African elites talk transformation but practice acceleration

 

Across Africa, the language of transformation is everywhere. Governments promise industrialisation, value addition, green growth and economic sovereignty. Strategies are launched. Roadmaps are unveiled. The rhetoric is ambitious and often sincere.

Yet the actions tell a different story.

What dominates in practice is not transformation, but acceleration: faster licensing, quicker approvals, rapid deal-making, and early monetisation of resources. Speed replaces sequencing. Momentum substitutes for commitment.

This is not hypocrisy. It is politics.

 

Acceleration as a political shortcut

For many African elites, acceleration has become the default mode of governance. It delivers immediate revenues, visible activity and short-term stability. It satisfies investors, reassures partners and finances political coalitions.

Transformation, by contrast, is slow. It requires delaying rents, disciplining elites, coordinating institutions and absorbing social and political costs before benefits materialise. It demands patience — and patience is politically expensive.

Faced with this trade-off, elites increasingly choose speed.

Acceleration offers the appearance of progress without the burden of commitment.

 

When speed replaces strategy

This dynamic is visible across sectors, but it is most striking in extractives and industrial policy.

Leaders speak of beneficiation and local processing, yet sign long-term offtake agreements that pre-commit output to export. They endorse local content rules, then grant exemptions to secure quick deals. They announce industrial parks, while approving infrastructure designed primarily for raw-material export.

Each decision is justified as pragmatic. Taken together, they hollow out the very transformation elites claim to pursue.

Acceleration does not fail by accident. It succeeds at doing exactly what it is designed to do: deliver short-term results while deferring long-term choices.

 

Development bargains without discipline

At the heart of this pattern lies a weak development bargain.

Transformative development requires an elite agreement to prioritise long-term structural change over immediate rents. It requires coordination across factions, restraint in the use of power, and credibility over time.

In many countries, such bargains exist rhetorically but not operationally. Political coalitions are fragmented. Electoral cycles are short. External pressures are intense. Under these conditions, elites hedge.

Acceleration becomes a substitute for discipline.

Rather than commit to a shared long-term path, elites keep options open for themselves — even as national options quietly close.

 

The politics of “windows of opportunity”

Acceleration is often justified by urgency. The window is narrow. Markets are volatile. Technology is changing fast. Delay is framed as failure.

This narrative is politically useful. It compresses debate, marginalises dissent and reframes caution as irresponsibility. It turns structural choices into technical imperatives.

But urgency is not neutral. It privileges actors already prepared to move quickly — investors, financiers, external partners — while weakening the state’s ability to sequence development strategically.

In the name of speed, elites surrender control over timing.

 

Why reform always arrives too late

This explains a recurring pattern. Reform is announced after acceleration has already done its work.

Industrial policy arrives once contracts are signed. Regulation tightens after infrastructure is built. Value addition is promoted once export pathways are locked in. Reformers then face resistance — not because their ideas are wrong, but because the future has already been committed.

Acceleration creates faits accomplis. Transformation is asked to adapt.

 

Not a failure of ideas — a failure of commitment

African elites are not short of vision. Many understand the limits of extractivism and the risks of premature liberalisation. The problem is not ignorance.

It is the absence of political arrangements that reward restraint over speed, coordination over opportunism, and patience over immediacy.

Without such arrangements, acceleration will always win.

 

The cost of perpetual haste

Acceleration may stabilise the present, but it mortgages the future. It entrenches dependence, narrows policy space and normalises exemptions as governance. Over time, it erodes public trust, as promises of transformation fail to materialise.

Most damagingly, it makes genuine transformation appear unrealistic — not because it is impossible, but because it is never truly attempted.

Choosing commitment over motion

The real test of leadership is not how quickly deals are signed, but how long difficult commitments are honoured.

If African elites want transformation, they must resist the temptation of constant acceleration. They must rebuild development bargains that make waiting politically viable and sequencing strategically rational.

Transformation is not a race.
It is a commitment problem.

And until commitment replaces speed, Africa will continue to move fast — without moving far.