Ibrahim Index: Africa is building roads, but for whom?

According to RFI, the 2026 Ibrahim Index, published on Saturday 31 October, highlights a paradox: in 25 African countries, infrastructure is expanding and access to the Internet is improving, while security is deteriorating and the rule of law is receding. Nathalie Delapalme, executive director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, comments on these results on the radio. What we know stops there: the dispatch details neither the countries, nor the figures, nor the causes put forward. The rest is our reading.

The word "paradox" nonetheless deserves to be turned over. It is only surprising if one assumes that roads, ports and cables mechanically benefit those who live alongside them. Yet the question that matters lies elsewhere: who captures the value of this infrastructure? A rail corridor linking a mine to a port is not progress for the village it passes through; it is first and foremost progress for the buyer of the ore. Nothing in the dispatch says that this is the case here, but that is precisely what aggregate indicators fail to show.

Dependency theorists remind us that peripheral economies were shaped to supply raw materials, cheap labour and outlets to the centre. Debt, unequal exchange and conditional loans lock in that position. Within this framework, growth can very well advance without the structure moving: we export more, we build more, and the decisions on price, financing and destination are still taken far from Dakar, Kinshasa or Nairobi.

The other half of the finding, insecurity and retreating freedoms, is not an accident beside the first. When economic gains concentrate, institutions are needed to contain those excluded from them; and when states depend on a few rents, rulers answer less to their citizens than to their creditors and partners. Cabral had warned that, without social transformation, a small local bourgeoisie can inherit the colonial apparatus: independence then changes the flag, not the structure. This is not an accusation against any particular leader; it is a question about how states are organised.

There is also a point of intellectual honesty: an index, however serious, measures governance as its designers define it. It tells us whether the Internet is progressing, not who owns the networks or where the profits go. Nor does it tell us what people living in areas affected by insecurity endure, those who pay first the price of this gap.

We would therefore like the next reading of the index to ask two further questions: who finances this infrastructure, on what terms, and who collects the revenues? As long as we look only at the level of equipment and not at the ownership and debt that accompany it, we can applaud the roads while ignoring which way they run.