? UN Photo
By Cristina Duarte
The Sovereignty of Mindset: Dismantling the Architecture of Low Ambition
We gather today under the timely theme: Seizing the Moment: The African State and Its Promise. The promise of the African State is a question of presence, of performance, of transformation, but above all, it is a question of sovereignty.
A conversation about state-building in Africa cannot be dissociated from a conversation about sovereignty. These are not parallel debates, they are two sides of the same coin.
The effectiveness of the African state, its legitimacy, and its capacity to deliver depend fundamentally on its ability to exercise sovereignty, not only in legal or geopolitical terms, but also in how it defines problems, sets priorities, and mobilizes its own knowledge and assets.
In these remarks, I focus on a critical and often overlooked relationship: how building the state requires building sovereignty, and how building sovereignty, in turn, requires confronting the internal constraints that shape our development trajectory, particularly the architecture of our mindset.
This is not a rhetorical statement. It is a structural argument: if the state is to perform, it must be rooted in the reality of its societies, and that cannot happen without epistemic and cognitive sovereignty.
No meaningful transformation can emerge from a policy architecture that is externally driven, intellectually outsourced, or disconnected from the structural and historical realities of the continent.
There is no sovereignty without a sovereign mindset. And there is no sovereign mindset without sovereign scholarship.
This is the lens through which I approach the African state, not as an object of reform, but as a subject of agency. Not merely as a provider of services, but as a shaper of futures.
Not just as an institutional form, but as a political project whose credibility hinges on its ability to exercise control over its choices, its resources, and its knowledge systems.
Africa’s deficit is fundamentally a sovereignty deficit, driven not solely by external constraints, but equally by internal ones. If we want to seize this moment, if we want to reimagine the African State for the 21st century, we must be willing to confront the internal architecture that governs our development choices. At the heart of that architecture lies the sovereignty of mindset.
The African state is often evaluated through an external lens, its presence, delivery, legitimacy. But what of its internal constitution? What assumptions shape its design? What models shape its policies? And more importantly: whose ambitions shape its aspirations?
For decades, Africa has been governed not only by constitutions and policy frameworks but also by inherited development logics, an implicit contract of low ambition.
This architecture of low ambition reduces the African State to a manager of scarcity, a distributor of external aid, a steward of externally driven reforms.
It is a mindset forged in colonial logic, reinforced in post-independence economic orthodoxy, and naturalised in global development discourse. It treats structural transformation as a luxury, not a necessity.
It defines Africa’s reality by what it lacks, rather than by what it could become.
This mindset is not simply ideological, it is institutionalised. It shapes planning frameworks, budgeting tools, and evaluation metrics.
It defines success in terms of compliance, not transformation. It focuses on absorptive capacity, not productive capacity. And crucially, it teaches African states to manage poverty rather than development.
To dismantle this mindset is not to reject reform. It is to reclaim the right to imagine a different future and to equip the State with the intellectual and institutional instruments to pursue it.
That begins with a radical shift in ambition: from managing short-term vulnerability to unlocking long-term sovereignty. From adjusting to external constraints to confronting and transforming them.
We cannot build sovereign states on the foundation of dependent thinking.
We cannot design sovereign institutions if the intellectual frameworks we use to design them remain externally prescribed.
The 21st-century African State must be intellectually sovereign if it is to become politically, economically, and institutionally sovereign. That brings me to the next frontier.
The Sovereignty of Thinking: No Sovereignty Without Scholarship
There is no sovereignty without scholarship. A sovereign State must possess not only the capacity to decide, but the epistemic infrastructure to know what it is deciding, why, and on what terms.
Yet African scholarship remains marginal in shaping the policy choices of African states. This is not a benign omission, it is a structural vulnerability.
Knowledge shapes policies. Policies shape systems.
Systems shape destinies. When African knowledge is excluded from African policymaking, three consequences follow:
- Our development models become externally oriented, not locally grounded.
- Our intellectual sovereignty is outsourced to global institutions, even when they lack contextual legitimacy.
- Our policy choices drift away from our structural realities, because they were never designed to match them.
This is not about cultural exceptionalism. It is about the integrity of policy design.
Development models that do not emerge from the structural realities of African societies, land tenure systems, informal economies, demographic dynamics, climatic risks, cannot meaningfully deliver transformation. And yet, African research institutions, policy think tanks, and universities are often consulted post-facto, if at all.
It is time to revalue African scholarship as a strategic asset.
Not just as an academic resource, but as a sovereign lever of state-building.
We must reconstitute our ministries, planning departments, and public service academies as knowledge institutions.
We must position African universities not at the periphery of policy, but at the heart of it.
And we must invest in long-term research ecosystems that serve the State, not just the market or donors.
This requires a new compact between the African State and its intellectual infrastructure. A compact that treats African knowledge not as an input to be validated abroad, but as a sovereign asset to be leveraged at home.
The African State must become the primary client of African knowledge, and African scholars must rise to meet the challenge, producing work that is rigorous, relevant, and unapologetically rooted in the continent’s realities.
The Downstream Frontiers: Flows and Futures
If the first frontier is the mindset, and the second is the sovereignty of thinking, then the next two frontiers are the downstream consequences of failing to confront the first two.
The sovereignty over economic and financial flows is one such frontier. Africa’s persistent fiscal crises are not just the result of external debt cycles; they are a consequence of policy architectures that fail to domesticate and govern our own financial flows.
Illicit financial flows, inefficient procurement, undervalued natural assets, and unleveraged domestic savings are not accidents. They are systemic outcomes of externally modelled statecraft and domestically neglected policy ecosystems. Without sovereign thinking, we cannot build sovereign revenue systems. And without sovereign revenue systems, we cannot finance the ambitions we claim to hold.
Then comes the frontier of digital sovereignty. Today, Africa generates data but does not own it. We use digital platforms but do not govern them. We adopt algorithms but do not design them. If we do not shift from access to agency, we will move from aid dependency to algorithm dependency.
In a world where power is increasingly embedded in code, the sovereignty of the African State will erode unless Africa claims digital control as a strategic imperative.
This is not a rhetorical choice. It is a governance imperative.
The future of the African State, its presence, its performance, its legitimacy, will be determined not only by how it delivers but by how it thinks. By the models it adopts. By the ambitions it holds. And by the knowledge it builds.
Let us not waste this moment.
Let us seize it, with sovereignty.
The Africa we want, it is the Africa that the world needs.