When Ayi Kwei Armah wrote The Beautyful Ones about post-independence Ghana in 1968, the corruption, the complicity, the “rot” spreading through institutions built to serve citizens but captured by elites, he diagnosed a condition that has metastasised across the continent.
Nearly sixty years later, the patterns he identified have not merely persisted but evolved into more sophisticated forms.
Africa in 2026 faces a debt crisis exceeding $1.15 trillion, loses $88.6 billion annually to illicit financial flows, and watches as leaders who campaigned as champions of people experiencing poverty implement austerity packages dictated by Washington and Brussels. The independence that generations fought for has, in too many cases, become what Burkinabè Captain Ibrahim Traoré called the continuation of slavery by other means.
Africa’s debt trap drains social spending.
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have become instruments of what critics increasingly call “cleverly managed reconquest”, Thomas Sankara’s prescient warning made manifest. Twenty-one low-income African countries are either bankrupt or at high risk of debt distress. Annual debt service payments have exploded from $61 billion in 2010 to $163 billion in 2024, a 335% increase that has fundamentally redirected African resources away from citizens and toward creditors.
The human cost emerges starkly in budget allocations. Thirty of 49 African countries now spend more on interest payments than on public health. For the first time in 2023, African governments collectively spent more on servicing debt than on education. In South Africa, debt service costs (R382.2 billion) have surpassed the basic education budget. Kenya devotes nearly 40% of export revenues to international debt servicing. Mozambique allocates almost 70% of its expenditure to debt repayment. The pattern is consistent: external obligations take precedence over domestic welfare.
IMF programs in Kenya, Zambia, Ghana, and Ethiopia impose conditions that critics argue echo colonial extraction. Kenya’s Extended Credit Facility demanded a 16% VAT on bread, taxes on mobile money transfers and sanitary towels, and cuts to public university funding. Zambia’s program required abolishing fuel and electricity subsidies and slashing the Farm Input Support Programme from 3% to 1% of GDP, a decision blamed for contributing to the 2024 hunger crisis. Eight out of ten African countries were recently advised to cut or freeze public sector wage bills. Oxfam calculated that for every dollar the IMF encouraged poor countries to spend on public goods, it instructed them to cut four times more through austerity.
The G20’s Common Framework for debt restructuring has demonstrably failed. Zambia, the first pandemic-era African default, took four years to negotiate a restructuring of $6.3 billion in bilateral debt. Ethiopia has been trapped in restructuring limbo for five years, with its $1 billion Eurobond still in default. UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared the situation “more than counter-productive. This is immoral. This is wrong.”
Resource wealth flows outward as extraction patterns persist.
Africa’s mineral riches continue to finance global development while leaving producing nations impoverished. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies over 70% of global cobalt, essential for the batteries powering electric vehicles and smartphones, yet 80% of the DRC’s cobalt output is owned by Chinese companies, refined abroad, and sold to battery makers who capture most of the value. The 2008 Sicomines deal granted Chinese firms rights to 10 million tons of copper and 600,000 tons of cobalt over 25 years, with Chinese partners controlling 68% of the venture. An expanded $7 billion arrangement in 2024 left the DRC government as a “junior partner” in the extraction of its own resources.
Illicit financial flows represent an even more devastating haemorrhage. The African Development Bank estimates that Africa loses $1.6 billion daily to IFFs, totalling $88.6 billion annually, equivalent to 3.7% of continental GDP. The UN Economic Commission for Africa estimates that $40 billion leaves the extractive sector each year. Gold supply chains alone account for 77% of extractive-related illicit outflows. Countries with high IFFs spend 25% less on health and 58% less on education, a direct line from capital flight to human suffering.
The CFA franc system exemplifies monetary colonialism. Fourteen African nations must maintain 50% of their foreign reserves with the French Treasury, while France retains veto power over economic policy. A November 2024 survey found 95% of West Africans desire to leave the CFA system. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have announced intentions to exit. “We will break all ties that keep us in slavery,” Captain Traoré declared. By January 2025, six African countries had expelled French troops, and in March 2025, the three Sahel states withdrew entirely from the International Organisation of La Francophonie.
