Walter Anuku PhD, DBA
A friend once shared a story that, while simple, captures a troubling reality of modern African politics. A politician helped his wife secure a public-sector job. Speaking from a place of personal gratitude, the man said that he would continue to support the politician forever, no matter how well or badly he performed in office.
This scenario poses a basic question for democratic development: what happens to the social contract between citizen and state when personal favors supersede public performance? It’s not just that a politician did a favor for a constituent. The deeper problem is what this sort of arrangement symbolizes. Public office is to be used for the common good. But when citizens judge political leaders mainly by the personal benefits they deliver to their immediate circles, governance becomes a transactional exchange: political loyalty for personal favors. In such a system, public goods like roads, hospitals, electricity, and schools become secondary to private connections.This transactional dynamic explains one of the central paradoxes of African politics: why political loyalty frequently survives years of disappointing public performance.
The failure to establish basic infrastructure, particularly road networks is one of the most visible manifestations of this breakdown. Roads need paving, schools need building and healthcare needs modernizing and that requires long-term capital investment, transparent procurement and sustained maintenance. But in a patron-client political system, public infrastructure is less politically rewarding than targeted personal favors. A paved road benefits everyone equally, including political opponents, whereas a personal favor a job, a contract, or a school-fee subsidy secures immediate, loyal political capital.Consequently, political elites often approach the electorate not as equal citizens with rights, but as a population to be managed through periodic handouts. Infrastructure is not a luxury; it is the deciding factor in whether farmers can get their produce to market, children can get to school safely, and businesses can move goods efficiently. But citizens consistently rate infrastructure as one of the top failures.
A 2026 Afrobarometer survey of 38 African countries found that infrastructure and roads were still the biggest problems citizens wanted their governments to address, with 54 percent giving their governments failing grades on infrastructure, healthcare and electricity. So why do citizens continue to support leaders that fall short in these core duties? Much of the answer is in the rational response to institutional failure. When state institutions fail to provide reliable services, citizens understandably turn to alternative means to protect their families. When you know a politician personally, you get immediate, tangible help you have a medical bill you need to pay off, you want to get into a school, you want someone in a government office to leave you alone it seems a lot more reliable than the hazy notion of reforming institutions over the long haul. Afrobarometerdata show that citizens stroncommunity. Weak institution and nepotism in the abstract but often have a different view of political patronage when it directly benefits their family or community. Weak institutional accountability offers little incentive to politicians to provide long-term public goods when short-term private rewards are more politically rewarding.Political theorists frequently cite the famous allegory attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to understand how systemic deprivation reinforces political loyalty. Popularized by Kyrgyz novelist ChingizAitmatov, the story tells of a leader who rips out every single feather from a live chicken.
The bird is put down on the floor, shivering, in agony. The chicken, instead of running away, follows the leader around the room, collecting small morsels of grain dropped from his hand. Historians tend to see this story as an allegory, not history, but its view of authoritarian control is sharp. In a political system that keeps its population constantly vulnerable, the demands for structural progress are secondary to the need for basic survival.In such a case a leader who gives out small personal favors is not seen as an exploiter who has produced the deprivation, but as a benefactor who gives relief.
When formal institutions fail to provide basic security or livelihoods, political relations become patron-client networks. Governance is no longer a social contract for public goods but a zero sum competition for scarce state resources. The politician is seen as a patron whose role is mainly to distribute spoils among an immediate circle, rather than as a public servant responsible to all.The persistent nature of these governance challenges often raises a more fundamental and uncomfortable question: Is there something fundamentally wrong with Black people or African societies that makes sustainable development so elusive?To answer this we need to distinguish between biological fallacies and institutional realities. All racial groups are equal in human potential and intellectual capacity.
Developmental challenges cannot be explained biologically or neurologically through the use of race.The achievements of the African diaspora are a stark empirical denial of racial determinism. Millions of individuals of African descent achieve extraordinary success as scientists, engineers, jurists, entrepreneurs, and political leaders across Europe, North America, and beyond. A Nigerian engineer working in Canada does not acquire a different brain upon arrival; a Ghanaian physician practicing in Britain does not become a different species. The individual carries the same intellect and ambition into a different institutional framework. This is a very important truth: Human achievement is very much a function of the rules, incentives, laws and educational environments in which people find themselves working.Economists and political scientists such as Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have demonstrated that the long-term development of nations is mainly determined by the differences in economic and political institutions. Their research points to the persistence of extractive institutional patterns established during colonial rule after independence. Colonial governments were never meant for broad-based development or public accountability, but for resource extraction and population control. In many post-colonial states, new political elites inherited these administrative structures without altering the underlying logic, resulting in systems where leaders view the public as subjects rather than sovereign citizens.In the past, institutional failures in Africa have been used by proponents of racial hierarchy to justify oppression. P. W. Botha , the apartheid-era leader of South Africa, espoused deeply racist views of this sort, asserting that Black people were inherently incapable of self-governance , and used this ideology to justify white minority rule and political exclusion. These were never objective observations but ideological tools for rationalizing political domination. This history is an important warning.
When a ruling class convinces itself or the public that citizens cannot govern themselves, it is easy to rationalize exploitation and harder to challenge institutional failure.But acknowledging the legacy of colonialism and the myths of apartheid ideology does not mean that the answer is external domination or ‘recolonization.’ Recolonization would merely substitute external coercion for internal exploitation. Foreign colonial rule was inherently extractive and self-serving; it never existed to build inclusive democratic state capacity. What Africa needs is not foreign masters, but stronger internal citizenship, a stronger legal framework, and a political culture that treats public office as a public trust. The fundamental challenge facing African nations like Nigeria is not a scarcity of talent, intelligence, or resources.
It is the structural challenge of building institutions that consistently reward integrity, competence, productivity, and long-term planning. Roads do not fail because of a lack of cognitive capacity; they fail when procurement is corrupt, planning is weak, funds are diverted, and oversight is non-existent. Realizing sustainable development requires a fundamental shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state. Citizens must move from viewing the government as a source of occasional personal charity to demanding it function as an accountable provider of public goods. This shift requires a cultural transition in how leadership is measured. Success must no longer be judged by whether a politician secured a job for an individual relative but by whether an administration built infrastructure, improved healthcare, and created opportunities that elevated thousands of lives.
The central question of citizenship must move from “What did this leader give to me?” to “What did this government build for everyone?” Africa does not need to prove its human capacity for development; history, science, and global achievement have already answered that question. The real challenge is to create lasting institutions that can turn individual potential into collective progress. The way forward is institutional reform, rigorous political accountability and a political culture that puts the common good above personal patronage.
