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I: On heroic martyrs and their legacies

History is littered with public figures who were valorized in death simply because they were assassinated early in their careers, but who would have otherwise not amounted to much had fate allowed them to live their full natural lives. Such figures often become the perfect saintly martyrs precisely because they did or stood for so little, thereby making it possible for people to project all manner of aspirations and ideological convictions onto their legacy.

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I: Entering a brave new world by blasting through one established norm after another

So fa…

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I: Can we trust the evidence on Rwanda’s economic development?

Pritish Behuria’s The Political Economy of Rwanda’s Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is brilliant. Despite being intended for an academic audience, I highly recommend the book to a general audience because it provides an in-depth description of the challenges of late development in the 21st century; and how a specific country (Rwanda) is going about overcoming those challenges. Readers will greatly appreciate the fact that The Political Economy of Rwanda’s Rise is refreshingly different from your standard Rwanda book. Behuria doesn’t pretend that Rwanda’s history began in or is only about 1994. He’s not out to settle scores. And he raises constructive questions about the political economy of Rwanda’s current development strategies.

The book is freely available from Cambridge University Press.

However, before diving into the specific evidence and arguments in the book, it is worth addressing an important point Behuria makes in the final chapter of the book:

Debates about Rwanda’s growth success are largely concerned with quarrelling over the veracity of data. There is less attention to the distinct nature of its development strategy and what that tells us about the challenge of late development under contemporary globalisation.

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I: Intra-African air travel is insanely expensive (and yet African airlines barely make a…

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I: Getting serious about building the African state

My previous post discussed the need to…

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

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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.

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I: Has industrial policy become the new development fad?

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

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

…

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I: What explains the …

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

An important driver of Afric…

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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).

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I: Wallowing in nostalgia is not a strategy

Early last year I urged us all to quickly move…

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I: Economics

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

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

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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