Africa has ideas. But not yet control over its future.

Africa is not short of vision. From the Africa Mining Vision to the Africa Green Minerals Strategy, the continent has articulated some of the world’s most coherent blueprints for turning natural resources into broad-based development. These strategies are not naïve. They recognise the risks of raw export dependence, the need for value addition, and the importance of linking minerals to industrialisation, skills, and green growth.

And yet, implementation consistently disappoints.

The problem is not a lack of ideas. It is a deficit of temporal power: control over futures, intelligence about them, authority to anchor them socially, and elite commitment to stick with them when the costs arrive.

Africa’s development challenge today is less about what to do than about who governs the future, how early, and for whom.

The illusion of choice in Africa’s mineral boom

Critical minerals have returned Africa to the centre of global attention. Lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earths are now framed as strategic assets for the energy transition. Governments are told—often urgently—that this is a narrow window of opportunity. Move fast, or be left behind.

This is where the illusion of choice sets in.

African states appear to be choosing rapid extraction, generous fiscal terms, and long-term offtake agreements. In reality, many of these choices are made upstream—through investor expectations, global standards, financing conditions, and geopolitical competition—before domestic debate has even begun. Futures arrive pre-packaged.

I call this the governance of horizons: the political struggle over which development futures are treated as realistic, investable, and inevitable. By the time production starts, the horizon has already narrowed.

Three missing capacities

To understand why Africa-led strategies underperform, we need to look beyond governance checklists and ask whether African states possess three critical capacities.

First: collective forward intelligence.
This is the shared ability to anticipate and govern uncertainty—about technology, markets, substitution, and climate risk. Battery chemistries are changing. Recycling is accelerating. Demand projections are volatile. Yet many policy decisions still rely on linear forecasts and external feasibility models. Without robust forward intelligence, governments default to short-term decisions that feel safe today but foreclose options tomorrow.

Second: strategic narrative autonomy.
Africa has no shortage of strategies, but too often the binding story about the future is written elsewhere—by investors, foreign governments, or consultants. When timelines, standards and sequencing are externally anchored, national strategies become aspirations rather than instructions. Control over narrative is not cosmetic. It determines whose future becomes contractually real.

Third: ideational reach.
Even the best-designed strategy fails if the state lacks the authority to anchor it socially. Mineral-led development requires patience: delayed rents, tighter regulation, visible costs before benefits arrive. In many contexts, governments fear backlash, mistrust, or elite defection. The result is selective enforcement, exemptions, and early concessions. Policy survives on paper, but not in practice.

The missing fourth ingredient: elite commitment

There is a final, uncomfortable truth. Broad-based mineral development requires elites to commit to long-term transformation rather than short-term rents. That commitment—what political economists call a development bargain—is often weak. Fragmented coalitions, electoral cycles, and intense external pressure make it hard to defer gratification.

Without elite discipline, even strong social authority cannot deliver transformation. Without social authority, even committed elites retreat.

Anticipatory capture: how futures are lost early

When these capacities are absent, a predictable pattern emerges. Futures are opened rhetorically but closed institutionally. Contracts are signed. Infrastructure is built. Revenues are pre-committed. This is what I call anticipatory capture: lock-in that happens before extraction, before learning, and before political consensus.

By the time reformers arrive, the future has already been spent.

This is why Africa repeatedly finds itself reforming after extraction has begun—when leverage is weakest and adjustment costs are highest.

A different starting point

The lesson is not that Africa should retreat from minerals, nor that industrialisation is unrealistic. It is that governing the future is now the core development challenge.

That means investing as much in forward intelligence as in infrastructure. It means treating narrative control as a strategic asset, not a communications exercise. It means rebuilding state authority through fair, credible implementation. And it means forging elite bargains that can survive the temptation of early rents.

Africa does not need more visions. It needs the power to keep them open long enough to choose wisely—and the discipline to see them through.

Until then, the continent will continue to supply the materials of the future, while the future itself is decided elsewhere.