What explains the “ambition gap” among Africa’s (ruling) elites?
On the drivers of African elites’ addiction to muddling through developmentalism
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I: Africa’s elites cannot outsource their countries’ developmental ambitions
Former Liberian Minister for Public Works and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Gyude Moore, recently wrote an excellent piece warning African leaders against thinking that they can outsource their countries’ development ambitions. Here are some exerpts:
The Chinese have historically avoided conflating their current circumstances with their goals. They have never outsourced their ambitions to others, even when dependent on external actors for capital and expertise.
If there is one big thing we, Africans, can learn from our Chinese cousins, it is that we must wrest our ambitions for an expected future from external “partners” — be they multilateral institutions, Europeans, Americans, or Chinese.
A few years after the end of the Liberian civil war in 2003 — when I was an aide to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — the government of Liberia had two projects that it sought financing for. First was a link between Monrovia’s airport and the city itself. The goal was to build a four-lane highway. It was evident, even back then, that the city’s only path to growth was along that route. But the project was dismissed by a certain multilateral bank on the basis that “there was no traffic to justify it.” Within a few years, traffic overwhelmed the two-lane highway that was ultimately built.
External actors have no incentive, inclination, or obligation to imagine an expansive future for you.
The piece is spot on, and absolutely worth reading in full. Regular readers know of my running critiques of the low-ambition approaches to development policymaking across the Continent — as illustrated by policy extraversion; reflexive embrace of common-denominator approaches to development “goals” (like SDGs); uncritical mimicry of global “best practices”; and the general notion of muddling through developmentalism without serious attention to outcomes (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). In his piece, Moore succinctly captures the net effect of these ills, which is that African elites have for the most part outsourced their countries’ developmental ambitions to outsiders.
Regardless of ideology, elites’ play an outsized role in the process of economic growth and development. Which is why it’s worth pondering the factors behind the high levels of elite complacency and lack of collective ambition in contemporary Africa. This post explores four key factors that (I think) explain the lack of elite ambition in the region: (1) Elites’ failure to establish cultural, material, ideological, and intellectual hegemony over their societies; (2) Weak state capacity; (3) Lack of policy autonomy; and (4) Being limited to a narrow set of feasible accumulation strategies in the global political and economic periphery.
If you’ve ever wondered why Africa’s ruling elites just don’t seem to have any strategic depth or a sense of their role on the grand stage of history, you should read on.

What does the outsourcing of ambition mean in practice?
It means that outsiders often set targets for outcomes in health, education, poverty reduction, responses to climate change, quality of governance, agricultural output, public finance, infrastructure, etc.
Meanwhile, African governments and mainstream civil society organizations typically embrace these targets and the accompanying analyses and “best practices” as gospel truth. All you have to do is comb through policy documents, watch African governments behave as if the World Bank or IMF ought to care more about their macroeconomic stability, or listen to official speeches in the region to understand the depth of this problem. From the goals, to the statistics and analyses cited, to the legitimation strategies, everything tends to be externally facing and not sufficiently aligned with contextual objective realities. One would be forgiven for thinking that the region’s states and civil society organizations are mere implementation arms of foreign governments and organizations.
To echo Moore, the problem isn’t that African countries solicit foreign help and expertise. The paradigmatic examples of rapid modernization and economic development in Japan, South Korea, the Gulf, and China all involved a fair amount of local adaptations/deployment of foreign expertise. This, in fact, is supposed to be a key advantage of being a late developer. In my view, the real problem is how African states use foreign expertise. Instead of helping with questions of “how to get things done,” outsiders are often recruited into the driving seat and tasked with deciding “what is to be done.” And because they aren’t omniscient neutral players, foreigners’ recommendations often reflect their own cognitive limits as well as ideological/national/professional/attitudinal/informational/cultural biases and gaps.
The consequence of outsourcing ambition is that African countries have largely built for themselves very low development ceilings; and left their populations dependent and exposed to outsiders’ caprice — the most recent example being the halt in American funding for life-saving drugs and humanitarian relief on the Continent.

Moore’s reference to China is also spot on. Among the Continent’s major development partners, China is the one country whose government and elites still subscribe to the idea that economic development ought to be about structural change and not just palliative “anti-poverty” projects. The goals elites seek calibrate the limits of their collective ambition. Which is to say that African governments ought to learn the right lessons from China’s very impressive developmental achievements over the last 40 years (spoiler: it’s not the autocracy that did it).
