Why Africa Keeps Getting the Wrong Kind of Crisis
Ambition has never been the problem.
Ken Opalo has been writing in several posts about what he calls the “ambition gap”: the distance between the scale of Africa’s development challenge and the outsourced, muddling-through way in which its governments tend to meet it. In his account, the problem is not that elites lack the will, but that the reforms that would deliver growth run against the rulers’ own interests, in ruling coalitions held hostage to distributive politics, under leaders who cannot discipline their fellow elites. This post builds on that diagnosis and asks: if the political settlement is the binding constraint, what would actually move it, and why does that so rarely happen?
African governments announce ambitious development goals, and have for sixty years. Nigeria was to be a top-twenty economy by 2020. Ghana has produced dozens of distinct reform programmes since independence.
The goals are not met, and the next ones are set anyway. If developmental ambition were the scarce resource, the record would not be this full of it.
So the puzzle is not why ambition is missing. It is why so much declared ambition produces so little transformation.
Growth Is Not Transformation
Start with what transformation is, because the word gets blurred. An economy can grow for decades on what it already has: oil where there is oil, cheap labour where wages are low. That is the default. It is not the thing we are trying to explain.
Transformation involves economic reconfiguration. It is what happened in Korea, in Taiwan, and in a few other places. Capabilities built in one sector lower the cost of building the next. A logistics network laid down for farm exports becomes the infrastructure a manufacturer uses to reach the port. Each domain that forms makes the next one cheaper, and the economy compounds into a structure that holds together on its own and is hard to reverse.
Africa has produced growth, in particular sectors and in the aggregate. Beyond a handful of examples, it has not produced transformation. The question is why.
Why Talk Is Cheap
Most developing states, in Africa and elsewhere, are governed by a distributional political settlement: the leader holds power by handing out resources and protection to the supporters who matter, in return for loyalty. At bottom, it is an arrangement for deciding who is shielded from costs and who absorbs them.
Inside that arrangement, announcing a bold goal costs nothing. It commits no one to reorganising anything, so announcements are cheap and everywhere. The appearance of reform is better than free: a plan or an agency brings in donor money and the look of progress, at no cost to anyone.
Real economic reconfiguration is the opposite kind of act. It imposes costs on the very people the settlement exists to protect, whether directly or by stripping the privileges that hold the wider economy back. Undermining those privileges is exactly what the settlement’s logic is built to punish. So distributional governments produce the form of development, the plans, the agencies and the targets, and quietly withhold the function.
Ghana's dozens of programmes are not failures of execution, and not for lack of desire or good faith. They are what a broader system that rewards announcements and penalises reconfiguration produces by design. The energy enters; the inertia absorbs it.
Declared ambition, then, is the symptom of the equilibrium, not the thing missing from it.
What Transformation Takes
If ambition is not the binding constraint, what is? Reconfiguring a political and economic settlement like this takes four things at once, and such combinations are rare.
The first is a settlement permissive enough to allow it. What decides whether a settlement qualifies is blunt: can the leadership impose a real loss on one of its own and survive it? Where rival factions hold one another in place, it cannot, because any move to remove a protection is vetoed by the faction it would cost. Where authority sits more firmly at the centre, it can. Morocco’s monarchy can ring-fence an agency and hold it to a hard standard in a way a faction-bound coalition never could, not because its elite is more ambitious than its neighbours’, but because its settlement lets the centre impose the cost.
The second is a window of change: an opening in which the people who block reform are permitted, or forced, to move. What moves is their willingness, not the settlement's structure. Sometimes that is a genuine change of view; more often, it is the moment when everyone realises the old arrangement is over, and resistance collapses: each faction had held the line only while it expected the others to do so.
Often a crisis pries it open, a shock big enough that carrying on is no longer survivable. But a founding moment can do the same, or any deep resettlement of who holds what.
