Modernisation or development: The choice of a regime
What if, for the first time, Africa came to an international meeting with a clear vision of its own destiny — and no longer with a simple list of demands?
On October 14, 2026, in Bangkok, African and Asian decision-makers will discuss economic transformation. Behind the agenda — growth, industrialisation, climate — lies a question too rarely asked aloud: what model does Africa really want to build, and who among us will be held accountable for it?
This is not theoretical. It is a choice of sovereignty.
For decades, Africa has chosen modernisation. It has imported models, systems, institutions designed elsewhere. The results are mixed; the underlying trends are troubling. In several countries, debt service absorbs up to 72 per cent of public revenue. On average, African states devote 17 per cent of their revenues to it — often more than to health or education.
These figures have external causes: costly capital, ratings, conditionalities, private creditors. But a high debt does not by itself say why the money was borrowed, what it was used for, or who decided. Part of the architecture is external. Part is internal: weak tax systems, captured contracts, budgets that protect the apparatus before the public. African leaders were not passengers. They signed. They allocated.
The distinction that matters is simple. A loan treated as capital finances an asset that reproduces itself — energy, port, training, industrial tooling — and comes with rules. A loan treated as income pays salaries, subsidies, networks. Nothing remains when the bill arrives.
Modernisation imports. Development invents.
Modernisation copies. Development builds from within.
As long as the two are confused, dependence is reproduced in the name of progress.
Factories, budget arithmetic, ports, selection by competence are not a “Western culture.” They are techniques. They work when they impose feedback. They fail when a network captures them without ever paying the price. The sin is not having borrowed a tool. It is having left it to cousinage.
One example suffices. In several countries, infrastructure contracts have been signed without real competitive bidding, at above-market prices, with companies linked to circles of power. The loan was contracted. The asset never produced the expected revenue. The debt, however, remains.
This is not a problem of model. It is a problem of regime.
It is precisely that regime that Ali Mazrui, nearly 40 years ago, had already described in other terms. Africa, he wrote, is the product of a triple heritage: indigenous, Islamic, Western. The question is not to oppose them. It is to know whether Africa can synthesise them to invent its own path.
Too often, we have imported instead of composing. Adopted forms instead of building substance. Modernisation without roots produces fragile institutions and societies that do not recognise themselves in their own rules.
Resources exist. Ubuntu carries an idea of power as responsibility and prosperity as common good. But these resources are not enough. Without meritocracy, the collective becomes a closed circle. Meritocracy — the effective possibility for competence to reach responsibility outside networks — is not the enemy of Ubuntu. It is its condition of credibility. This is the meaning of the Abdou Samb Foundation’s commitment. Talent without opportunity remains a promise in suffering.
Asia is not proof that a different metaphysics is needed. China, Singapore, Malaysia, India did not reject calculation, competition, competence. They used tools — sometimes the same ones — with state discipline and a demand for results. What separates one trajectory from another is not the model displayed. It is the capacity to make money work, to punish failure, to not turn the loan into a lifestyle.
That is why African youth as the seventh region of the African Union is not an ornament. A seat without rules is a chair at the same table.
For it to be a lever, this region must have a right of initiative, real representation in decisions, its own budget, access rules based on merit, and public evaluation of its action.
To make youth a region is to decide whether this voice will extend a system of imported forms and protected networks — or whether it will force an architecture in which competence is rewarded, failure sanctioned, and rules apply even to those who wrote them.
Modernisation taught us to adopt forms.
Development requires that we produce our own rules.
The choice is not an abstract binary. It is a choice of regime: responsibility or impunity. Tools in the service of a project, or tools captured by a network.
So, is it still possible to move toward rooted and sovereign development?
Yes. But this shift will not be decreed from above. It presupposes a generation capable of synthesising our heritages, refusing clientelism, and building institutions where failure has a price.
That generation is African youth. Not because it holds all the answers, but because it carries a demand for merit that current systems struggle to satisfy.
Not giving it a real place is not remaining neutral. It is excluding it once again — and letting the gap widen between ageing institutions and a society that has already shifted.
Making youth the seventh region is not a favour. It is a strategic choice.
Either this region becomes the lever of a real passage: inventing our rules, and making them respected. Or it will be just one more institution in a system that prefers dependence to sovereignty, and impunity to responsibility.
The choice is ours. And the future will hold us accountable.
BY ABDOU SAMB
The writer is the President, Abdou Samb Foundation and Honorary Ambassador, Pan-African Parliament — Diaspora
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