Two Publics, One Trust Crisis: Why African Governments Struggle to Earn Legitimacy

By Danilo Desiderio

The Brookings Institution’s latest Foresight Africa report lands with uncomfortable precision. Across the continent, fewer than half of citizens trust their presidents.

Confidence in police, courts, and parliaments runs even lower.

These aren’t merely opinion poll fluctuations or the grumblings of a dissatisfied electorate. They represent something far more fundamental: a structural fracture between African states and the societies they purport to govern.

James A. Robinson’s contribution to the 2026 edition revives a nearly 50-year-old theory that explains why this chasm persists – and why closing it remains one of Africa’s most urgent governance challenges. His analysis revisits the groundbreaking work of Nigerian political sociologist Peter Ekeh, whose 1975 essay “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa“ diagnosed a problem that still festers today.

The Colonial Inheritance Nobody Wanted

Ekeh’s central insight was deceptively simple yet profound. African societies, he argued, operate within two fundamentally different spheres of public life that rarely intersect and often conflict.

The first is what he called the “primordial public” – the world of ethnic identity, kinship networks, religious communities, and local traditions. Here, moral obligations function much as they do within families: reciprocity is expected, trust is earned through proximity, and social responsibility carries genuine weight.

The second sphere is the “civic public” – the apparatus of the modern state with its ministries, parliaments, courts, and security forces. This domain emerged almost entirely from colonial imposition.

It remains, in the eyes of many Africans, fundamentally alien: impersonal, extractive, and morally hollow.

This dual structure creates a peculiar paradox. Citizens who would never dream of stealing from their village cooperative or defaulting on obligations to extended family may view the state treasury as fair game.

Politicians who champion communal values in their home districts preside over staggering corruption in national office. The state demands loyalty but offers little legitimacy in return.

Why Trust Remains Elusive

The persistence of Ekeh’s “two publics” illuminates why governance reform in Africa so often disappoints. It’s not that Africans lack political engagement – quite the opposite.

Voter turnout frequently exceeds that of established Western democracies. Civil society organizations proliferate. Citizens demonstrate sophisticated understanding of political dynamics.

What’s missing is the moral connection between citizen and state that makes governance effective. When institutions are perceived as imposed rather than indigenous, enforcing compliance requires coercion rather than consent.

When the state exists outside the sphere of shared moral norms, accountability mechanisms struggle to gain traction.

Afrobarometer’s consistent findings underscore this reality. The trust deficit isn’t superficial disappointment with particular leaders or parties.

It reflects deep skepticism about whether state institutions can ever truly represent the interests and values of ordinary Africans.

Paths Toward Reconciliation

Yet the situation isn’t hopeless. Scattered across the continent are examples of governments successfully bridging the gap between traditional legitimacy and modern statecraft.

Botswana’s post-independence leaders, rather than dismissing traditional governance structures as backward, incorporated village assemblies – kgotla – into national decision-making processes.

This integration helped forge a sense that the modern state reflected, rather than rejected, local norms and practices. The result has been one of Africa’s most stable and well-governed democracies.

Rwanda’s post-genocide reconstruction drew heavily on locally rooted conflict resolution mechanisms and community-based governance approaches. Somaliland’s hybrid system blends clan elders with elected officials, creating institutions that command greater legitimacy than many internationally recognized but weakly rooted governments elsewhere on the continent.

These successes share a common thread: they take seriously the insight that durable state legitimacy cannot simply be imported or imposed. It must grow from soil enriched by local practices, norms, and sources of authority.

When Good Intentions Fall Short

Not every attempt at bridging the two publics succeeds. Tanzania’s ujamaa experiment under Julius Nyerere sought to build modern socialism on foundations of traditional communal values.

The policy was conceptually elegant but practically disastrous, demonstrating that romanticizing traditional structures or forcing them into inappropriate modern frameworks can backfire spectacularly.

The lesson is that institutional innovation must be contextual, evolutionary, and genuinely participatory. Cookie-cutter governance models – whether imported from the West or imposed from national capitals – rarely achieve the moral resonance necessary for sustained legitimacy.

The Path Forward

Robinson’s revival of Ekeh’s framework arrives at a critical moment. As African nations confront climate change, demographic expansion, technological disruption, and shifting global power dynamics, effective governance becomes increasingly urgent.

States that cannot command the trust and cooperation of their citizens will struggle to address these challenges, regardless of how well-designed their policies appear on paper.

Narrowing the gap between the primordial and civic publics requires more than technocratic reforms or anti-corruption campaigns. It demands inclusive dialogue about what legitimate authority looks like in contexts where colonial impositions still cast long shadows.

It requires institutional designs informed by local knowledge rather than foreign templates. Above all, it necessitates governance systems that reflect the lived social realities of African societies rather than abstract ideals.

External partners – donors, development agencies, international organizations – can support these efforts. But they cannot manufacture legitimacy.

That must emerge from within Africa’s own political communities, built on foundations that resonate with how Africans actually organize their social and moral lives.

The trust crisis facing African governments isn’t inevitable. But addressing it requires confronting uncomfortable truths about the colonial inheritance, acknowledging the enduring power of traditional sources of legitimacy, and building institutions that bridge rather than widen the divide between the two publics.

Until that work begins in earnest, the trust deficit will persist – and with it, the perpetual struggle to govern effectively.

Danilo Desiderio serves as the CEO of Desiderio Consultants Ltd in Nairobi, Kenya, specializing in African customs, trade, and transport policies. He is a customs and trade expert at the World Bank and a senior associate to the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI).