Ade Adefeko is right to insist that Africa’s development challenge is not merely the quantity of capital available but the quality and structure of financing that reaches the real economy. Short tenors, high pricing, rigid risk models, and imported templates that do not fit African project cycles have repeatedly produced the same outcome: big ambitions, thin execution, and an infrastructure and industrial gap that refuses to close.
But if we are serious about “for Africa, by Africa”, then we must complete the argument in a way the Davos conversation often avoids. Africa’s core problem is not only inappropriate financial architecture. It is the persistent erosion of African sovereignty… Political, fiscal, industrial, and institutional which makes any architecture brittle. Without sovereignty, the best-designed financing structures become sophisticated packaging around the same debilitating and humiliating dependency. They may unlock transactions, but they will not change the terms of Africa’s development.
To be clear, Africa’s dependency is not occurring in a vacuum. It is reinforced by an inherited position in the global economy, commodity concentration, volatile terms of trade, asymmetric bargaining power, and external rule-making that too often rewards extraction over industrial upgrading. A sovereignty-first agenda must therefore confront both internal governance failures and external structural constraints; otherwise, we mistake symptoms for causes.
If Africa does not lack capital, then African capital must be first, not incidental.
The most consequential line in Ade’s argument is that Africa does not suffer from a shortage of capital. If that is true, then the logical policy agenda starts with the domestic mobilisation of pensions, insurance assets, sovereign funds, local banks, and diaspora savings. Too often, these pools are trapped in low-yield government securities, misallocated through weak intermediation, or effectively excluded from productive investment because of regulatory conservatism (and incompetence), shallow markets, and lack of credible project pipelines.
This is not a minor technical detail. It is the difference between agency and dependency. A continent cannot credibly claim it will define how it is financed while its own savings remain underutilised at home and its governments continue to perform “capital attraction” as a substitute for capital formation.
“For Africa, by Africa” should therefore be blunt about priorities… Build project preparation capacity so local institutions have investable pipelines; establish transparent credit enhancement mechanisms; deepen local currency financing so projects are not strangled by foreign exchange exposure; and create regional vehicles that can aggregate risk and scale deployment across borders. If the money exists, then the first task is to make African savings finance African productivity.
Risk is not only “misunderstood”; much of it is manufactured at home.
The Davos lexicon loves one comforting explanation: “African risk is misunderstood.” Sometimes it is. But a great deal of risk is not imported; it is produced domestically by policy volatility, discretionary regulation, weak contract enforcement, compromised procurement, unstable fiscal regimes, and the absence of predictable institutions. Investors do not invent these problems; citizens live with them.
This matters because the financial tools Ade highlights, blended finance, guarantees, and first loss structures, can either accelerate development or entrench rent-seeking. In weak governance environments, they easily become instruments for socialising losses while privatising gains: the public absorbs the downside, while private actors capture the upside, often without performance discipline. A more honest and truly Afrocentric approach insists that finance cannot substitute for institutional reform. It can only amplify whatever governance system already exists.
So yes, improve risk frameworks. But the first reform is to reduce real risk, not rebrand it. Predictability is a development asset. Courts that enforce contracts, regulators that publish and follow rules, procurement that can be audited, and budgets that reflect reality are not Western luxuries; they are preconditions for African sovereignty.
And even where domestic reform is sincere, Africa still faces structural risk embedded in global markets, commodity price swings, external tightening cycles, and trade regimes that penalise value addition. That is precisely why Africa must deepen regional markets, build buffers, and finance more in local currency: not to isolate itself, but to reduce vulnerability.
Food sovereignty requires industrial policy, not merely better term sheets.
Ade is strongest when he shifts the conversation from food security to food sovereignty: owning the financing, processing, and distribution of what Africa consumes. That framing is correct, and it should be extended. Sovereignty is not achieved by capital structure alone; it is achieved by industrial capacity and value chain control inputs, logistics, storage, processing, standards, and regional market integration.
Africa cannot become food sovereign if it remains dependent on imported inputs and fragmented logistics or if African cross-border trade remains hostage to friction, petty rent extraction, and inconsistent rules. A pan-African financing strategy must be inseparable from AfCFTA implementation that works in practice: coordinated standards, efficient borders, interoperable payments, and trade corridors that reduce friction and cost. “Bankable projects” do not scale without “bankable systems”, but those systems are not only financial. They are also trade, customs, standards, energy reliability, and industrial clusters.
The “trust” framing is not harmless; it is deeply insulting and condescending, and it reveals the problem.
The essay concludes with a question posed to “global capital”: not whether Africa is investable, but whether Africa will be trusted to define how it is financed. That framing may read like pragmatism. It is not. It is condescending because it quietly accepts that African agency requires external permission and that African dignity must be negotiated through foreign validation.
Africans should reject the posture embedded in that sentence. A sovereign people do not ask to be trusted to design their own future; they exercise the authority to do so, then enforce it through institutions and outcomes. When African elites reflexively frame the issue as “Will the world trust us?”, they reveal an old dependency mindset dressed in modern terminology: relevance as proximity to Western approval, rather than measurable delivery for African citizens.
