.Why does every serious vision for Africa’s transformation ultimately return to the question of political power? Because in Africa, power is not merely procedural—it is ontological. It shapes the very conditions of being, belonging, and becoming. Colonial conquest was not just territorial—it was governmental. European empires dismantled indigenous governance rooted in communal ethics and replaced it with centralised states engineered for control and extraction. Infrastructures like roads and courts were not neutral—they were instruments of domination, logistical veins of imperial metabolism. Sovereignty was not simply seized; it was reprogrammed, dislocating power from people and embedding it in alien bureaucracies. Rather than deconstructing this architecture, postcolonial states often inherited and reinforced it, transforming anti-colonial dreams into neo-colonial continuities. They preserved the colonial administration’s centralised, hierarchical logic, where the state remained an instrument of elite control rather than collective emancipation. Once imagined as a vehicle for liberation, political authority became a tool for patronage, militarisation, and surveillance, reproducing the alienation it was meant to redress. Thus, contesting political power in Africa is not to chase office—it is to interrogate and reconstruct the frameworks through which life is governed. Transformation demands not evasion of the state but its reconstitution as an ethical and liberative force grounded in African agency, memory, and collective dignity.
It is precisely against this backdrop that the African liberation struggle emerged—not merely as a revolt against foreign occupation, but as a profound demand for the restoration of political being. The fight was to dismantle colonial administration and reclaim the power to define, govern, and imagine African life on African terms. Visionary leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah understood that true decolonisation was inseparable from political sovereignty. His enduring words, “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto you,” were not an overstatement of politics, but a lucid acknowledgement that without the power to govern oneself, every other aspiration remains hostage to external terms. In this light, political power was never intended to be the end—it was a means of liberating human potential, redistributing dignity, and anchoring national development in the people’s will. Yet this founding insight was tragically eclipsed in much of the post-independence era. The machinery of state consolidation often consumed the revolutionary zeal of liberation. Power was centralised, opposition was suppressed, and public institutions became tools of elite continuity rather than vehicles of societal transformation. The kairotic moment—the opportunity to restructure political life around justice and community—was too often lost to the gravitational pull of inherited systems. To recover Africa’s liberative vision today is not to abandon politics or sever the state from the development project, as some neoliberal discourses suggest, but to critically reclaim and reconfigure political authority as a central instrument for collective emancipation and structural transformation. It is an ontological, political and epistemic Exodus return to the original purpose of political power: as a sacred trust for the stewardship of justice, the restoration of dignity, and the reweaving of a fractured social order into one rooted in equity, participation, and collective destiny.
This is why political disengagement—however well-intentioned—often fails to disrupt the status quo. It underestimates the extent to which the state remains the gravitational centre of societal life in Africa, not by moral merit, but by historical design. The colonial legacy endowed the state with an almost sacred sovereignty, concentrating the levers of economic distribution, legal legitimacy, national identity, and cultural recognition in the hands of a narrow elite—first colonisers, then postcolonial bourgeois successors—thereby reproducing structures of exclusion under a different flag. Post-independence governments, rather than dismantling this architecture, often reinhabited it, replacing foreign governors with native elites while preserving the exact mechanisms of central control. Thus, the competition for state power remains intense, not merely out of personal ambition, but because it serves as the engine room of structural transformation, or a pathway into elite circles that thrive on preserving inequality. Tragically, while the original vision of Africa’s founding thinkers was anchored in the former—deploying political power as a vehicle for justice, liberation, and collective uplift—many today are increasingly drawn to the latter. Political authority is too often reduced to consolidating privilege, shielding the wealthy from the demands of the poor, and entrenching power within insulated elites. NGOs may treat symptoms, and local initiatives may offer islands of hope. However, the state still sets the parameters of justice, determines the rules of economic engagement, and authorises the national narrative. To transform society without transforming political power is to plant seeds in soil not yet reclaimed. For Africa’s true renewal to emerge, political power must be reoriented—from being a tool of extraction to a platform for emancipation; from preserving elite interests to protecting the commons; from reproducing inherited hierarchies to restoring communal agency. The state must be re-rooted in the people it was severed from, reimagined as the collective expression of a sovereign, dignified, and self-determining African future.
