Africa speaks often about unity, growth, and human capital. But who exactly is included in these ambitions, and who is left out? These speaking notes by Yaw Nsarkoh ask whether Africa’s development frameworks are transforming lives or merely producing impressive language.
Main Theme for summit: ‘Building a New United Africa’
- Greetings and salutation: As the famous Latin American theologian once described; when I feed the poor I am called Holy, but when I ask why there are so many poor people, I am called a communist. Thanks for inviting me to share some candid thoughts at this summit. I intend to ask several questions, making my point in a Socratic manner.
- The concept of Human Capital is a contested one. Iconic scholars like Amartya Sen, Henry Mintzberg and Jeffrey Pfeffer have made strong arguments against the idea that human beings should be considered as capital.
- What is the real-life ( de facto) definition of what policy makers in the ACFTA space refer to glibly as “Human Capital”? Does it include workers and peasants – our compatriots who are in the majority? Or does this betray an elite consensus which focuses on professionals alone? If the latter is true, is that not one of our major problems in need of redefinition?
- Agenda 2063 of the AU has attributes of a grand vision without convincing organisational/execution specifics and delivery vehicles grounded in concrete realities. What does AFRICAN UNITY mean and look like in 2026?
- Why does unity even matter in the first place – are we willing to confront the challenges Amilcar Cabral placed all those years ago? Is African unity a means to a better tomorrow, or an end in itself?
- Around what civilisational and development paradigms are we trying to unite – to lift our people out of misery and improve well-being? Or to promote only an elite?
- These questions, it appears to me, very easily define what should be the historical task of the AU/ACFTA, etc.
++ It should be to liberate the productive forces to improve livelihoods and secure the long term health of society, by radically improving the well-being of ALL our compatriots, especially those mired in the indignities of poverty.
++ Not to get lost in misleading ourselves that we are progressing because of marginal shifts in GDP, etc. As Professors: Joseph Stiglitiz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi captured so well in their joint work titled, “Mismeasuring Our Lives,” the real economy is what matters most. Not national percentages in sterile reports focused on abstractions.
In thinking about the way forward:
A – Face reality: Own up quickly to what is not working, stop living in denial.
B – Challenge handed down orthodoxies: The distinguished writer, Chinua Achebe, argued convincingly in his famous last novel, “Anthills of the Savannah,” that, whether of the right or of the left, rigid orthodoxies are the graveyards of creativity. Systems thinkers are the antidote – they see beyond silos, beyond imported paradigms, and beyond short-term fixes. We must therefore:
+Adopt what that seminal African thinker, Samir Amin, described as: “a differentiated polycentric approach – one planet, many systems.”
+ Create the space throughout our educational systems and research institutions to approach development in a people-centred holistic way (learning relevant lessons from wherever we can). To be clear, this is a call for significant educational reforms from top to bottom and a very clear acceptance that the neoliberal reforms of the ‘80s and ‘90s have failed. There are many well-known examples from Asia about how public education has been strengthened. Rwanda seems to be a good case on the continent in this regard, we must take all these and fashion a response. Both at the peak of academia and in the development of vocational capabilities.
+ We Africans are not the children of a lesser God, we, like all other peoples of the world, help hold up the sky. But right now we are regurgitating paradigms that are not always relevant or suited for our concrete realities, or for our phase of development. (E.g. we need to fix our governing institutions and the public sector, so we drive our development efforts with competent states that are accountable for delivering tangible improvements to our people).
C – Historicity and space for serious reflection: We need a deeper understanding of history than our development people betray. How did we get to be where we are today, what are the lessons? These are not questions to be answered only by investment bankers and lawyers sitting in high brow officers, we need all our highly grounded thinkers on board. The thinking to be done must necessarily be interdisciplinary and fully decolonised – and focused on improving well-being of the people. This should lead to development approaches with distinct African characteristics, specifically a path to building agricultural and industrial capabilities that viably serve our needs. They are grounded in Africa’s lived realities – whether in agriculture, education, or governance -and they have the courage to use science and facts, not magical thinking, to drive decisions. Revamping agriculture will be critical for any plan to absorb the large pools of unemployed labour that we are saddled with. Impactful agricultural reforms will need to involve value-chain optimisation, land reforms, research & development, and a decision on the level of strategic state support, etc. to be deployed.