Mauritius is the case in point. At independence in 1968, it looked like a dead end: a one-crop sugar island whose population was outrunning its economy, a prospect the economist James Meade had predicted would fail. But no ethnic group was large enough to rule alone, so the founding bargain forced power-sharing, and the new state used that opening to build an export base outside sugar before Meade’s reckoning could arrive. The window there was the founding itself, not a crisis. The trigger varies; the opening is what counts.
The third is a leadership that uses the window before it shuts. In 1986, an oil-price collapse opened such a window in Nigeria, and no one built a lasting machine within it; when the pressure eased, the adjustment was abandoned. After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda’s rulers used their window to build an accountability machine that binds officials from the ministry down to the village through annual performance contracts. Both were windows of change. One was seized; one was let go.
The fourth is a team ready in advance, because windows do not wait. Botswana’s founders had worked out the machinery before independence: Seretse Khama gave up his own chieftaincy claims in 1956, and the 1967 Minerals Act placed mineral rights in the state’s hands before anyone knew what the diamonds were worth. In 1982, Ghana threw its committees together under crisis pressure, with no prior design, and within two years they had curdled into local rackets. Readiness is not something you assemble once the window is open. You carry it in.
Four conditions, required all at the same time. The puzzle, then, is not why most countries fail to transform. It is why any succeed.
The Crisis a Settlement Can Survive
Of the four conditions, the window of change is the one that looks like luck. A crisis large enough to open one either arrives or it doesn’t, and none can be willed into being. But it isn’t luck. The kind of crisis a country gets depends on its settlement, and a patronage settlement tends to throw off the kind it can ride out rather than the kind that would force it to change.
What decides whether a crisis can be ridden out is not its size but whether it can be paid off. A solvency crisis, a debt emergency, or a run on the currency can be ended with money: a loan or a better year for export prices. The threat passes, and no one inside the coalition has had to move. This topic has been a recent subject of discussion with respect to Malawi.
The medicine such a crisis calls for is cutting public spending, and that is the one kind of pain a distributional settlement can take, because the cuts can be aimed away from the protected core. Told to retrench, governments cut social and development spending first, leaving the patronage machine standing. The bill falls on clients and on the unprotected, not on the insiders that real reform would have to confront. So a solvency crisis is survived with the settlement intact.
The crises that force a reckoning are the ones money cannot end, and they come in two kinds. One indicts the productive model itself: a country’s exports lose their market, or its one resource runs dry, and no cheque can buy back competitiveness. The other puts the coalition’s survival in play: a war, or a contested handover, where staying in power means reorganising who gets what, not waiting for the next loan.
In Africa, the competitiveness crisis is the rarer. Most of the continent sells commodities, and a commodity shock is a cash shortfall, not a verdict on what a country makes. So the forcing crisis that does come is usually the survival kind.
Rwanda’s rulers used their window: the 1994 genocide was a survival crisis no loan could end, and they built the accountability machine that still holds the state together. Côte d’Ivoire had the same kind of opening in 2011, a contested handover settled by force, and seized it only halfway: a decade of fast growth, but on discipline borrowed from its creditors, with no machine of its own yet built. The survival crisis is not the rare part. Using it is.
The other way through is not to wait for a crisis at all. Mauritius saw its verdict coming, in Meade’s 1961 forecast that the sugar model would fail, and diversified at its founding before the failure could arrive. Both routes are rare, which is much of why transformation is.
The Rescue That Locks It In
The outside world makes the solvency crises even easier to survive. When a state hits a fiscal emergency, the lender that arrives is the IMF, built to restore solvency, not to put a productive model on trial. The rescue pays off exactly those crises that might otherwise have forced a change of course.
Ghana has spent forty of its sixty-eight independent years under IMF programmes, through seventeen of them, each one ending a fiscal emergency and none genuinely reconfiguring anything. By the usual governance measures, the country ends the stretch about where it started.
And the supply of these payable crises is not bad luck. A patronage settlement leans the economy onto a few commodities; commodity dependence breeds balance-of-payments crises; the rescue refinances them. The settlement manufactures the very crisis that protects it, and the money sent to help locks the arrangement in place.
