Researcher Says Africa’s Economic Model Favors Quick Cash Over Long-Term Development

Amina Touré, a researcher in African studies and MPhil student at the University of Cambridge, has argued that the primary force driving many African economies is not long-term development but the pursuit of quick and immediate financial returns.

In a recent analysis, Touré questioned the value of ongoing discourse around Africa’s integration into the global economy, warning that such integration is largely ineffective when pursued without strong institutional capacity and a clear industrial vision. According to her, African economies often enter global value chains without the ability to shape them, leaving them vulnerable to external pressures rather than benefiting strategically from global engagement.

She introduced the concept of “liquidity politics” to describe an economic system in which the speed of money circulation takes precedence over the creation of sustainable value. Under this system, economic decision-making across the continent is influenced less by long-term national development plans and more by immediate political and fiscal demands, including the need to maintain political coalitions, manage budgetary pressures, and stabilise loyalties in real time.

Touré noted that meaningful development requires clear strategies, careful sequencing of policies, and strong institutional patience. However, she argued that liquidity politics rewards actors who can quickly release funds, distribute opportunities immediately, and convert resources into short-term political gains, often at the expense of durable economic transformation.

This pattern, she said, is visible across multiple sectors but is particularly pronounced in public finance. In many African countries, negotiations and policy priorities are driven by cash flow considerations rather than coherent economic visions. Governments, she observed, tend to prioritise sectors capable of generating instant liquidity, leading to outcomes where consumption grows faster than production, tariffs are adjusted primarily to plug revenue gaps rather than support industrial growth, and infrastructure projects are shaped by short-term fiscal pressures instead of long-term planning objectives.

She further explained that investments in industrial policy, research, irrigation systems, and energy infrastructure typically require significant upfront costs with benefits that only materialise years later. Fragmented political and administrative systems, she said, often struggle to protect such long-term investments across electoral and political cycles.

According to Touré, the current system is not malfunctioning but rather responding to incentives designed around political and economic survival. She traced the roots of this structure to colonial administrative systems that prioritised extraction, a legacy later reinforced by the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, which weakened state institutions and curtailed coordinated industrial policy, agricultural boards, and national development planning.

The result, she argued, is a pattern of economic evolution centred on what can be quickly monetised rather than on sectors capable of delivering transformative, medium- to long-term economic impact.

Touré emphasised that African countries do not lack ambition or resources. Instead, she said, the core challenge lies in the absence of institutional environments that reward durability over immediacy, coordination over fragmentation, and strategic accumulation over constant short-term liquidity.

She concluded that the central task facing African economies is not merely achieving growth but fundamentally redesigning the incentives that govern economic decision-making across the continent.