5 ideas
Africa's young, impatient professionals (cheetahs) push for accountability, transparency and entrepreneurial solutions. The old-guard ruling elites and intellectuals (hippos) sit in their comfortable swamps, blame colonialism and imperialism for every failure, and resist reform that would threaten their privileges. Development depends on whether the cheetahs can bypass or displace the hippos.
Precolonial and village Africa had free markets, free trade and free enterprise. Market women, long-distance traders and peasant producers set their own prices and kept their own profits. So market economics is not a Western import, and state socialism and price controls were the foreign imposition.
The post-colonial African state is captured by a small elite that uses government machinery to extract wealth from peasants and traders rather than serve them. The main tools are marketing boards, price controls, licensing and state enterprises. Power becomes the route to personal enrichment, so every election or coup is a contest over who controls the looting apparatus.
Africa's poverty should be read as a failure of institutions rather than a shortage of aid, capital or resources. The key institutions are an independent judiciary, a free press, a neutral military, a credible electoral commission and a sound central bank. Without them, aid and resource revenues are simply captured by the ruling elite, so reform must precede money.
Most Africans live and work in the informal economy of peasant agriculture, petty trading and artisanal production, which is resilient but starved of credit and harassed by officials. Development should start by removing state barriers to these producers and extending microcredit and secure property rights to them. Grand state-led industrial projects bypass this majority and usually collapse into white elephants.