Africa’s problem is not dependency — but delegated foresight

For decades, Africa’s development debate has revolved around a familiar diagnosis: dependency. Too much reliance on foreign capital. Too much exposure to external markets. Too little domestic capacity. The prescription has been equally familiar — diversify, industrialise, move up the value chain.

Yet this framing increasingly misses the real problem.

Africa’s central vulnerability today is not financial dependency, but delegated foresight. The continent has outsourced not only investment and technology, but the authority to imagine, anticipate and govern its own future. And when foresight is outsourced, power follows.

 

The quiet shift in how power works

In a world shaped by energy transition, technological uncertainty and geopolitical rivalry, power no longer rests only on ownership of assets. It rests on the ability to anticipate change early, to interpret uncertainty, and to decide which futures become credible before others even enter the debate.

This capacity — what can be called collective forward intelligence — determines who sets the timetable, who defines risk, and who decides when urgency is real and when patience is strategic.

Too often, Africa does not exercise this capacity itself. It borrows it.

When foresight is imported, so are decisions

Across extractives, infrastructure, climate policy and industrial strategy, African governments routinely rely on external feasibility studies, demand projections, transition scenarios and “bankability” assessments. These tools appear neutral. They are not.

They embed assumptions about technology, markets, time horizons and acceptable risk — assumptions aligned with the interests and priorities of those who commission them. When a feasibility study concludes that local processing is “not viable”, or that speed is essential to capture a “narrow window”, it is not merely analysing the future. It is selecting it.

Once such projections are accepted, decisions become path-dependent. Contracts are signed. Infrastructure is built. Revenues are pre-committed. Alternatives fade from view.

Dependency, in this sense, is not imposed. It is anticipated into existence. It is captured by anticipation.

Critical minerals show the pattern clearly

Nowhere is delegated foresight more visible than in Africa’s critical-minerals boom.

Lithium, cobalt and graphite are framed as historic opportunities. Governments are told that battery technologies are evolving rapidly, that markets are volatile, that competition is fierce. The conclusion is always the same: move fast.

But whose intelligence defines “fast”? Whose scenarios determine which technologies will dominate? Whose models decide whether waiting, sequencing or experimenting might preserve value?

In practice, Africa often accepts externally produced forecasts about demand, chemistry and substitution — forecasts that justify early extraction and long-term offtake agreements, while postponing industrialisation to an undefined future. By the time uncertainty resolves, options have narrowed.

The irony is striking. Africa bears the geological risk, the environmental cost and the political fallout — yet delegates the interpretation of uncertainty to others.

Dependency is temporal before it is financial

This is why the language of dependency needs updating.

The problem is not that Africa lacks capital. It is that it lacks control over when decisions become binding. The problem is not exposure to global markets, but exposure to externally defined timelines. The problem is not risk, but the inability to decide which risks are worth taking — and when.

Delegated foresight turns uncertainty into urgency, and urgency into compliance.

Once that happens, even the most ambitious strategies struggle to matter. Africa can write industrial policies, mineral strategies and green transition plans — but if the future has already been framed elsewhere, these documents remain aspirational.

Why this weakens state authority

Outsourcing foresight also weakens the state internally.

When governments cannot explain why certain sacrifices are necessary — why benefits will arrive later, why rents must be deferred, why sequencing matters — social trust erodes. Leaders retreat into exemptions and ad hoc deals. Enforcement becomes selective. Policy coherence collapses.

The state appears indecisive not because it lacks vision, but because it does not own the future it is trying to implement.

This is how extractive continuity survives reform: not through ignorance, but through early closure of alternatives.

Reclaiming foresight as power

The solution is not isolation, nor rejection of foreign expertise. It is to rebuild collective forward intelligence as a public function.

That means investing in domestic and regional capacities to scan technological change, model multiple scenarios, and update strategy dynamically — not once, but continuously. It means treating foresight as a strategic asset, not a consultancy product. It means using uncertainty to keep options open, rather than rushing to eliminate it.

Above all, it means recognising that the future is not something to be forecast and accepted, but something to be contested and governed.

The real development frontier

Africa does not suffer from a lack of ideas. It suffers from a loss of authority over time.

Until African states reclaim the capacity to anticipate, interpret and debate their futures on their own terms, translate them into effective actions, put in place dynamic systems capable of learning and correcting course in timely manner, dependency will persist — even as investment rises and strategies multiply.

In the 21st century, the most decisive form of power is not ownership of resources, but ownership of foresight. And that is a frontier Africa can no longer afford to delegate.