Of course African elites didn’t always lack ambition.
It’s important to remember that African elites haven’t always lacked collective ambition, at least not at the same scale witnessed today. Even if we restrict ourselves to the modern era (post 1600) with its many histories humiliation and dispossession, there are the examples of ambitious transformational elites in the early 19th century’s age of revolutions; the modernizing Christian and Muslim clerics and laypeople who for centuries incorporated foreign ideas and systems of knowledge production to improve their communities’ material well-being; and the modernizing independence era generation of leaders who did so much with so little in the interwar period (albeit with varying degrees of success).
With this in mind, the lack of ambition among the Continent’s present leadership should be understood as a product of history and not an inherent feature of the region’s societies. For example, African leaders are not any more corrupt or rapacious than their counterparts in other regions of the world. The only difference tends to be the (low-ambition) forms of corruption they engage in.
Lastly, it’s important to contextualize the discussion here by noting that:
(1) Moore’s argument applies equally across the public and private sectors. While public sector failures in the region are readily apparent, it’s not a coincidence that there’s not a single African Fortune 500 company or that African universities continue to woefully underperform their global peers.
(2) There’s quite a bit of temporal and cross-country variation in elite ambition and outcomes in the region. For example, the ruling elites in Rwanda are obviously collectively more ambitious than their counterparts in Malawi. Furthermore, individual-level ambition remains high — with lots of people doing well for themselves despite the structural limits imposed by low-ambition ruling classes. In other words, the real problem is an abiding inability to coordinate on ambitious collective endeavors. To reiterate, I believe that the absence of collective elite ambition (and not a lack of individual ambition) is the binding constraint.
II: What explains the collective ambition gap among Africa’s ruling elites?
Contemporary African elites’ lack of collective ambition is over-determined. Overall, the key drivers of this phenomenon are related to elites’ inability to (legitimately) accumulate wealth within the region. This, in turn, imposes a ceiling on their economies’ potential. Despite their potential to accumulate vast wealth, African elites remain at the bottom of the global totem pole. For instance, in the modal African country the top ventile of the wealth distribution lags the bottom ventile in high-income countries. These differences are reflected in outcomes such as elite-level life expectancy or access to basic essentials like treated pipe borne water (boreholes and water tanks dominate wealthy sections of many African cities).
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Continent’s economic output remains relatively low in part because African elites have historically struggled to accumulate wealth and/or cultivate related wealth-creation processes on the Continent. This leaves them in a “low-ambition trap,” whereby elite accumulation strategies end up slowing down (or completely upending) the development process. Below I discuss four of the leading factors behind African elites’ low-ambition trap in turn.
(1) Challenges to both elite and mass coordination at scale due to an enduring hegemony gap:
I’ve written a few times before about African elites’ (cultural, economic, religious, academic, political, etc) hegemony gap (see here, here, and here). As several scholars have pointed before (see here, here, here, and here), the hegemony gap and the attendant crisis of confidence are historically produced. Robert Fatton captured this very well in 1988 (there has been marginal improvement on this dimension since):
African ruling classes are in the process of "becoming." They lack hegemony, and they are likely to be fragmented and hesitant about their interests and aspirations. Their ability to engage in coherent and sustained collective action is thus limited, uncertain, and contradictory. In this perspective, the extent to which the state can protect successfully the position of the ruling class, that is, the extent to which the state is an effective state, is directly dependent on the degree of hegemony which the ruling class itself has achieved.
The key argument here is that non-hegemonic elites across the Continent have struggled to build anything meaningful (from states, to rule of law, to private enterprises) due to their inability to mobilize consenting publics in support of specific grand projects (nation-building, development, war, etc) and/or credibly guarantee the capture and retention of rents so produced.

A lot follows from this predicament. Intra-elite lack of trust inhibits coordination at scale, and means that elites rarely make long-term deals founded on “open access” public policy. It’s also not a surprise that the region doesn’t have many giant private corporations (which are excellent mechanisms for coordinating elite accumulation). Instead, intra-elite deals typically involve spot payments or conditional access to patronage resources via direct appointments within closed ethnic/regional groups (see works on prebendalism). Even then perfidy reigns, with coalitions rising and falling on rather flimsy grounds. Importantly, the reliance on personalist dealmaking obviates the need for pro-growth rule of law (or even rule by law). The logic here is straightforward. Deals founded on policy require law-imposed predictability. Deals founded on precarious/condutional prebends require weak rule of law to facilitate maximum discretion in the management of personalist networks.
