The Mettaboy Report

  For decades, Africa’s development debate has been framed around familiar shortages: capital, infrastructure, skills, state capacity. When projects fail or reforms stall, the explanation is usually the same—insufficient resources, weak institutions, poor implementation. This diagnosis is increasingly misleading. Africa’s core disadvantage today is not a lack of capital or competence. It is the loss of control over time —over when decisions become binding, when options close, and when futures are effectively decided. Development, in the 21st century, is less about delivering projects than about governing time . Power has moved upstream In a world shaped by financialisation, long-term contracts, global value chains, technological and geopolitical uncertainties, power no longer sits primarily at the point of execution. It sits upstream, in the moment when expectations harden into commitments. Once a contract is signed, infrastructure financed, or standard adopted, time ...

Across the world, industrial policy is back. Governments are picking sectors, subsidising technologies and reshaping markets in the name of resilience, decarbonisation and competitiveness. Africa is no exception. From green industrial strategies to mineral beneficiation plans, the language of transformation is everywhere. And yet, failure is common. Industrial policy is often blamed when outcomes disappoint: weak implementation, investor resistance, social backlash or policy reversal. The usual diagnosis follows—capacity constraints, poor coordination, weak institutions. But this misses a deeper problem. Industrial policy fails not because states cannot implement it, but because they ignore how futures are negotiated long before they are implemented .   The hidden stage where policy succeeds or dies Most industrial policies are treated as technical exercises. Analysts debate incentives, tariffs, local content rules and financing instruments. Politics enters late, usuall...

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 — w...

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...

Africa does not lack ideas about how its mineral wealth should drive development. It lacks control over when and how mining futures are locked in. From the African Mining Vision to national industrialisation strategies, the continent has articulated some of the most ambitious thinking on extractives anywhere in the world. Yet outcomes on the ground remain stubbornly unchanged: enclave production, limited value addition, fiscal leakage, and weak domestic linkages. This gap between vision and outcome is often blamed on weak implementation, corruption, or capacity constraints. These factors matter. But they miss the deeper issue. Africa’s mining problem is not vision. It is capture . Futures are being captured before they are debated Most mining debates focus on what happens after extraction begins: how revenues are disclosed, how companies comply with standards, how governments manage receipts. By that stage, the most important decisions are already settled. Mining futur...

Lead poisoning is preventable. Yet widespread use of lead in consumables including paints and gasoline continues to pose major risks to environment and public health. WHO ranks exposure to the  versatile and toxic substance among the top ten priority chemicals of public health concerns in Africa.   In a recent self-assessment survey by WHO, majority of Member States in Africa identified lead poisoning as a key public health threat. Exposure is pervasive to human health. Lead poisoning kills about 494,550 people yearly, accounting for over 9.3 million disability adjusted life years (DALYs) due to long-term health effects. In Africa, it is responsible for about 22,605 deaths in 2016. There is no known safe concentration of lead in the blood.   In the body, the heavy metal affects brain, liver, kidney and bones.   Exposure produces a spectrum of irreversible injuries including loss of cognition, shortening of attention span, alteration of behavior, attention def...

An Africa Progress Panel report puts it simply:  ''If Africa is so resource-rich, why are its people not better educated, its children well-nourished and its adults longer-lived?'' The decades old question remains spot-on today as yesterday.  Africa’s subsoil is rich enormously and will remain so, at least for some years to come. It host   an estimated 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves, and even greater share of key precious and base metals including diamond and platinum [1] .   Over 9 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves and 7.5 percent of gas reserves are found in the continent [2] . After agriculture, the extractive sector is the most important in terms of contribution to gross domestic product.   The International Monetary Fund has grouped more than 20 African countries as heavily dependent on natural resources, with resource revenues accounting for over 20 percent of their tax and export revenues. Many more countries are increasingly d...

It is two hundred years plus since Henry Stanley labelled Africa a ‘dark continent.’ Back then, most Western explorers and missionaries were attracted to the region’s strangeness: Africa’s pristine environment was a curiosity, its inhabitants were unknown and its subsoil was treasure trove— with potential to power industrial revolutions. Today, the pejorative tag is out of fashion.  Africa is increasingly rebranding itself as a ‘rising continent.’ Yet a dark scar continues to stick on its public health map. Unlike its exotic appeal, Africa’s hidden disease burden remains a product of policy neglect— collectively affecting the lives of its bottom 500 million citizens. This is more than half of its population-- in fact, even greater than Nigeria and South Africa combine. The World Health Organization has identified seventeen bio-medically dissimilar bacteria and parasitic infections which are linked together by their collective neglect in decisio...