Africa reset is rewriting the code for African development

By Faustine Ngila 

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a room when everyone simultaneously realises the game is over. I heard it in a packed conference hall in Davos, when African leaders stopped using diplomatic language and started speaking like people who have finally run out of patience.

The Accra Reset Initiative, the reason for the gathering, was clearly not another development framework. It is a divorce decree.

For sixty years, Africa has operated within a development model written by others, financed on their terms, and designed to produce outcomes that conveniently require permanent external management.

That model is now being discarded entirely, not because it failed to produce any results, but because everyone has finally acknowledged what was obvious from the start: it was never designed for African success. It was designed for African dependence.

And the most damning evidence? Africa currently has four trillion dollars in domestic capital sitting idle while the continent begs for aid that totals a fraction of that amount. This is not a resource problem. This is a hostage situation, and the hostage just figured out the door was never locked.

The numbers are almost obscene. African pension funds control 500 billion dollars. Insurance companies hold 300 billion dollars. Sovereign wealth funds possess 180 billion dollars.

Public development banks manage over 200 billion dollars. Add it up, and you have well over a trillion dollars that could be financing African infrastructure, African businesses, and African futures right now.

Instead, much of it sits in foreign treasury bonds, earning minimal returns while the countries that own this capital take out expensive loans from multilateral institutions to fund basic development.

Let me say that again because it deserves emphasis: African countries are lending their own money to wealthy nations at low interest rates, then borrowing different money at high interest rates to build schools and hospitals. This is not economics. This is madness dressed up as technical policy. 

Where have you heard that before? In the mineral wealth conversation. The DRC sits on trillions of dollars worth of mineral resources. And yet you have small European countries, many with total populations lower than a Kinshasa suburb, dangling a million dollars here, a million dollars there, in so-called aid to build schools and hospitals.

Even as DRC’s cobalt and copper powers Europe’s green industrial ambitions in everything from automotive to aerospace platforms.

The Nigerian example exposes just how deliberate this kind of madness is. After pension reforms, Nigeria required fund managers to allocate specific percentages to infrastructure, venture capital, and private equity.

The logic was simple and depressing: workers save their entire lives, but if those savings do not create jobs and opportunities for the next generation, what is the point? So the system was restructured to ensure capital actually builds the future instead of financing someone else's deficit.

It worked. It is working. And the reason this model has not been replicated across the continent has nothing to do with technical feasibility and everything to do with the fact that replication would destroy the premise that Africa needs constant external financing to develop.

The aid industry cannot survive Africans discovering they can finance themselves. So it will not teach them how.

But someone finally did. And watching a prime minister from Papua New Guinea explain how his tiny Pacific nation now captures 55 per cent of natural resource revenues while African countries routinely settle for 20 per cent or less was one of the most quietly humiliating moments I have witnessed at an international forum.

Here was a country with twelve million people teaching a continent of 1.5 billion the basics of sovereign negotiation.

His prescription was almost insulting in its simplicity: decide what you want, make your policies clear, capture the value from your resources, ensure investors still profit, and invest the proceeds in your youth. That is it. No complex formulas.

No capacity-building workshops. Just elemental self-respect and the political courage to say no to bad deals.

The fact that this counts as revolutionary thinking in African development tells you everything about how broken the system is. About how much of a yawning gap has opened up in Africa’s sovereign negotiating capacity.

What made the Davos confab different was the willingness to name the enemy, and the enemy is not capitalism or globalisation or any of the usual abstractions. The enemy is the triple burden of dependency, marginalisation, and vulnerability. Marginalised by others and denied choices in the security sphere. Dependence on donors for health and education systems.

And most poisonously, supplying the world's critical minerals, capturing almost none of the value, and thus being highly vulnerable to wild price swings triggered by Western investors playing games with the market.

This triple dependency creates a specific pathology: countries that negotiate from fear, plan from scarcity, and implement under permanent interruption. It produces governments that are more accountable to donors than citizens, more responsive to external conditions than domestic needs, and more skilled at writing grant proposals than building institutions.

And everyone knows it. The South African minister said it plainly: Africa knows its problems, knows its resources, knows what needs to be done, and discusses it endlessly on every possible platform. What is missing is not knowledge. It is will. The political courage to act on what everyone already knows.

She asked the question that should haunt every African leader: Is Africa learning to speak with one voice, or does it keep indicating left and turning right? Because right now, China and India, both with populations comparable to Africa's, operate from unified development blueprints. Africa has more than 50 national plans and wonders why investors seeking scale look elsewhere.

The fragmentation is not an accident. It is a feature of a system that benefits from African weakness. Divide and conquer is not just a colonial memory. It is the current trade policy, current investment policy, current everything policy.

