Every few years, headlines remind us that a handful of billionaires hold more wealth than half the continent. But the real story isn’t in the numbers; it’s in the neighbourhoods.
In places like Mathare in Nairobi or Makoko in Lagos, residents trace promised clinics and markets only to discover they exist solely in government files, commissioned, “completed,” or even “destroyed by fire” without ever being built.
This is not administrative failure; it is how power works. Across sub-Saharan Africa, “ghost projects” have become one of the clearest indicators of a state repurposed for private gain.
Audits in Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique reveal clinics with no walls, roads that vanish after payment, and schools funded multiple times. Kenya’s Kimwarer and Arror dam scandals exposed billions lost to companies with no construction history.
In Nigeria, school feeding programmes justify vast payouts with little evidence of delivery.
Read: African youth aren’t waiting to inherit broken systems, they’re dismantling themBehind these schemes is a political-business class that has no reliance on public services but heavily relies on the state as a gate to profit. Contracts are channelled through shell companies tied to officials or their proxies. Procurement processes are written to exclude competition.
Short timelines, vague criteria, and compliant evaluation panels ensure insiders dominate. Beneficial ownership is concealed, allowing elites to redirect public money, including emergency funds, without consequence.
Oversight institutions often lack the autonomy to intervene. Audits raise alarms, but prosecutions rarely follow. In some cases, the officials responsible for oversight benefit from the very contracts they are meant to police. Donors, meanwhile, fund sectors where delivery exists mostly in reporting, not reality.
As the renowned African economist and former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria Kingsley Moghalu continues to say, “The continent continues to have differing versions of crony capitalism in which politicians and those with access to them will prosper, but there is no real economic productivity or broad-based wealth creation because the poor have no way up.”Inequality is not an accident; it is a political design. To understand Africa’s recurrent instability, then, we must ask not just who governs, but for whom the state truly works.
Political instability across Africa is often narrated through ethnicity, region, or party competition. But these frames explain symptoms, not causes. When you examine where discontent gathers and why political crises escalate, a clearer pattern emerges: the struggle is over access to the state because the state remains the most reliable distributor of wealth, protection, and opportunity. And access is increasingly structured by class.
In Niger, the 2023 coup followed a decade of donor praise for macroeconomic progress. Yet almost half the population lived in poverty while revenues from uranium and oil were absorbed by political networks and foreign firms.
For many Nigeriens, elections had become rituals that changed governments but not the distribution of power. When the military intervened, the absence of public resistance was not endorsement; it was exhaustion with a system that insulated elites and left everyone else exposed.
A similar dynamic underlies Tanzania’s 2025 election. The state delivered an implausible 97.66 percent victory for the incumbent, backed by repression and an internet blackout. What looked like electoral control was class consolidation.
Growth had been steady but concentrated in sectors tied to the ruling coalition. Young people, informal workers, and rural communities saw little material improvement. Their frustration was not ideological; it was structural. They were watching a political economy in which opportunity narrowed the closer one got to power.
In Senegal, the postponement of elections in 2023 triggered widespread protests. The most striking feature was not the opposition leadership’s reaction but the demographic composition of the street: unemployed young people in Dakar’s peripheries, students, and displaced workers.
Read: AfDB flags East Africa for procurement fraud in projectsThey read the postponement not as a constitutional irregularity but as confirmation that political office had become a self-protective mechanism for preserving the privileges of a small governing class.
In Guinea-Bissau, the battle is no longer framed in public ideology. Control of the state means access to foreign aid flows, to transnational criminal economies, and to legal impunity.
Political parties rotate; extractive logic remains. Identity politics plays a role, but only as a mobilising tool; the underlying conflict is over economic access and exclusion. This is not a new insight. Kwame Nkrumah, writing in Class Struggle in Africa, warned that independence had merely shifted the architecture of extraction into local hands. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).