“Rules-based order” rhetoric masks selective enforcement
Western nations invoke democracy promotion and a rules-based international order to justify interference while exempting themselves and strategic allies from the same standards. The ICC’s seventeen ongoing investigations include ten African states, prompting accusations of a double standard when the United States, Russia, and China refuse to ratify the Rome Statute. Human Rights Watch documented that few ICC member countries addressed the court’s role in Palestine, contrasting sharply with responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This, observers noted, “has led to perceptions of double standards.”
The Sahel states’ rupture with France crystallised African frustration. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023, announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS in January 2024, and finalised their departure in January 2025. Their leaders articulated a pointed critique. “The fate of our countries will not be decided in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or London,” Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop declared. “It will be decided in Bamako, Ouagadougou, Niamey.” The AES condemned Western sanctions as “imperialist tools designed to undermine regional sovereignty” and rejected UN calls for accelerated transitions to civilian rule as externally imposed timelines.
When French President Macron complained in his 2025 New Year’s speech that African countries “forgot to say thank you” for France’s decade-long anti-jihadist deployment, the response encapsulated African sentiment: Niger’s President Tchiani called for France to pay damages for “years of looting.” By early 2025, Chad, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast had joined the exodus of French military presence, six African nations fundamentally reconfiguring their security relationships away from the former colonial power.
The United States has pursued similar pressure campaigns. Proposed legislation (H.R. 2633) would sanction South African officials and ANC leaders for joint naval drills with Russia and China, failure to condemn Russia over Ukraine, and accepting donations from sanctioned Russian oligarchs. African commentators called this “neocolonial threat dressed in diplomatic garb” and framed South Africa’s BRICS alignment as “reassertion of strategic sovereignty in the long arc of decolonisation.”
Foreign actors manipulate African democracies.
Election interference has become systematic. The Africa Centre for Strategic Studies documented a fourfold increase in foreign information manipulation campaigns targeting Africa since 2022, with Russia seeking to “undercut democracy in at least 28 African countries.” Meta has dismantled multiple Russian disinformation networks in at least eight African nations. Russia operates a “franchising strategy” paying residents and influencers to create manipulated content on Facebook, X, WhatsApp, and Telegram. ISS Africa describes this as a “regime survival package” offered to African autocracies, including Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan.
The 2024 electoral calendar exposed vulnerabilities across the continent. Chad’s Mahamat Idriss Deby won a disputed election in May; the Comoros saw internet shutdowns following President Azali Assoumani’s contested victory; and the Central African Republic’s Touadéra successfully removed term limits via a constitutional referendum, amid profound Russian Wagner influence. Cambridge Analytica had already interfered in Kenya and Nigeria before its 2018 shutdown, while French military-linked disinformation was taken down in the Central African Republic before its 2020 election.
The pattern reveals a troubling convergence: foreign authoritarian actors “have facilitated the democratic backsliding witnessed in Africa in recent years.” In contrast, Western powers criticise some governments while supporting others with similar problems when strategically convenient. Chad’s Deby family dynasty received French support for decades, despite its authoritarian governance, until Chad expelled French troops in 2025.
Leaders betray their progressive promises.
Kenya’s William Ruto epitomises the gap between campaign rhetoric and governing reality. He campaigned as champion of “hustlers”, the working poor, against dynastic elite wealth. In office, he implemented IMF-mandated tax increases on bread, sugar, cooking oil, and fuel. The June 2024 Gen Z uprising saw 65 protesters killed by police, with demonstrators carrying signs reading “IMF Go Home” and “colonialism never ended.” The OCCRP nominated Ruto for their 2024 “Corrupt Person of the Year” award he received the most votes.
Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu removed fuel subsidies on his first day in office, causing prices to triple. Food inflation reached 39.2% by October 2024, with 65.8% of Nigerian households skipping at least one meal daily. The August 2024 #EndBadGovernance protests were violently dispersed. Yet Tinubu’s past includes 1990s U.S. court documents linking him to a heroin trafficking investigation, with approximately $460,000 confiscated from his accounts. His son Seyi owns a £10.8 million London mansion. Chatham House reported that 80 million Nigerians, one-third of the population, now live in poverty.