Under these circumstances, only direct appointments to specific posts emerge as credible forms of power sharing in the public sector. This explains the Continent’s many examples of bizarre appointments of aging unqualified old people to public office whereby competent younger proxies would’ve been appropriate. The same is true in the private sector where dealmaking tends to limited to domains where extra-legal contract enforcement is feasible.
The net result has been a discernible Continental pattern of erratic wealth accumulation and destruction due to elite political instability.
The nature of elite-mass relations exacerbates elites’ inability to reliably coordinate at scale. Weak elite material, cultural, religious, intellectual, and coercive dominance has left them unable to overcome anti-accumulation ideologies (be they social, anti-capitalist, anti-state, etc). There’s a lot of social and political pressure to redistribute (or inefficiently hide) wealth. In the same vein, elites have struggled to deploy systematic labor suppression policies like their counterparts elsewhere (bizarrely, foreigners tend to do better at labor suppression in the region than local elites). Despite the quasi-egalitarian pressures from below, mass fragmentation (along ethnic lines) militates against the emergence of socialist accumulation at scale (it’s an often-ignored insight that in African polities both the state and society tend to be weak).
(2) Weak state capacity:
African elites have mostly made up for their lack of cultural/ideological/intellectual hegemony by (erratically) deploying the coercive powers of the state. Unfortunately for them, this very tool remains weak vis-a-vis both domestic and foreign actors. Domestically, African states often have to share sovereignty with all manner of non-state actors (some of them direct competitors); and expend a lot of resources in buying and maintaining compliance (which erodes property rights over legible wealth). Weak state capacity also means that citizens are typically able to simply exit from the state’s influence. Both factors make it very difficult for elites to direct traffic either for transformational development or their own private accumulation at scale.
Overall, the African state’s lack of infrastructural power raises the costs associated with extracting value from society and protecting elite property rights. Social fragmentation in most states along identity lines also inhibits African societies’ ability to exert themselves and have their respective states reflect their political/economic preferences (one way to think about this is that most African countries are stuck in an equilibrium with both weak states and societies). The resulting “negotiated” moral economy exerts significant redistributive pressures on elites and incentives them to inefficiently hide their own wealth (mostly abroad).
Sitting atop feckless states places African elites in a terrible negotiating position internationally. They can’t organize and/or discipline/suppress their labor enough (whether through coercion or ideology) to meet the cost structure of global supply chains and therefore attract investments (labor is more expensive in Africa than Asia). Their economies are always in a state of permanent crisis and in need of externally-directed adjustment. Desperation for quick personal enrichment and political survival pushes them to mortgage away national jewels for trinkets in deals with foreign multinationals that make it impossible to accumulate wealth at home. The best illustration of this is the Democratic Republic of Congo. A good deal of Congo’s tragedy stems from its elites’ inability to coordinate on stable accumulation strategies — a fact that has left Congolese citizens exposed to one of the most rapacious global extraction regimes on record.
To be clear, the point here isn’t that an exceptionally high levels of state capacity is a precondition for elite political stability and economic development — state capacity coevolves with development. Rather, it’s that you need minimum levels of capacity and the ability to make up for the difference through popular mobilization to get on the first rung of the development ladder.
(3) Lack of policy autonomy:
The lack of policy autonomy (and its negative impacts on elite-level collective ambition) is terribly underrated as a source of under-development. The resulting extraversion yields policies that aren’t fit for context, limits opportunities for governments to learn by doing, stunts the development of policymaking and implementation “muscle” both in government and non-state sectors, inhibits innovative risk taking, and erodes both accountability (governments blame outsiders; and outsiders are able to phone it in, fail, and move on without any consequences).
This pathology also stifles elite ambition. Here, it’s hard to not sympathize with African elites. In the same vein as Moore’s road example above, African elites often find themselves having to kowtow to all manner of foreign ideas and impositions that are at variance with their objective realities and/or interests. Consequently, elites usually find themselves working against their very own “official” policy thereby creating a state of “permanent crisis.” This simple fact — African elites’ inability to align their public policies with their collective interests — is terribly underrated as a driver of policy failure in the region. Why do elites in the region play along with policy prescriptions that go against their interests? Some of it comes from internalized misperceptions about the superiority of foreign ideas borne of a crisis of confidence among both elites and their citizens. Another reason is that accepting conditionalities typically unlocks much-needed cash for development projects or macro-economic stabilization.