What Is Actually Scarce
So what is actually scarce is the conjunction: a political settlement permissive enough to bear reconfiguration, a window of change, a leadership ready to use it, and a team prepared in advance. Ambition is nowhere on that list.
Opalo places the binding constraint within the coalition. The question examined here is: why is the coalition so seldom forced to change? The answer is uncomfortable. A distributional settlement rides out the crises it meets, or is rescued through them, while the one crisis that could force its hand is the kind its own structure rarely throws up.
For sixty years, the conversation has asked, in various ways, how to raise Africa’s ambition. The question that should be asked is whether there is any road to transformation that does not run through a crisis the settlement is designed to prevent.
Further reading
The essay this answers
Ken Opalo, “What explains the ‘ambition gap’ among Africa’s (ruling) elites?” An Africanist Perspective (2025). The shortfall is structural, not a failure of will.
Why settlements block, and reform proliferates without delivery
Mushtaq Khan, “Political Settlements and the Governance of Growth-Enhancing Institutions” . What a coalition can enforce depends on how power is distributed within it.
Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett & Michael Woolcock, Building State Capability (Oxford University Press, 2017). The form of reform without the function.
Crises, windows, and how developmental states form
Richard Doner, Bryan Ritchie & Dan Slater, “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States,” International Organization 59(2), 2005. States transformed by a threat they could not buy their way out of.
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson, Why Nations Fail (Crown, 2012). Critical junctures: a shock breaks the lock that entrenched interests hold.
Leszek Balcerowicz, “Understanding Postcommunist Transitions,” Journal of Democracy 5(4), 1994. “Extraordinary politics,” the brief opening a crisis creates.
Jeffrey Frankel, “Mauritius: African Success Story,” NBER Working Paper 16569 (2010). The island Meade expected to fail built power-sharing and an export economy instead.
Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). The “partial reform syndrome”: why retrenchment spares the patronage core.
Ken Opalo own interests, in ruling coalitions held hostage to distributive politics, under leaders who cannot discipline their fellow elites. This post builds on that diagnosis and asks: if the political settlement is the binding constraint, what would actually move it, and why does that so rarely happen?
African governments announce ambitious development goals, and have for sixty years. Nigeria was to be a top-twenty economy by 2020. Ghana has produced dozens of distinct reform programmes since independence.
The goals are not met, and the next ones are set anyway. If developmental ambition were the scarce resource, the record would not be this full of it.
So the puzzle is not why ambition is missing. It is why so much declared ambition produces so little transformation.
Growth Is Not Transformation
Start with what transformation is, because the word gets blurred. An economy can grow for decades on what it already has: oil where there is oil, cheap labour where wages are low. That is the default. It is not the thing we are trying to explain.
Transformation involves economic reconfiguration. It is what happened in Korea, in Taiwan, and in a few other places. Capabilities built in one sector lower the cost of building the next. A logistics network laid down for farm exports becomes the infrastructure a manufacturer uses to reach the port. Each domain that forms makes the next one cheaper, and the economy compounds into a structure that holds together on its own and is hard to reverse.
Africa has produced growth, in particular sectors and in the aggregate. Beyond a handful of examples, it has not produced transformation. The question is why.
Why Talk Is Cheap
Most developing states, in Africa and elsewhere, are governed by a distributional political settlement: the leader holds power by handing out resources and protection to the supporters who matter, in return for loyalty. At bottom, it is an arrangement for deciding who is shielded from costs and who absorbs them.
Inside that arrangement, announcing a bold goal costs nothing. It commits no one to reorganising anything, so announcements are cheap and everywhere. The appearance of reform is better than free: a plan or an agency brings in donor money and the look of progress, at no cost to anyone.
Real economic reconfiguration is the opposite kind of act. It imposes costs on the very people the settlement exists to protect, whether directly or by stripping the privileges that hold the wider economy back. Undermining those privileges is exactly what the settlement’s logic is built to punish. So distributional governments produce the form of development, the plans, the agencies and the targets, and quietly withhold the function.