Trust, in any case, is not bestowed at conferences. It is earned in execution and sustained by credible institutions. But the deeper point is that Africa’s development cannot be organised around pleading for trust. It must be organised around building African power, productive capacity, fiscal discipline, regional market scale, and enforceable governance. That is what shifts bargaining positions.
Implementation is where African plans go to die unless accountability is designed in.
Domestic mobilisation and industrial policy require an enforcement architecture: transparent procurement and contracting; routine audits with publication of key financial flows; independent oversight that cannot be captured by the ruling class; and citizen-facing feedback channels that make non-delivery politically costly. Sovereignty is not a slogan; it is measurable performance backed by consequences.
Capital flight is the quiet veto on African development.
No serious “for Africa, by Africa” agenda can treat capital outflows as a sidebar. Illicit financial flows, corrupt offshoring, trade misinvoicing, and aggressive tax avoidance are not merely moral failures; they are a structural drain that forces governments back into dependency narratives. Leaders claim they lack resources, then celebrate external financing, while domestic wealth silently exits the continent.
If Africa wants autonomy, it must treat leakage like a sovereignty emergency and a noticeably clear and present danger that must be tackled and stamped out. That means beneficial ownership transparency, customs and revenue digitisation, asset recovery, credible enforcement, and consequences for elite impunity. Without curbing outflows, Africa will remain trapped in a cycle of fundraising abroad while bleeding at home.
Davos culture is a symptom: validation-seeking dressed up as strategy.
The spectacle of African delegations at Davos in the Swiss Alps is often framed as “engagement”. Too often, it is something else: a badge of honour culture among political and business elites who treat proximity to global gatekeepers as proof of relevance. It is a politics of validation that drains scarce foreign exchange, absorbs administrative focus, and reinforces the narrative that Africa’s future is something to be negotiated elsewhere.
The issue is not travel; it is orientation. Africa cannot keep behaving like a supplicant class in the global economy, arriving, showcasing, pleading, and returning home to the same structural weaknesses. If leaders want legitimacy, the highest stage is not Davos. It is the lived experience of African citizens that has been provided by their leaders and elites with secure communities, reliable power, functional institutions, productive jobs, and food systems that work.
The alternative is not a new spectacle. It is a substance: an annual Africa-based policy and agenda-setting gathering rooted in the African Union, AfCFTA institutions, regional blocs, and African financial institutions, where priorities are set, reforms are agreed upon, project pipelines are validated, and delivery is tracked publicly. Not a talk shop, but a governance mechanism with transparent scorecards, time-bound commitments, and consequences for non-performance. Africa should not be “marketed” abroad before it is organised at home.
A sovereignty agenda that does not deliver inclusion becomes another elite project. The point is not to replace foreign dependency with domestic oligarchy; it is to deliver jobs, productivity, and basic services, especially for women, youth, and rural communities, so citizens are participants, not spectators.
Completing the thesis: sovereignty-first sequencing and the contradiction at the heart of the argument
Ade’s essay claims the language of African agency, yet it submits Africa to an embarrassing dependency frame: Will global capital trust us? That is the deeply insulting contradiction. You cannot simultaneously argue that Africa has the means and then centre the psychology and permission structure of external financiers as the decisive factor. The more that African elites internalise this dependency logic, the more they will overlook what is staring them in the face… ‘Waytin dey for Sokoto? E dey for Sokoto.’ Africa has the financial wherewithal but lacks the political will and institutional discipline to harness it.
If “for Africa, by Africa” is to be more than a slogan, the sequencing must be explicit, and it must demand a drastic paradigm shift, not polite continuity.
Sovereignty fundamentals first: rule of law, contract enforcement, predictable regulation, transparent procurement, sanctions for corruption.
Domestic mobilisation next: pensions, insurers, banks, sovereign funds, and diaspora capital crowded into productive investment through credible governance and project preparation.
Regional integration as the multiplier: AfCFTA implementation, interoperable payments, shared standards, investable cross-border corridors, and industrial clusters that scale beyond small national markets.
Foreign capital last: welcomed selectively on Africa’s terms into Africa-defined pipelines with technology transfer, local value retention, and accountability.
This is not a rejection of cooperation. It is a demand for disciplined partnership: co-investment with African institutions, local value retention, technology transfer and skills development, transparent terms, and alignment to Africa’s industrial priorities. Cooperation is not the problem; submission is.
This is the drastic shift Africa needs: from validation seeking to self-organisation, from deal chasing to institution building, and from dependency narratives to sovereignty economics. It is not anti-foreign investment. It is anti-humiliation, anti the idea that Africa must humiliatingly ask for permission to be the author of its own development.
Until that mindset changes among leaders, technocrats, and the corporate elite, the continent will remain stuck in an old pattern: presenting itself to global capital, celebrating commitments, and returning home to the same fragilities and incongruencies that made those commitments necessary in the first place. The new era demands something harder and more honest: Africa putting its own house in order, not as a slogan but as a strategy for genuine political and economic independence.
An op-ed rebuttal by Kierin Ombu, Kelechi and Elaye Youdeowei
