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When aid, donation and infrastructure become the vectors for organised underdevelopment
The semantic trap of cooperation
The word cooperation has an almost indisputable positive moral charge. He refers to mutual aid, solidarity, sharing of interests and the reassuring idea of common progress. Applied to Africa, it has since been imposed as a discursive pillar of development: bilateral, multilateral, South-South, strategic partnerships, win-win agreements.
Yet behind this consensual rhetoric is a more brutal reality: international cooperation, in its dominant forms, has never allowed the African continent to break off from underdevelopment in a lasting way.
Worse still, it often seems to have become one of the structural mechanismsNot by accident, but by construction. As actors change: former colonial powers yesterday, new emerging powers today, the matrix remains surprisingly stable. Financial flows follow each other, infrastructure simmers and discourses are renewed, but African economies remain trapped by weak productive transformation, chronic external dependence and a recurring cycle of debt.
Therefore, an issue is becoming increasingly acute: Has international cooperation, whatever its origin or form, not become a sophisticated instrument for predation and perpetuation of African underdevelopment?
Cooperation as a political fact before being an economic fact
Any serious analysis of cooperation must first depart from the technocratic illusion. Cooperation is not a neutral mechanism for optimal allocation of resources. She's a political fact, embedded in deeply asymmetric international power relations. States that cooperate never do so out of pure altruism, but because they have a strategic, economic, diplomatic or security interest.
This reality applies to both traditional Western powers and emerging new ones such as the China, the Turkey or Gulf countries. The difference does not lie in the nature of intent, but in the style, the discourse and the instruments mobilized. Where the West has long conditioned its support to institutional reforms and normative criteria, the new partners favour a more transactional approach, less ideological in appearance, but also oriented by their own interests.
Cooperation then becomes a power projection tool, a means of placing its presence in strategic geopolitical spaces, under the guise of development.
From colonial domination to contractual predation
The common mistake is to compare contemporary cooperation with classical colonization. Modern domination no longer needs direct administration or permanent military coercion. She exercises through contractual mechanisms, legal and financial, perfectly legal but structurally unbalanced.
The current cooperation agreements are based on:
- turnkey infrastructure contracts,
- sovereign or guaranteed loans,
- complex public-private partnerships,
- often unfavourable international arbitration clauses,
- long-term financial liabilities denominated in foreign currencies.
This architecture creates a situation where risk is largely borne by African States, while value added, profits and technological control remain largely in the hands of external partners. Predation is no longer violent or visible; she is Institutionalized, legally secure, and all the more effective as it is presented as voluntary cooperation.
New powers, old model: the false breakup
The arrival of new actors has fed the hope of a break with the patterns inherited from the postcolonial period. The China, the Turkey or Gulf countries were perceived as alternative partners, capable of proposing a different model, freed from Western conditionalities and more respectful of African priorities.
In fact, this rupture is largely illusory. If the discourse changes, the economic structure of trade remains remarkably constant. The projects financed focus heavily on heavy infrastructure: roads, ports, dams, railways, designed primarily to facilitate the extraction and export of raw materials or access to new markets. Local industrial transformation, increased production and technology transfer remain marginal.
Thus, the continent does not change its course; it simply changes from dependency partners. South-South cooperation, presented as an emancipator, often reproduces the same imbalances as North-South cooperation, without correcting its structural effects.
Infrastructure fetishism: a major strategic mistake
One of the pillars of contemporary cooperative discourse is the idea that infrastructure is the foundation of development. Roads, ports, airports and networks Energy are presented as prerequisites for growth. This statement is not false in itself, but it becomes deeply misleading when isolated from any industrial strategy.
Infrastructure is never neutral. It always serves a specific economic purpose. When it is primarily oriented towards the export of raw resources, it strengthens the subordinate integration of the national economy into global value chains. She becomes a extraction corridor, not a transformation lever.
In the absence of a local industrial fabric capable of capturing value added, the infrastructure financed by international cooperation contributes paradoxically to accelerating the exit of wealth from the territory, while leaving the State the burden of their maintenance and depreciation.
Spectacular gifts: diplomacy of prestige as an instrument of influence
It is in this context that infrastructure takes place. « offered » : stage National, major theatres, Congress hall, emblematic institutional buildings. Presented as unselfish donations, these equipments actually meet a logic of soft power extremely effective.
Their primary function is not economic, but symbolic. They are part of the collective imagination, associate the donor with national pride and create a Implicit political debt. They short-circuit public debate, because refusing a donation is politically costly, if not incomprehensible to people facing multiple deprivations.
Yet these donations are never free. Their real cost is simply delayed and moved. Maintenance, maintenance, safety, future renovations and operating costs are entirely on national budgets. In States with limited fiscal resources, This equipment quickly becomes structural burdens, absorbing resources that could have been allocated to productive investment.
The gift thus acts as a Diplomatic bait It creates a climate of trust, opens up access to decision-makers and prepares the ground for much heavier, often unbalanced, subsequent cooperation.
Debt: the backbone of underdevelopment
At the heart of this mechanism is debt. Africa is not in debt for overdevelopment, but by absence of an autonomous productive base. In the absence of sufficient domestic savings and robust tax revenues, African States are massively using external financing to fill their investment deficits.
This use of external debt triggers a well-known cycle: foreign currency financing, exposure to exogenous shocks, deterioration in terms of trade, liquidity crises, restructuring, and then new debt. This cycle is not accidental; It is inherent in a development model based on capital imports rather than local value production.
Change of creditor without changing economic structure is prolong addictionNot to solve it.
Fundamental death angle: African elites and weak state
Any analysis that would make international cooperation the only one responsible for African underdevelopment would be incomplete or even dishonest. The persistence of this model also rests on the responsibility of the African political and economic elites.
In many countries, the state is institutionally weak, while the elites are powerful and relatively disconnected from the imperatives of structural transformation. Cooperation then becomes a tool for political financing, a means of clientelist redistribution and an instrument for consolidating power. Agreements are negotiated in an opacity, without long-term vision, and often without concern for economic sustainability.
Without a clear industrial project, without productivity-oriented budgetary discipline, cooperation can only be achieved through permanent crutchNever a lever of emancipation.
Can cooperation escape the predation logic?
The answer is neither simple nor comfortable. In theory, yes: cooperation could become a tool for transformation if strictly subordinated to a sovereign economic strategy, based on industrialization, regional integration and upscaling. But in practice, these conditions are rarely met simultaneously.
As long as Africa does not master its productive base, as long as it does not speak with one voice in the negotiations, as long as its markets remain fragmented and its states remain fragile, any cooperation, whether from the North or the South, will mechanically move towards predation.
Cooperate without getting lost: an existential challenge
International cooperation is neither a panacea nor an absolute evil. She's a tool, and like any tool, it can serve or destroy depending on how it is used. But in the current African context, marked by weak productive and institutional structures, it most often functions as a Dependency amplifier.
Stages, theatres and major emblematic projects do not develop an economy. They can, on the other hand, make a model that perpetuates underdevelopment socially and politically acceptable under modern and attractive auras.
The real question, therefore, is not who Africa cooperates with, but for what and under what conditions. Without a profound overhaul of the African economic project, cooperation will remain what it is all too often today: a mirage of progress masking a reality of lasting dependence.