The Coloniality of Political Power
During the colonial era, political power was deliberately constructed as a mechanism of imperial control, systematically dispossessing Africans and enforcing racial hierarchies through legal and administrative means. In South Africa, the 1913 Land Act legally confined Black Africans to a fraction of their ancestral lands, while the Pass Laws controlled their movement and labour, entrenching social and economic exclusion. In Kenya, the creation of “Native Reserves” displaced indigenous peoples to marginal lands to benefit settler agriculture, and in the Belgian Congo, colonial authorities replaced traditional rulers with appointed chiefs loyal to Brussels, fracturing indigenous governance structures. Colonial borders, often arbitrarily drawn—such as those dividing the Somali people across multiple states—further undermined social cohesion. Infrastructure like railways and roads primarily transported raw materials to European ports, not to connect African communities or support local development. Education systems produced clerks rather than leaders, ensuring dependency rather than empowerment. Legal frameworks such as the Land Apportionment Acts in Rhodesia institutionalised dispossession under the guise of legality. Political power was thus weaponised to exclude Africans from decision-making and self-determination. Therefore, postcolonial reclamation of political authority requires dismantling these entrenched structures of exclusion and restoring the state as a tool for justice, restitution, and genuine popular sovereignty—a foundational step in reversing colonial incapacitation and enabling Africa’s holistic transformation. After all, colonial development was never neutral—it disproportionately benefited the coloniser not simply through superior capability, but through the structural and policy advantages granted by state power itself. One must therefore ask: how can Africa be liberated if it continues to wield political power in the very form that once subjugated it?
The so-called “development” witnessed under colonial rule—manifested in railways, administrative buildings, cash crop economies, and selective urban planning—has long been misread as evidence of colonial efficiency or civilizational superiority. This misconception dangerously obscures the reality that such developments were neither inclusive nor genuinely transformative; they were explicitly exploitative and extractive by design. The colonial state was a corporate apparatus serving imperial profit, privileging settler enclaves and centralising power in colonial capitals while systematically impoverishing indigenous systems of subsistence, governance, and autonomy. Economic activities were engineered to fuel European industries rather than local needs, and legal frameworks reinforced racial hierarchies and dispossession. To mistake this orchestrated system of domination for enlightened governance is to ignore the rigged nature of colonial power, which wielded overwhelming military, economic, and legal advantages to suppress African agency and self-determination. Tragically, many postcolonial states inherited this architecture almost intact, transferring power from white colonial rulers to Black elites without fundamentally transforming the state’s colonial logic. A telling example of this inherited colonial logic is the post-apartheid South African economy, which, despite ranking among the highest GDPs on the continent, remains the world’s most unequal country. The financialisation of its economy and adherence to neoliberal metrics such as GDP growth and foreign investment obscures the structural inequities embedded in land ownership, wealth distribution, and social services—remnants of colonial dispossession. Neoliberal development frameworks prioritise growth maintenance and market efficiency but remain blind to the profound transformational change required to redress historical injustices or achieve equity. This fixation perpetuates the colonial logic of exploitation under a different guise, where economic growth is fetishised while inequality and exclusion persist. This narrow focus starkly contrasts with Amartya Sen’s concept of development as freedom, which argues that actual development must expand people’s substantive freedoms—the capability to live dignified, healthy, and politically empowered lives—beyond mere financial indicators. The continent’s transformative rebirth will remain an elusive aspiration until African political power fundamentally reorients itself toward dismantling colonial economic structures and advancing equitable, participatory development.
Nkrumah’s and Sobukwe’s Prophecy, and the Bourgeois Betrayal
Kwame Nkrumah’s prophetic assertion—that the quest for political power must precede all else—pierces the heart of Africa’s unfinished liberation struggle. He recognised that political sovereignty was not a mere symbolic transfer of control but the indispensable foundation for dismantling colonial economic, legal, and social architectures that continued to bind the continent. Yet, this prophetic vision was met with a profound betrayal by the emergent postcolonial bourgeoisie, who too often replicated colonial patterns of exclusion, centralisation, and exploitation under new guises. This class, shaped by colonial education and socialisation, engaged in what scholars term isomorphic mimicry: the adoption of Western institutional forms such as constitutions, electoral systems, and development plans, yet without altering their underlying functions or adapting them to African socio-political realities. Thus, they replicated the superficial trappings of modernity while sustaining structural dependency, social fragmentation, and widening inequality. This betrayal has hollowed the liberation project, converting sovereignty into a mask for exclusion rather than a foundation for collective self-determination. Rather than serving as stewards of radical transformation, many political elites embraced neoliberal economic orthodoxies and privileged accumulation, perpetuating inequalities that fractured societies and eroded popular agency. South Africa’s entrenched disparities, despite its formal democratic institutions, stand as a stark reminder of how political independence without structural transformation leads to a hollow sovereignty, where power is exercised to maintain inherited hierarchies rather than to expand freedom or equity.
