leadership” on Continent. Second, it’s to define how Africa’s leaders can help the region avoid a calamitous future as far as human welfare goes.

There’s no way to sugarcoat the current state of affairs on the Continent and what it means for the future. Africa is rapidly becoming the last world region to be ravaged by extreme poverty and its manifestations. Importantly, most African states remain weak and unable to secure their citizens, provide essential public goods and services, or create enabling conditions for commerce at scale. It’s my contention that coordinating out of this mess will require a much higher caliber of leaders than the Continent currently has.

For emphasis, the facts and figures quantifying decades-long policy failures across the Continent are grim. 600m people in the region lack access to power — this is over 80% of the global population without power (Africa represents 18% of global population). Only 20% of Africans use clean fuels to cook (those without access represent 43% of global total). Of the 58m primary school age children worldwide who aren’t enrolled, 33.8m are in Africa. An astonishing 60% of African 17 year olds are not in school. Furthermore, the region significantly lags the rest of the world on research — a reflection of the sorry state of higher education in the region. The atrocious levels of under-investment in education extend well beyond education. 31.7% of kids in the region are stunted (only South Asia records similar levels). Under 40% of Africans have access to piped water in their homes. The region’s economies remain largely informal, and create a mere 30% of the needed annual formal jobs. Over 80% of jobs are in the informal sector. It is no wonder that the last few years have seen young Africans protest their governments at risk of life and limb. A majority now openly support coups. The list goes on and on.

Sure, there has been some recent progress on key development indicators. Infant mortality rates are relatively lower (although still unconscionably high). Life expectancy is up. Despite enduring challenges to quality and access, education attainment levels are inching ever higher. And many countries continue to post economic growth rates that outpace their population expansion.

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Policymaking is fundamentally about balancing tradeoffs and setting clear goals, but can African policymakers have it all when it comes to electrification?

I love well-r…

Read more

With reference to leading personalities, politics in post-independence Kenya can be periodized into three eras: the Jomo Kenyatta era (1963-1978), the Daniel arap Moi era (1978-2002), and the Raila Odinga era (2003-2025). As the founding president Kenyatta shaped Kenya’s postcolonial political settlement, the related elite ba…

Read more

Subscribe now

Foreign Policy magazine’s Fall 2025 issue has interesting essays on development. They are all worth reading, as they provide important perspectives on how the current geopo…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: Forcing energy-poor low-income countries to disproportionately focus on climate mitigation is anti-development

Charles Kenny, Vijaya Ramachandran and Guido Núñez-Mujica o…

Read more

Subscribe now

This is a follow up to earlier pieces that I wrote on development in an age of climate change; why (energy) poverty is not a viable climate strategy in the developing world…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: African economies desperately need lots and lots of formal sector jobs

The rate of informal employment in Africa is high, and basically hasn’t budged over the last 20 yea…

Read more

Subscribe now

I: All borders are arbitrary

All borders are artificial, and arbitrarily refl…

Read more