Africa Won’t Rise on Western Optimism and Private Capital. It Needs the State.

By Kingsley Moghalu

Every few years, Western financial media rediscovers Africa. The continent becomes, once again, the story – the frontier, the opportunity, the redemption arc.

The Economist‘s March 2026 long read, “Get Paid, Not Aid,” is the latest iteration of this recurring genre. It is well-reported, thoughtfully framed, and almost certainly wrong in the ways that matter most.

The magazine argues that business investment, not foreign aid, will shape Africa’s future. On its face, this is uncontroversial. Few serious analysts dispute that private capital is preferable to perpetual dependency.

But the piece’s broader optimism – its implicit suggestion that a new wave of investment-driven growth is finally at hand – deserves far more skepticism than it receives.
We have been here before. Repeatedly.

The Eternal Return of the Africa Narrative

In May 2000, The Economist itself ran one of the most infamous covers in modern journalism: “The Hopeless Continent.” The piece was sweeping, condescending, and not without consequence – it became, for a time, the intellectual scaffolding around which many Western university courses on African politics were organized.

Eleven years later, apparently in a spirit of correction, the same magazine ran a new cover: “Africa Rising.” The silhouetted boy with a colorful kite bounding across the savannah was as evocative as it was misleading.

That “Africa Rising” narrative of the 2000s was not primarily driven by a hard-eyed assessment of African institutional capacity. It was driven, in significant measure, by the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, which wiped out roughly US$14 trillion in economic value and left institutional investors desperate for uncorrelated returns.

Africa, with its relatively low integration into global capital markets at the time, offered precisely that: a last frontier. The narrative served the narrative’s authors as much as it served the continent.

I argued as much in my 2014 book, Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy’s ‘Last Frontier’ Can Prosper and Matter, published by Penguin. The Financial Times, reviewing it, called the work “a welcome last word on the Africa Rising obsession.”

The core argument was simple but necessary: Africa was emerging, yes – but it had not risen, and was not rising, despite the breathless commentary of Western observers. Emergence and transformation are not the same thing. Momentum and structural change are not the same thing. A decade on, that distinction has only become more consequential.

The Ledger, Honestly Drawn

Africa’s economic growth is projected to outpace Asia’s, and there are genuine bright spots worth acknowledging. Entrepreneurial energy across the continent is real.

Mobile technology has leapfrogged legacy infrastructure in ways that would have seemed implausible two decades ago. A cohort of indigenous African business leaders – some lauded in The Economist‘s own pages – is building enterprises of genuine scale and sophistication.

But step back from the individual success stories, and the structural picture is considerably bleaker.

Democracy, the foundational precondition for accountable governance, is in retreat across the continent. Military coups have become routine across the Sahel.

Institutions that took decades to build have been hollowed out in months. As Winston Churchill observed – with characteristic bluntness – democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest.

Africa has not yet found a better alternative, and the authoritarian models gaining traction in several states offer no credible developmental path.

Industrial transformation – the kind that pulled hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty through manufacturing-led growth – has not occurred. Innovation-driven productivity gains remain largely absent, with South Africa as a partial exception.

Six hundred million Africans still lack reliable access to electricity, a figure so large it is almost impossible to absorb. Poverty rates remain stubbornly elevated even as population growth – entirely disconnected from commensurate economic expansion – accelerates.

The arithmetic is unforgiving: when populations grow faster than the quality of governance, education, and economic opportunity, the result is not an emerging middle class. It is deepening fragility.

What “Get Paid, Not Aid” Gets Wrong

The Economist‘s new piece is, at its core, a story about Western investors eyeing Africa’s critical minerals – lithium, cobalt, copper, the raw materials of the clean energy transition – dressed in the more palatable language of entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency. That framing is not dishonest, exactly, but it is incomplete in ways that matter enormously.

The implicit argument – that the substitution of investment for aid represents a structural upgrade for Africa – assumes that private capital can substitute for functional states. It cannot. Asia’s transformation, which remains the only genuine modern template for mass poverty reduction through economic growth, was not delivered by private capital alone. It was enabled by states that could mobilize domestic revenues, provide education and healthcare, maintain security, and create the regulatory and physical infrastructure within which private enterprise could thrive.

Africa’s 54 nations, with notable exceptions, have not yet built those states. The prerequisites are not exotic or ideologically contentious. They are, in fact, elementary: security; effective domestic revenue mobilization, rather than chronic dependence on external borrowing; competent provision of health and education services; and enabling business environments, starting with reliable electricity.

These are the building blocks. Without them, foreign investment – whether from London, Beijing, or New York – will continue to produce enclaves of profit rather than broad-based development.

The critical minerals boom is, in this sense, illustrative rather than encouraging. The Democratic Republic of Congo contains some of the world’s largest deposits of cobalt and coltan. It also contains some of the world’s most acute human suffering.

Resource wealth, absent functional governance, does not transform economies. It distorts them.

The Real Prerequisites

In Emerging Africa, I argued that the continent’s genuine ascent would rest on five foundations: a coherent philosophical worldview – an Africa-rooted sense of developmental identity rather than a reflexive adoption of imported models; education and skills investment at scale; basic good governance anchored in transparency and accountability; technological innovation applied to African conditions; and entrepreneurial energy channeled through enabling environments.

None of these is delivered by foreign capital. All of them are delivered, primarily, by choices made within African societies and governments.

That is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of realism – and of respect for African agency.

The most important question is not whether Western investors are interested in Africa. They always are, when the returns are sufficiently attractive.

The most important question is whether Africa’s governments are building the institutional capacity to convert that interest into durable, broadly shared prosperity – or whether they are, once again, extracting short-term rents while the fundamentals remain unreformed.

Beyond the Narrative

There is something revealing about the periodicity of these Western media cycles. They tend to arrive when global capital is looking for a story.

The “Hopeless Continent” served a particular ideological moment. “Africa Rising” served the post-crisis investor hunger for frontier returns.

“Get Paid, Not Aid” arrives at a moment when critical minerals are strategically essential to the Western clean energy agenda, and when the retreat of traditional development aid – accelerated by the political realignments of major donor governments – creates a convenient ideological opening for market-led solutions.

None of this makes the arguments wrong, necessarily. But it should make African policymakers, and discerning readers everywhere, appropriately cautious about which interests these narratives serve, and whose futures they are actually designed to secure.

Africa will rise – not because The Economist says it will, and not because commodity prices make it temporarily interesting to global investors. It will rise when its governments deliver security, electricity, schools, and hospitals; when its tax systems are robust enough to fund those services domestically; when its institutions are accountable enough to be trusted; and when its citizens have the education and tools to build the future that outside observers keep projecting onto them.

That is a longer, harder, less telegenic story than “Get Paid, Not Aid.” It is also, regrettably, the true one.

Kingsley Moghalu is a Nigerian political economist, lawyer, and academic with broad expertise in international affairs, finance, and governance. A former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and founding President of the African School of Governance, he is recognized globally for his leadership in economic policy, international development, and public sector reform. Moghalu has advised governments, corporations, and international organizations on strategy, finance, and global competitiveness. A respected thought leader, speaker, and author, he brings intellectual rigor and executive experience to debates shaping Africa’s economic transformation and global governance.