<![CDATA[An Africanist Perspective]]>

<![CDATA[An Africanist Perspective]]>https://www.africanistperspective.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CaH3!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28f2b955-acad-4857-829b-a5abd066c694_1280x1280.pngAn Africanist Perspectivehttps://www.africanistperspective.comSubstackTue, 28 Apr 2026 06:17:34 GMT<![CDATA[African policymakers should be clear-eyed about the short and medium term impacts of the U.S./Israel-Iran war]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/african-policymakers-should-be-clearhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/african-policymakers-should-be-clearTue, 17 Mar 2026 17:58:59 GMTThank 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 33,000 other subscribers. New regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

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

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]]><![CDATA[Conflict in the Horn of Africa isn’t inevitable. People can choose peace.]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/conflict-in-the-horn-of-africa-isnthttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/conflict-in-the-horn-of-africa-isntSat, 28 Feb 2026 03:33:10 GMTThank 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 33,000 other subscribers. New regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afewerki during happier times. Source: The BBC

I: What explains the …

]]><![CDATA[How African policymakers should prepare for the coming commodity boom ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/how-african-policymakers-should-preparehttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/how-african-policymakers-should-prepareTue, 17 Feb 2026 06:03:16 GMTThank 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 33,000 other subscribers. New regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

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

An important driver of Afric…

]]><![CDATA[Book Review (1/26): Mahmood Mamdani’s Slow Poison]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/book-review-126-mahmood-mamdanishttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/book-review-126-mahmood-mamdanisWed, 04 Feb 2026 11:53:35 GMTThank 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 33,000 other subscribers. New regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

Parselelo ole Kantai and Mahmood Mamdani and during a recent book event in Nairobi. Source: Ken Opalo

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).

]]><![CDATA[The international development community isn’t adapting fast enough to official aid cuts. That’s a big problem.]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-international-development-communityhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-international-development-communityTue, 27 Jan 2026 20:59:55 GMTThank 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 33,000 other subscribers. New regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

I: Wallowing in nostalgia is not a strategy

Early last year I urged us all to quickly move…

]]><![CDATA[Africa in 2026]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/african-in-2026https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/african-in-2026Thu, 08 Jan 2026 08:59:02 GMTThank 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 32,000 other subscribers. All new regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

I: Economics

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

]]><![CDATA[2025: Year in Review]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/2025-year-in-reviewhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/2025-year-in-reviewThu, 01 Jan 2026 16:00:33 GMTThank 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 32,000 other subscribers. All new regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

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

]]><![CDATA[Book Review (12/25): The Second Emancipation ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/book-review-1225-the-second-emancipationhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/book-review-1225-the-second-emancipationSat, 20 Dec 2025 10:03:11 GMTThe Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, by Howard W. French

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.

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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]]><![CDATA[Firms or Families? Another installment in the Mission 300 electrification debate ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/firms-or-families-another-installmenthttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/firms-or-families-another-installmentMon, 08 Dec 2025 03:05:41 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 31,000 other subscribers.

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…

]]><![CDATA[Raila Amolo Odinga]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/raila-amolo-odingahttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/raila-amolo-odingaWed, 15 Oct 2025 15:18:55 GMTI: A politician for the ages

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…

]]><![CDATA[The geopolitics of international development (after foreign aid)]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-internationalhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-internationalThu, 02 Oct 2025 15:03:59 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 30,000 other subscribers.

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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]]><![CDATA[The most unlikely degrowthers]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-most-unlikely-degrowthershttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/the-most-unlikely-degrowthersThu, 18 Sep 2025 23:19:24 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 29,000 other subscribers.

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…

]]><![CDATA[Electrifying African firms for growth and development ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/electrifying-african-firms-for-growthhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/electrifying-african-firms-for-growthMon, 08 Sep 2025 02:57:14 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 29,000 other subscribers.

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…

]]><![CDATA[There will be no economic takeoff in Africa without lots of large (private sector) firms ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/there-will-be-no-economic-takeoffhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/there-will-be-no-economic-takeoffFri, 29 Aug 2025 05:06:49 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 29,000 other subscribers.

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…

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]]><![CDATA[On Africa’s “arbitrary” borders and their alleged impacts ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/on-africas-arbitrary-borders-andhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/on-africas-arbitrary-borders-andThu, 14 Aug 2025 23:14:18 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 28,000 other subscribers.

Flag of the Union of African States (Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union) which existed between 1961-1963).

I: All borders are arbitrary

All borders are artificial, and arbitrarily refl…

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]]><![CDATA[How Ethiopia avoided colonization in the late 19th century but then lagged behind in the 20th century]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/how-ethiopia-avoided-colonizationhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/how-ethiopia-avoided-colonizationThu, 07 Aug 2025 02:57:21 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 28,000 other subscribers.

President William Tolbert and Emperor Haile Selassie. Source: YouTube

Let’s be blunt. It’s fair to say that, relative to other African counties, contemporary Ethiopia and Li…

]]><![CDATA[A Historical Political Economy of Kenya]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/a-historical-political-economy-ofhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/a-historical-political-economy-ofThu, 24 Jul 2025 03:00:30 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 27,000 other subscribers.

This is the final installment in a four part series to mark the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests. It offers a general commentary on how the current moment fi…

]]><![CDATA[How Kenya’s opposition can defeat President William Ruto in 2027]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/how-kenyas-opposition-can-defeathttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/how-kenyas-opposition-can-defeatFri, 11 Jul 2025 09:03:57 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 27, 000 other subscribers.

This is the third installment in a four part series to mark the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests. The first post discussed the state of the Kenyan economy u…

]]><![CDATA[Reelecting William Samoei Ruto]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/reelecting-william-samoei-rutohttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/reelecting-william-samoei-rutoTue, 01 Jul 2025 12:08:47 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 27, 000 other subscribers.

This is the second installment in a four part series to mark the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests. You can read the first post here. The third post will spe…

]]><![CDATA[On the Kenyan economy under William Ruto’s presidency ]]>https://www.africanistperspective.com/p/on-the-kenyan-economy-under-williamhttps://www.africanistperspective.com/p/on-the-kenyan-economy-under-williamSun, 22 Jun 2025 07:51:32 GMTThank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates along with over 26,000 other subscribers.

This is the first of four posts that offer reflections on the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests and storming of Parliament in Kenya. The second post will expl…

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