Ghana's dozens of programmes are not failures of execution, and not for lack of desire or good faith. They are what a broader system that rewards announcements and penalises reconfiguration produces by design. The energy enters; the inertia absorbs it.
Declared ambition, then, is the symptom of the equilibrium, not the thing missing from it.
What Transformation Takes
If ambition is not the binding constraint, what is? Reconfiguring a political and economic settlement like this takes four things at once, and such combinations are rare.
The first is a settlement permissive enough to allow it. What decides whether a settlement qualifies is blunt: can the leadership impose a real loss on one of its own and survive it? Where rival factions hold one another in place, it cannot, because any move to remove a protection is vetoed by the faction it would cost. Where authority sits more firmly at the centre, it can. Morocco’s monarchy can ring-fence an agency and hold it to a hard standard in a way a faction-bound coalition never could, not because its elite is more ambitious than its neighbours’, but because its settlement lets the centre impose the cost.
The second is a window of change: an opening in which the people who block reform are permitted, or forced, to move. What moves is their willingness, not the settlement's structure. Sometimes that is a genuine change of view; more often, it is the moment when everyone realises the old arrangement is over, and resistance collapses: each faction had held the line only while it expected the others to do so.
Often a crisis pries it open, a shock big enough that carrying on is no longer survivable. But a founding moment can do the same, or any deep resettlement of who holds what.
Mauritius is the case in point. At independence in 1968, it looked like a dead end: a one-crop sugar island whose population was outrunning its economy, a prospect the economist James Meade had predicted would fail. But no ethnic group was large enough to rule alone, so the founding bargain forced power-sharing, and the new state used that opening to build an export base outside sugar before Meade’s reckoning could arrive. The window there was the founding itself, not a crisis. The trigger varies; the opening is what counts.
The third is a leadership that uses the window before it shuts. In 1986, an oil-price collapse opened such a window in Nigeria, and no one built a lasting machine within it; when the pressure eased, the adjustment was abandoned. After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda’s rulers used their window to build an accountability machine that binds officials from the ministry down to the village through annual performance contracts. Both were windows of change. One was seized; one was let go.
The fourth is a team ready in advance, because windows do not wait. Botswana’s founders had worked out the machinery before independence: Seretse Khama gave up his own chieftaincy claims in 1956, and the 1967 Minerals Act placed mineral rights in the state’s hands before anyone knew what the diamonds were worth. In 1982, Ghana threw its committees together under crisis pressure, with no prior design, and within two years they had curdled into local rackets. Readiness is not something you assemble once the window is open. You carry it in.
Four conditions, required all at the same time. The puzzle, then, is not why most countries fail to transform. It is why any succeed.
The Crisis a Settlement Can Survive
Of the four conditions, the window of change is the one that looks like luck. A crisis large enough to open one either arrives or it doesn’t, and none can be willed into being. But it isn’t luck. The kind of crisis a country gets depends on its settlement, and a patronage settlement tends to throw off the kind it can ride out rather than the kind that would force it to change.
What decides whether a crisis can be ridden out is not its size but whether it can be paid off. A solvency crisis, a debt emergency, or a run on the currency can be ended with money: a loan or a better year for export prices. The threat passes, and no one inside the coalition has had to move. This topic has been a recent subject of discussion with respect to Malawi.
The medicine such a crisis calls for is cutting public spending, and that is the one kind of pain a distributional settlement can take, because the cuts can be aimed away from the protected core. Told to retrench, governments cut social and development spending first, leaving the patronage machine standing. The bill falls on clients and on the unprotected, not on the insiders that real reform would have to confront. So a solvency crisis is survived with the settlement intact.
The crises that force a reckoning are the ones money cannot end, and they come in two kinds. One indicts the productive model itself: a country’s exports lose their market, or its one resource runs dry, and no cheque can buy back competitiveness. The other puts the coalition’s survival in play: a war, or a contested handover, where staying in power means reorganising who gets what, not waiting for the next loan.