D – Read the geopolitics right: In an age of such rapid change, new powers and new technologies – what are the opportunities hiding in the interstitial spaces? Typically, and Ghana where you are meeting is a good example of this, Africa hardly exports value added products to ASEAN. We remain largely a periphery of the colonial legacy metropole. Latin America and non-China Asia have for example done much more transformational things to improve connectivity (transport and communications) with China’s BRI.
E – Derailed and derailing democracies: Our talent base must be willing to confront the elephant in the room. And drive public sector reforms and institutional remakes that ensure much greater capability to deliver to our people, and significantly decrease the pain from corruption. Again, we know how to do this, the question is: do we have the political will? Can we organise to hold our states more accountable to the people?
+Our Santa Claus democracies are failing, from Cape Town to Cairo.
+ These Santa Claus democracies have failed to deliver what they promised to the people in better lives – as a result the coups are back?
+ Everywhere, the rule of law, and the very idea of law-based societies are under strain, with ominous consequences on people’s security. Are we then try to unite this chaos? Why do we make so little people against endemic corruption?
+Are our leaders of AU/ACFTA countries then agents of progress or retrogression? Do they represent regeneration or degeneration?
F – ACFTA must become more of a people’s movement: Is ACFTA an elite body or are its prime considerations about how to improve the well-being of ordinary Africans? These questions require diligent deliberation and solid evidence to answer purposefully. Are the P&Ls of oligarchs more important to ACFTA than the lives of hundreds of millions of our compatriots trapped in misery? Can we improve both – how can we organise to deepen true democracy, do we need to build local government structures that function as real people’s congresses?
If ACFTA is only about numbers, it will fail. If it is about people, it will endure. ACFTA is NOT just about GDP, it is about livelihoods. Not elites, but people. A real economy focus must aim to radically strengthen and accelerate:
+Connectivity: Transport and telecommunications
+Agriculture/Agribusiness (which cannot be modernised without difficult decisions being made around land reforms).
+Education and culture
+Health and sanitation
G – The kind of talent we need: can handle these nuances in the civilisational competitive contexts that we face in Africa and the world today must be systems thinkers (they can think through whole-process, end-to-end, multiple order consequences for the long-term. and they are deeply connected to Africa’s concrete realities and have the courage to use science and facts to drive decision making to improve those realities).
+They must be multi-stakeholder oriented: keen to use win-win approaches that yield optimal benefits for all of society in the long-term, not just the shareholder. This is economics of regenerative mutuality.
+ Deeply connected to Africa’s concrete realities but with strong disciplinary foundations that enable them to learn from relevant breakthroughs anywhere in the world: This will ensure there is the courage to use scientific approaches and facts to drive decision making and action required to improve society. Not superstition and magical thinking passed on as intellectual exertion.
+ Right purpose: Our talent must seek solutions that improve all people and all in society for the long-term. As Amilcar Cabral pointed out in 1966, in his highly insightful and now famous “Weapon of Theory” speech: “Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward to guarantee the future of their children.” Systems thinkers are those who can translate ideas into tangible improvements in livelihoods
F – ACFTA must regroup to think deeply and then tackle real problems and provide real solutions: A starting point could be that the AU itself checks in a systematic way, what the African people think about it – it may be quite revealing. ACFTA must regroup – not to impress reports, but to transform lives.
Finally,
A better Africa is possible – not inevitable. Until the day comes, when a more united Africa takes her rightful place in the world because the people of Global Africa live in dignity and are self-confident, shall we – like the freedom fighters of the liberation movements in Portuguese speaking Africa, also say: A LUTA CONTINUA!
May today’s UTOPIAs of a much better African tomorrow for all our people, soon become our concrete realities.
These speaking notes were delivered by Yaw Nsarkoh on December 17, 2025, in Accra, Ghana, at the Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast City, during the summit on Building a New United Africa, convened in partnership with the African Union – ECOSOCC, the Government of Ghana, and the Center for Strategic African Development (CENSADEV).