But Nkrumah’s vision extended beyond national borders. For him, political power was not merely erecting African flags over former colonial capitals but constructing a unified, people-centred, socialist-oriented continent where wealth was redistributed, justice institutionalised, and development decolonised. His imagination was Pan-African in scope—he foresaw the dangers of fragmented sovereignties competing within a neocolonial global order. He thus called for the immediate political unification of Africa as a bulwark against imperial reassertion. Political power was not to be hoarded by elites, nor divorced from economic liberation; it was to be wielded as a transformative force—an ethical, collective instrument for reordering society based on equity, solidarity, and African agency. Nkrumah’s prophecy, tragically, was betrayed in practice. While many African nations gained flag independence, few realised the depth of institutional transformation he envisioned. To recover Nkrumah’s imagination is to understand that political power is sacred—it is the entry point to self-determined development, the re-humanisation of the African condition, and the reconstitution of a continent long fractured by conquest. Robert Sobukwe, echoing the same spirit, insisted on an Africanist future led by Africans for Africans, warning that political freedom without ideological clarity would merely reproduce colonial subjugation in Black face. Both thinkers understood that the liberation of one African country is inseparable from the liberation of all—that Africa’s strength lies in its unity. Such unity is not a romantic ideal but a strategic imperative: it enables intra-continental trade, strengthens collective bargaining on the global stage, fosters industrial complementarity, and enhances Africa’s capacity to define its developmental path. Unfortunately, many revolutionary governments morphed into elitist regimes that consolidated power in the hands of a few, sidelining the masses whose struggles had given rise to independence. Rather than becoming vessels for liberation, states have too often been repurposed into tools of patronage, repression, and internal colonisation. The greatest moral failing lies in this betrayal not being imposed from without, but enacted from within—by those entrusted with the people’s hopes and dreams.
The “What is to be Done” Question
Dismantling this inheritance requires a deep epistemic rupture—decolonising the very categories through which power is conceived and exercised. Power must no longer be designed as a vertical, monopolistic instrument wielded by an elite class but as a relational, distributed force that manifests through collective responsibility, embedded accountability, and genuine popular sovereignty. This implies the resurrection and rearticulation of indigenous political ontologies such as Ubuntu, where authority is understood as reciprocal and contingent on the flourishing of the community. Transformational change thus begins with the reconstruction of political imagination—moving away from liberal individualism and Western state-centric models toward a model where political authority is inseparable from ethical obligation, communal identity, and historical self-determination. Decentralisation and democratisation are not mere institutional reforms but ontological shifts: they reclaim African political subjectivity by rooting decision-making in lived realities and reviving modes of governance that prioritise relationality, solidarity, and stewardship. This requires dismantling formal institutions of exclusion and corruption and the epistemic frameworks that legitimise elite control, technocratic governance, and neoliberal rationalities that depoliticise power and reduce human agency to market participants.
Economically, the transformation is inseparable from the political redefinition of power, for economic liberation cannot be abstracted from the conditions that enable or constrain it. The colonial and postcolonial political economy has structured Africa as a periphery of extraction, reliant on raw commodity exports, subordinated to global capital flows, and dependent on external technologies and markets. This configuration is reproduced by dominant development paradigms that fetishise GDP growth, emphasise integration into global neoliberal markets, and measure success through metrics divorced from human dignity and social justice. What must be dismantled is not merely economic dependency but the very epistemology of development that naturalises inequality, commodifies human life, and excludes indigenous knowledge. The political imperative is to reassert economic sovereignty as an existential dimension of liberation, where the state acts as a redistributive agent, not an instrument of elite accumulation. This demands structural reforms such as radical land redistribution, the establishment of democratic public ownership over natural resources, and the creation of economic institutions that prioritise endogenous technological innovation and the valorisation of local capacities. Universal access to education and healthcare must be guaranteed, not as charity but as foundational human rights that expand substantive freedoms and cultivate critical consciousness necessary for collective agency. Sustainable development must be embedded in ecological and cultural specificity, countering extractivist paradigms with models of circular economies and agroecology rooted in indigenous practices.
Furthermore, the realisation of Pan-African integration is not merely economic pragmatism but a strategic ontological project to overcome the artificial fragmentation imposed by colonial borders, enabling a collective sovereignty capable of withstanding neocolonial pressures and reasserting Africa’s agency in the global order. This requires building supranational institutions empowered to harmonise policies, pool resources, and coordinate infrastructure and security in ways that reflect African solidarity rather than Western hegemony. Only through such an integrative and deeply ethical praxis can political and economic power be reclaimed not as ends in themselves but as sacred instruments for realising a new social contract—one grounded in justice, equity, and the restoration of African dignity and creativity.
In conclusion, political power is not merely a symbol of sovereignty but the axis from which all liberation—economic, social, cultural, and ecological—must unfold. Colonialism distorted this power to divide, dispossess, and dominate; postcolonial regimes, in many cases, tragically inherited and perpetuated its architecture. Today’s struggle is not for office, but for the ethical reconstitution of authority—power that restores dignity, redistributes resources, and reclaims agency. Economic emancipation is not a prelude to political transformation, but its fruit. The real question is not whether Africa has power, but whether it is exercised to serve the many or secure the few. The continent’s renaissance hinges on reclaiming political power as a collective, accountable, and liberative force.
Charline Prazen Chikomo is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2024) with a Master’s in Development Policy from UCT. His work explores educational reforms, decoloniality, and development discourse in Africa. The perspectives shared in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of The Southern African Times.