In Africa, the competitiveness crisis is the rarer. Most of the continent sells commodities, and a commodity shock is a cash shortfall, not a verdict on what a country makes. So the forcing crisis that does come is usually the survival kind.
Rwanda’s rulers used their window: the 1994 genocide was a survival crisis no loan could end, and they built the accountability machine that still holds the state together. Côte d’Ivoire had the same kind of opening in 2011, a contested handover settled by force, and seized it only halfway: a decade of fast growth, but on discipline borrowed from its creditors, with no machine of its own yet built. The survival crisis is not the rare part. Using it is.
The other way through is not to wait for a crisis at all. Mauritius saw its verdict coming, in Meade’s 1961 forecast that the sugar model would fail, and diversified at its founding before the failure could arrive. Both routes are rare, which is much of why transformation is.
The Rescue That Locks It In
The outside world makes the solvency crises even easier to survive. When a state hits a fiscal emergency, the lender that arrives is the IMF, built to restore solvency, not to put a productive model on trial. The rescue pays off exactly those crises that might otherwise have forced a change of course.
Ghana has spent forty of its sixty-eight independent years under IMF programmes, through seventeen of them, each one ending a fiscal emergency and none genuinely reconfiguring anything. By the usual governance measures, the country ends the stretch about where it started.
And the supply of these payable crises is not bad luck. A patronage settlement leans the economy onto a few commodities; commodity dependence breeds balance-of-payments crises; the rescue refinances them. The settlement manufactures the very crisis that protects it, and the money sent to help locks the arrangement in place.
What Is Actually Scarce
So what is actually scarce is the conjunction: a political settlement permissive enough to bear reconfiguration, a window of change, a leadership ready to use it, and a team prepared in advance. Ambition is nowhere on that list.
Opalo places the binding constraint within the coalition. The question examined here is: why is the coalition so seldom forced to change? The answer is uncomfortable. A distributional settlement rides out the crises it meets, or is rescued through them, while the one crisis that could force its hand is the kind its own structure rarely throws up.
For sixty years, the conversation has asked, in various ways, how to raise Africa’s ambition. The question that should be asked is whether there is any road to transformation that does not run through a crisis the settlement is designed to prevent.
Further reading
The essay this answers
Ken Opalo, “What explains the ‘ambition gap’ among Africa’s (ruling) elites?” An Africanist Perspective (2025). The shortfall is structural, not a failure of will.
Why settlements block, and reform proliferates without delivery
Mushtaq Khan, “Political Settlements and the Governance of Growth-Enhancing Institutions” . What a coalition can enforce depends on how power is distributed within it.
Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett & Michael Woolcock, Building State Capability (Oxford University Press, 2017). The form of reform without the function.
Crises, windows, and how developmental states form
Richard Doner, Bryan Ritchie & Dan Slater, “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States,” International Organization 59(2), 2005. States transformed by a threat they could not buy their way out of.
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson, Why Nations Fail (Crown, 2012). Critical junctures: a shock breaks the lock that entrenched interests hold.
Leszek Balcerowicz, “Understanding Postcommunist Transitions,” Journal of Democracy 5(4), 1994. “Extraordinary politics,” the brief opening a crisis creates.
Jeffrey Frankel, “Mauritius: African Success Story,” NBER Working Paper 16569 (2010). The island Meade expected to fail built power-sharing and an export economy instead.
Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). The “partial reform syndrome”: why retrenchment spares the patronage core.
Excellent article Stephen. I agree with the 4 conditions we need concurrently. Hence why need to support with growth oriented teams, and support progressive leaders (in govt/politics AND in business), as they are the ones to know/be in the political windows and know where there is room to maneuvre the political settlement.
Interesting. What would you make of Mkandawire's argument (Thinking About Developmental States in Africa: https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/25.3.289), that Africa has had developmental leaders - able and willing to discipline their own support bases, but this alone is no guarantee that the developmental project is successful?