Political Economy Analysis

Pan-Africanism was never just a slogan, it was a survival strategy, born out of struggle and built to unite a deliberately fragmented continent. Decades later, the summits still happen, the speeches still soar, and the AU's own Commission chairperson has admitted that 93% of its decisions go unimplemented. The vision was always right. The institutions built to carry it never got the funding, the power, or the political will to do the job. So the question isn't whether Pan-Africanism is a good idea, it's whether African leaders actually believe in it, or whether it's just something that sounds good at summits.

Afro-optimism offers a comforting promise that Africa's moment is coming, despite it all, and that everything will be fine. But a mood is not a plan. From the GDP growth in the 2000s to the quiet rise of a new economic neocolonialism, the "Africa Rising" narrative has benefited investors and capital markets better than the populations it claimed to celebrate. The question worth sitting with is whether Afro-optimism ever graduated from sentiment into strategy or whether it was always the story we told ourselves while the hard work went undone.