Ghana illustrates the cyclical trap: the country has spent 21 of the past 30 years under IMF programs without achieving sustained development. Following its 2022 default, the new Mahama government faces $8.7 billion in debt due by 2028 while implementing further austerity. ISS Africa concluded that under most programs, Ghana “has been forced to implement austerity measures mainly by raising tax rates…detrimental to the economy in the long run.”
The liberation movements of southern Africa have undergone the transformation Armah diagnosed. Nelson Mandela warned in 1997 that the ANC was attracting “a route to power and self-enrichment.” In 2024, the party lost its parliamentary majority for the first time, with the Zondo Commission having documented extensive state capture involving ANC members. McKinsey was ordered to pay $122 million for bribing Eskom and Transnet officials, yet Open Secrets watchdog reported no successful prosecutions of any significant politician or corporate official as of July 2025. Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, born from the liberation struggle, has adopted what analysts call the “Rhodesian style of governance”: authoritarianism, violence, and patronage. At the same time, President Mnangagwa attempts an unconstitutional third term and faces U.S. sanctions for alleged involvement in illicit diamond and gold networks.
Continental corruption perpetuates colonial patterns.
Sub-Saharan Africa registers the lowest regional average globally on Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index: 33 out of 100, with 90% of countries scoring below 50. South Sudan (8) and Somalia (9) rank as the world’s most corrupt nations. The DRC scores 19, Zimbabwe 20-23, Angola 32, South Africa 41.
The DRC case reveals how mineral wealth becomes a mechanism for elite extraction, mirroring colonial patterns. A September 2022 leaked video showed presidential advisor Vidiye Tshimanga offering “unlimited access to mineral resources” for bribes. Catholic bishops denounced “the illicit and scandalous enrichment by a handful of political actors.” The Inspector General of Finance identified 145,000 ghost employees and $800 million in annual losses to the treasury. Mining cooperatives controlled by political elites seize up to half of artisanal miners’ earnings. The same workers are paid approximately $1 per day, while at least 25,000 children labour in cobalt mines.
Angola demonstrates how anti-corruption efforts become political weapons. President Lourenço prosecuted his predecessor’s family. José Filomeno dos Santos received five years for fraud, and Isabel dos Santos faces allegations over a $3 billion fortune while reportedly building his own network. Portuguese outlet Público reported Lourenço under investigation in the U.S. for alleged fraud. Three out of every five Angolans live under the extreme poverty line. When police killed eight people during June 2023 cost-of-living protests, the MPLA’s half-century grip on power remained unshaken.
African resistance and unfinished liberation
The evidence assembled here vindicates Armah’s vision while revealing its contemporary manifestations. The “rot” extends from predatory debt instruments to mineral extraction deals structured for external benefit, from foreign interference in elections to leaders who campaign as reformers and govern as IMF implementers. Yet the research also documents mounting resistance: the Gen Z uprising that forced Kenya’s president to withdraw his finance bill; the Sahel states’ decisive break with French influence; the 95% of West Africans seeking to leave the CFA franc; the African Union’s May 2025 continental debt conference calling for a UN framework convention.
The AU has declared 2025 the “Year of Reparations: Justice for Africans and People of African Descent.” Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema told the Lomé debt conference, “Africa must assert its voice in global financial discussions. We need reforms that acknowledge our unique economic trajectories.” These movements suggest that while the beautyful ones are not yet born, their conception may finally be underway not through the capture of state power by another generation of elites, but through the collective refusal of citizens to accept that independence must mean the repetition of oppression.
The fundamental insight Armah offered remains: the problem is not merely bad individuals but captured institutions, not simply corrupt leaders but systems designed to extract rather than develop. Until those systems change, until African votes at the IMF exceed 10%, until debt restructuring doesn’t take five years, until mineral wealth is processed where it’s mined, until monetary sovereignty is absolute, the cycle will continue. The beautyful ones will remain unborn until Africans achieve not just political independence but economic sovereignty and genuine self determination.