Bilateral negotiations keep African countries competing against each other for scraps while multinational corporations and foreign governments extract maximum value at minimum cost.

Which is why the proposal to negotiate collectively on critical minerals is not just smart economics. It is existential. Africa supplies the raw materials for every technology revolution, from smartphones to electric vehicles to renewable energy systems, and captures virtually none of the value.

The minerals leave as commodities and return as finished products at markup ratios that would make a loan shark blush.

Collective bargaining could change that overnight. But it requires African leaders to trust each other more than they trust external partners, and sixty years of deliberate fragmentation has made that trust nearly impossible to build.

Nearly, but not entirely. And that is what the Belvedere Commitments made by the Accra Reset presidents at Davos represented. Not trust yet, but the recognition that continuing without it is suicide.

The health sector analysis was particularly brutal. Africa loses 88 billion dollars annually to illicit financial flows while receiving 55 to 74 billion dollars in development assistance. The money bleeding out already exceeds the money flowing in.

Which means the entire aid relationship is a net negative before you even account for the policy distortions, institutional undermining, and dependency creation that aid produces.

And countries are waking up to this. Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe are implementing sin taxes and building social health insurance systems without waiting for donor approval or technical assistance.

They are mobilising domestic revenue and governing in real time. Which should be completely unremarkable except that the aid system has spent decades convincing Africans they cannot do basic governance without external support.

That lie is collapsing, and the speed of the collapse should terrify anyone whose salary depends on African incapacity.

But the most important shift is conceptual. The Accra Reset redefines sovereignty not as a political slogan but as execution capacity. The practical ability to negotiate effectively, coordinate across borders, mobilise capital, and implement at scale.

Sovereignty is not something you declare. It is something you build through boring institutional work that nobody photographs for press releases.

This is why the focus on corridors instead of projects matters. Why platform financing instead of transaction-by-transaction funding matters. Why multi-country coordination matters.

Because those are the mechanisms that create scale, and scale is what attracts serious capital. Right now, Africa does scattered projects that get completed, celebrated, and forgotten. What the continent needs is integrated systems that become irreversible infrastructure for shared prosperity.

The comparison to other developing regions is instructive and painful. Every region that successfully industrialised did it through exactly this kind of coordinated, state-directed, regionally integrated development.

East Asia did not stumble into prosperity through fragmented projects and donor coordination. It was built deliberately, strategically, and often in ways that violated every rule the international financial institutions later imposed on Africa.

The rules were changed specifically to prevent Africa from following the same path. And African leaders are finally calling that out.

The geopolitical context makes this moment particularly volatile and opportune. American funding to UN agencies is being slashed. European development budgets are being redirected to defence.

Chinese lending has contracted. In fact China - Africa financial flows are now net negative in value. The traditional sources of development finance are drying up or becoming purely transactional.

Which means the crisis is also an opening. If the money is not coming anyway, there is no cost to rejecting the conditions that came with it. If the multilateral system is collapsing, there is no point in waiting for it to reform. If sovereignty was always going to be disrespected, might as well exercise it and find out what happens.

What happens, apparently, is that you discover you had the capacity all along. You just needed permission to stop asking for permission.

The Accra Reset is that permission structure. It is African leaders telling each other: we know what to do, we have the resources to do it, the only thing stopping us is our own lack of courage. So let us build the courage together.

Will it work? The obstacles are real and enormous. Corruption is endemic. State capacity is weak. Political incentives favour short-term national interests over long-term continental coordination.

Vested interests in the current system will fight back viciously. And the technical challenges of actually coordinating policy, investment, and execution across 54 countries are staggering.

But failure is not an alternative. It is the status quo. The current model has already failed. It has produced sixty years of potential that never materialises, promises that never deliver, and a permanent state of almost-development that conveniently requires permanent external management.

I left that conference room convinced of one thing: the conversation has fundamentally shifted. This is no longer about reforming the aid system or making multilateral institutions more responsive. This is about building parallel structures that make the old system irrelevant.

And the most dangerous thing for any incumbent power structure is not opposition. It is irrelevance.

The begging is over. The building has begun. T And everyone who built careers managing African poverty should be updating their resumes, because the only growth industry left in development is going to be explaining what went wrong.

The answer, of course, is nothing went wrong. Everything went exactly as designed. Africa was never supposed to graduate from aid. It was supposed to remain a permanent client.

The clients just fired their managers. What happens next will be contested, transformative, and entirely Africa's to own.

The author, a global journalist based in Nairobi, comments on international matters. fauzagila@gmail.com