“I want to thank Mr. Trump, actually. I think he’s slapped us not on one cheek but on both cheeks – we should have been hammered a long time ago.” – Hakainde Hichilema, Zambian president
In recent weeks the inadequacies of African governments have been laid bare. Trump turned off the taps, the worlds largest aid agency USAID was closed. Across Africa thousands of aid programs simply stopped overnight.
Though painful, I think it’s about time.
African governments have, for too long, outsourced critical elements of service delivery in healthcare, social services, education, etc. to NGOs and development organisations. We can no longer hide our incompetence behind the West’s affluent saviour industrial complex.
What is clear, is that African government is not working for its people, and now the aid that used to hide that is gone.
In response to shuttering of USAID the continents political and policy leaders have not been confronting the issue of filling the gaps in healthcare, agriculture and education left behind. Rather its business as usual. Kenya’s political leaders are busy politicking and dividing up the government among themselves. South Africa’s leaders are locked in a budget dispute. Rwanda and Uganda are busy gobbling up the eastern DRC. Meanwhile millions will fall back into poverty and the progress made in the battle on HIV/AIDS will be lost.
If African government is not working, we must break it and remake it to be fit for purpose. Responsive to Africans needs, engaged with her citizens concerns, and delivering for all. I’m not talking about a DOGE inspired Elon Musk indiscriminate hacking away at the state. But rather a deliberate, single-minded process of redesigning African government to work for Africans. Not reform, but radical surgery.
Only by breaking our sclerotic corrupt states and remaking them into functional entities that can deliver services, foster growth, secure its people and their dignity, will this continent develop as we hope.
1. What is government for?
You can’t fix something if we don’t know what it is supposed to do. Thus, as African’s we must decide what ii is we want our government to do. Without that basic consensus then we will continue to have governments without any clarity of purpose, and unable to get much done. This starts by focusing on the core of what government is supposed to do, which all happen to be things African governments are generally terrible at:
- Ensuring the safety and security of citizens and property
- Basic service delivery – water, electricity, healthcare, education, basic documents.
- Providing a policy and regulatory environment in which businesses can grow
- Maintaining friendly diplomatic and trade relations with other nations.
- Providing a viable dispute resolution system (courts)
If these are the basics of what governments should be doing, it leads to the second logical question.
2. Why doesn’t it work?
You can’t fix something if you don’t know what’s going wrong. Why is African government unable to do what its supposed to do. Is it the people? You need to understand the culture, and incentive structures within government. Is it the laws and regulations, you need to understand their context, structure and impact. Is it corruption, what drives it? In Africa it is a combination of factors, but we must go through the painful process of thoroughly identifying and documenting these shortcomings.
Understanding what you want from government and why it isn’t working in the first place is critical if we are to do what Africa desperately requires.
3. Break it and remake it.
With that understanding in place it is possible to break government where it needs to be broken. If Africa is to get the government it needs, this needs to be ruthless. Getting rid of the elements of government that are not working, getting rid of the people in government that are not working, stopping money going where it isn’t doing any good.
However, it does not stop there. As Colin Powell once said, ‘you break it, you own it’. We not only have a responsibility to break African government. We must remake it, radically. To be responsive, to be transparent, to deliver.
This means rethinking how we hire and structure the civil service. Reworking the relationship between government and the private sector to focus on sustainable jobs and growth, to rethink our tax systems and our voting systems. Nothing should be off the table.
Afri-DOGE
Africa needs its governments to work and currently they are not. They are slow, frustrating, corrupt, infuriating bureaucracies that have made Africans experts at avoiding them or gaming the system.
I am no fan of Elon Musk, and a critical mistake that Musk and DOGE are making is that they are targeting the parts of government they don’t like in the name of efficiency. Rather than understanding what efficiencies they need to unlock and what is blocking them. They are literally taking a chainsaw to government and America will be the poorer for it.
Unlike the US, we are not involved in a centuries long philosophical dispute on the size and role of government, we need it to work. That requires understanding its current failings, ripping them down and building stronger ones in their place. Not an easy task but a necessary one.
Many years ago Chinua Achebe wrote “We have lost the twentieth century; are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the 21st? God forbid”. With our governments structured and operating the way they currently are, built on colonial systems to suppress the population and extract wealth, we will lose the 21st century, unless we do something radical. If we do not break them and radically remake them to fit Africa’s needs our children will be asking if theirs will loose the 22nd century as well.