Either way, the lack of policy autonomy continues to rob African elites of the chance to cultivate ambition by fully owning their developmental agendas.
(4) The limited accumulation strategies in the global economic and political periphery:
How a country’s elites make their money has a bearing on the prospects for both growth and the possibility of converting growth into development — hence developmental ambition. Given the sizes of African economies, relatively speaking there’s very little money to be made from domestic sectors such as telecoms, finance, construction, consumer goods, etc. (there are a few exceptions among the leading economies). Instead, African elites typically stand to make more money as local agents of import-export businesses or in the primary commodities sector (agriculture, mining, petroleum).
The problem, of course, is that for a variety of historical reasons contemporary African elites find themselves at the very bottom of the global totem pole in these sectors; and mostly operate as rent-seeking junior partners that are conduits for managing international corporations’ political risk. There’s a reason there aren’t more Dangotes, Dewjis, and Oppenheimers in the region; or the fact that the Abachas, Kabilas, Mobutus, Dos Santos, and Bashirs have failed to legitimize and therefore protect their loot.

It also doesn’t help that commodity exports comprise a tiny share of global output (a mere 6%) and that African economies’ earnings account for only a small share of an already small pie (see image above). Whether in the agricultural sector or mining/petroleum (see here and here), the small share of earnings is mainly because the region barely does any value addition before export. It’s one thing to have tons of arable land and/or minerals in the ground, but quite another to effectively manage the requisite exploitation processes and value addition; as well as to locally retain and accumulate wealth resulting from exports.
The overall point here is that perhaps African elites would be more ambitious if the default expectation was that they’d make money be engaging in labor intensive manufacturing or industrial agriculture instead of relying on raw commodities, low-productivity services, and rent-seeking.
III: Is there a way out of African elites’ low ambition trap?
The simple answer is yes. Recall that the current state of affairs was historically produced by the colonial experience that dethroned Africa’s old elites and replaced them with a new class of rulers whose legitimacy partially hinged on their extraversion and recognition by external powers. This means that even without deliberate interventions time alone will facilitate a hegemonic consolidation of the region’s new postcolonial elites and their preferred legitimation strategies. Emerging structural crises and contradictions would be the triggers of such gradual shifts.
For the less patient, potential ways of accelerating this process would involve deliberate investments in protecting (yes, corrupt) elites’ property rights, engendering greater policy autonomy in state and non-state sectors, and increasing state capacity. Nobody should be naive about doing any of these tasks. Plainly put, it takes persistent effort to have nice things. More importantly, African elites are quickly running out of runway. Factors like population growth, climate change, rapid urbanization, rising insecurity, and worsening global geopolitical instability will undoubtedly raise the cost of complacency and lack of collective elite ambition. Not even time might be that kind on Africa’s elites, after all.
Why should the euro-american colonialism show any interest in developing its colonies?
I ought to start my comment with the big caveat that I'm far away from Africa (in the UK) and very aware that not all African countries are the same, so I'm responding in generalisations.
Looking from the far distance it seems amorally rational, given the constraints and low expectations you describe, for elites to grab what they can and hide it incompetently overseas. I have the impression that one can make a nice living doing so and the likelihood of losing power in future can create an incentive to be quick and greedy about it.
My job as an investigator with an INGO in the 2000s was to look for these assets and expose them and with hindsight, I think we tended to over-emphasise corruption, which we saw as a problem of personal greed, and not to think systematically about its interaction with all the other factors you describe. Nor, I think, did we sufficiently recognise that this interaction has played out very differently in different African countries. Perhaps every country has high-level corruption to some degree, (just as the UK does, in particular forms) but few national elites were as grossly and blatantly predatory as Angola's under Dos Santos, for example.
Nonetheless I do wonder why cruder and more nakedly predatory forms of corruption have not more often evolved into those which are compatible with industrialisation and improving state capacity and which are common in (for example) China, as Yuen Yuen Ang describes.
Is it that decades of repressive and extractive colonial rule simply hampered the necessary institutions from developing? That is, institutions which were characterised by the payment of "access money" and "speed money" (to use her terms) but which also had a strong ideological bent towards "development" and the capacity to mount long-term schemes of transformation.
(This might be the time to mention that my grandfather, a very nice and decent man by all accounts, was a British colonial policeman in an African country before its independence.)
Another question - again, asked from the far distance and from a position of ignorance - is whether some African states are in fact evolving such institutions and whether the picture in twenty years' time might look rather different from now.