African governments can win political support for what they want to achieve while still failing to build the policy systems needed to deliver it, policy analyst Bright Simons has argued, pointing to a gap between political debate and the technical work of policymaking.
Simons made the argument while explaining his “Katanomics” framework at the Students and Young Professionals African Liberty Academy (SYPALA) 2026 in Accra.
At the heart of his framework is a simple distinction: politics determines the “what”, while policy determines the “how”.
Politics is where societies decide what they want, more jobs, better infrastructure, an end to flooding, or greater value from natural resources. Policy begins when those broad ambitions have to be translated into specific interventions, budgets, regulations and institutional decisions.
The problem, Simons argued, is that the transition from one to the other can cause the public to lose sight of the original issue.
He illustrated this with flooding. A political debate may begin with a simple question, why is the country flooding?, but a serious policy diagnosis quickly breaks the problem into drainage, zoning, municipal administration, environmental protection, infrastructure, engineering and planning.
Each requires its own expertise.
The result is a fragmentation of the policy conversation, with citizens increasingly unable to follow the technical debate that determines whether the government’s response will work.
“When it goes from that level to have flooded people vanish. People become smaller and smaller and smaller,” Simons said.
That fragmentation, he argued, creates a weakness in democratic accountability.
Citizens can readily judge whether they support a government’s broad political objectives. But determining whether the government has chosen the right policies to achieve those objectives requires a much deeper understanding of technical evidence and implementation.
Simons described this as the difference between political accountability and policy accountability.
Elections provide a mechanism for political accountability: governments can be rewarded or removed based on what citizens want. But policy accountability is harder because it requires citizens to understand the detailed chain of decisions behind a government programme.
That is where Simons sees a role for stronger policy platforms.
From debate to diagnosis
Simons argued that Africa needs platforms capable of bringing together the different strands of technical analysis and reconnecting them with the broader public debate.
The purpose would not be to replace political discussion with technical expertise, but to ensure that technical work does not disappear into isolated professional communities.
Unemployment, he said, provides a good example.
Creating jobs is not a single policy. It involves education, curricula, investment, entrepreneurship, industry-academia links and other areas. Specialists may understand individual parts of that equation, but without a mechanism to bring those findings together, the public may never get a clear picture of whether the government is actually making progress.
“Creating jobs may require you to do 20 other policies,” he said.
The same problem applies to other major national challenges. A broad political promise can survive for years while the individual policies intended to deliver it are debated separately, making it difficult to establish whether the overall strategy is working.
For Simons, this is where policy diagnosis becomes important.
A country should be able to move beyond asking whether a policy sounds good and determine why it succeeded or failed, what assumptions were wrong and what should be changed.
The cost of forgetting
Simons said the failure to connect technical analysis with public debate also prevents countries from developing what he called national learning.
When a policy fails, the lesson should become part of the country’s institutional knowledge. Instead, he argued, African policy debates often return to the same problems without sufficiently incorporating what previous attempts have taught.
The result is a cycle in which one issue generates intense public attention, becomes fragmented once it enters policymaking, loses the wider audience and eventually gives way to the next political controversy.
“Everybody’s a content creator. Everybody’s a broadcaster. Everybody has something to say,” Simons said of the modern media environment.
But, he added, the problem is that public discussion does not necessarily lead to solutions because it “doesn’t connect back to solving the problem.”
That challenge has become more pronounced with social media, where political issues can generate enormous attention without necessarily producing sustained scrutiny of implementation.
Why the mineral debate matters
Simons used Ghana’s gold policy to show how the problem plays out in practice.
The political proposition that Ghana should retain more of the value generated by its gold is straightforward and broadly appealing. But once that objective is subjected to detailed policy analysis, the questions become more complicated: what part of the value chain should Ghana target, what does it cost, what are the margins, what infrastructure is required and are there more profitable opportunities than refining?
His broader point was that politically attractive objectives still require technically sound implementation.
Without a mechanism to bring the analysis back into the public conversation, technically informed conclusions can struggle to compete with simple political messages.
For Simons, that is the central challenge Katanomics seeks to illuminate.
African countries do not necessarily lack political debate. They lack sufficiently strong mechanisms for turning that debate into coherent policy diagnosis, public understanding and institutional learning.
The task, therefore, is not simply to produce more research.
It is to build platforms that can take specialised analysis, reconnect the pieces and return them to the national conversation in a form that citizens can understand, debate and use to hold governments accountable.
That, Simons argued, would allow democracy to do more than determine what citizens want. It would give citizens a stronger role in determining whether the policies chosen to deliver those objectives are actually working.
