4 min read
In November 1884, 14 European powers gathered in Berlin to decide the fate of a continent none of them lived in. No African leader was in the room. What followed was not just the drawing of borders. It was the construction of an entirely new economic system. Communities, kingdoms and trade routes were carved apart to serve European interests. Africa was repositioned as a supplier of raw materials, a buyer of finished goods, and a borrower from institutions it did not control.
More than a century later, much of that architecture still stands. Colonialism ended on paper, but the economic design has proved far harder to dismantle. Last week’s business headlines reflected that difficult reality, showing how much of the old structure still sits beneath the language of modern development.
Last week, the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) raised a record $2bn syndicated loan to support infrastructure investment across the continent. The capital came overwhelmingly from outside Africa. Asia Pacific provided 35%, Europe 35%, and the Middle East 25%. Barclays, Commerzbank and First Abu Dhabi Bank were among the major backers, while African banks contributed just 5%.
The AFC is a pan-African institution owned by 48 African member states, yet it needed foreign backers for 95% of the capital raised to build infrastructure on its own continent. Those backers did not rush into the deal out of goodwill. They lent because the AFC carries an A-grade credit rating, allowing them to reduce the direct risk of lending to individual African governments while still earning attractive returns through the AFC’s balance sheet.
Profitable arbitrage dressed as development finance.
A similar logic was visible in Seoul last week, where South Korea convened the Korea Africa Business Forum, bringing ministers and business leaders from African nations to the Korean capital. The motivation was not subtle. Samsung, Hyundai and LG depend on lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite. South Korea has limited domestic access to these minerals and remains heavily exposed to China for refining capacity.
With Western rules increasingly penalising reliance on Chinese-linked supply chains, Seoul is racing to secure African mineral access before its competitors do. Korea’s wider $24bn package in development aid and export financing was not charity. It was a supply chain insurance policy.
Then there was the African Development Bank (AfDB)’s $125m injection into ATIDI, the African Trade & Investment Development Insurance agency. The stated reason is clear: aid is contracting, risk is rising, and African development finance needs new ways to keep capital moving. US development assistance fell sharply last year. Global aid also recorded one of its steepest annual declines.
African development finance can no longer rely on grants drying up elsewhere, so it is pivoting to guarantees. That pivot is understandable. But the underlying architecture is worth examining more carefully.
The AfDB is majority African-owned, but non-regional members hold up to 40% of its voting power. On major structural decisions requiring supermajority approval, this gives external shareholders significant blocking power. So even when Africa builds its own financial institutions, those institutions still operate inside a system shaped by external capital and external approval.
ATIDI itself was seeded by the World Bank in 2001. The same World Bank whose Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s and 1990s pushed African governments to cut public spending, privatise state assets and open markets before many domestic industries were ready to compete. The result was not just austerity. It was a generation of weakened state capacity, stalled industrialisation and deeper dependence on external finance.
Next week, the Africa Energy Forum in Cape Town will open, from 16 to 19 June, under the theme “Building Africa’s Industrialised Future.” The framing is a deliberate pushback against the Western climate agenda that has dominated energy conversations about Africa for the past decade. The panels are prioritising large-scale infrastructure, baseload generation and gas to power networks. The goal is stated plainly: power economic growth for 1.5 billion people, treating energy as a tool for local manufacturing and industrialisation, not only as a carbon reduction exercise.
The agenda being set is increasingly African. Whether the capital that follows will be, is a different question.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simply how capital works. Money flows toward opportunity, and Africa represents one of the clearest growth opportunities on the planet right now. Foreign capital isn’t the problem in itself. The question is who sets the terms, who absorbs the risk, and who captures the upside.
The original Scramble for Africa succeeded not because the continent lacked resources, people or ingenuity. It succeeded because Africa lacked the institutional infrastructure, financial tools and political unity to participate on its own terms.
The new scramble will be won or lost on the same grounds. Not in conference rooms in Berlin, Seoul or Frankfurt, but in determining whether African businesses can access the payment rails being built, use the insurance capacity being expanded, supply into the corridors being funded and meet the standards being harmonised.
Take ATIDI. Its underwriting process relies on formalised, audited accounts. Most African SMEs do not have them. So the insurance capacity being expanded will, in practice, flow more easily to large infrastructure projects, agricultural conglomerates and multinational distributors.
The smaller operators, the Kenyan exporter, the Ghanaian manufacturer, the Senegalese logistics company, remain largely outside the system being built in their name.
The control has shifted from cannons to credit ratings. The battleground has moved from physical territory to institutional boardrooms.
But the fundamental question remains the same: who benefits?
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