The Boom That Chooses

The institutional pattern is the conversion of capital arriving into prosperity presumed. Money crosses a border; the benefits are invited to follow. Whether they do depends on contracts, employment conditions, public budgets and the ability to challenge a decision. None of those travels automatically with the money.

In his October 7 Foreign Affairs essay, “The Two Africas,” Jared Cohen argues that growing commercial interest could produce sharply divergent economic futures across the continent. His central qualification matters: resources, population growth and foreign attention are opportunities, not guarantees. Governments must build the institutions and infrastructure that make productive investment possible.

Cohen is Goldman Sachs’ president of global affairs and a co-head of its Global Institute. That position does not invalidate his argument. It identifies the vantage point. An assessment of where capital can operate successfully is useful evidence about investment conditions. It is not, on its own, an assessment of whether the people affected can shape the resulting economy.

The harder division is therefore not only between countries that attract investment and countries that do not. It is also within successful destinations: between the people whose returns are secured by the terms and those whose gains remain a promise.

What the Investment Argument Gets Right

Cohen locates the opportunity in several overlapping developments: demand for critical minerals, a young workforce, growing consumer markets, strategically placed ports and competition among outside powers. He argues that reliable institutions, electricity and greater regional integration can turn those advantages into sustained growth.

His essay does not simply celebrate extraction. It explicitly asks whether governments can convert mineral interest into material gains for ordinary people, and it emphasizes education, employment and domestic economic development. That is an important distinction. Criticizing an argument it already rejects would be efficient, but only in the way a rigged tender is efficient.

Cohen also describes southern African electricity trading and customs cooperation as examples of institutions that help investors operate across national boundaries. The significance is structural: a market becomes more usable through rules and shared infrastructure, not merely because a map contains adjacent countries.

Yet making a market accessible leaves a second set of questions open. Which producers can afford to use the infrastructure? Who receives reliable electricity first? What obligations accompany a concession? How much of the value generated becomes wages, locally purchased services or public revenue?

Those are not objections to connectivity. They distinguish connectivity from distribution. A route that works for a large exporter may be valuable without yet serving smaller businesses on workable terms. Whether it does both requires evidence about access and pricing, not another photograph of the route.

Aid and Trade Are Not Interchangeable

Cohen opens with the shift in US rhetoric from aid toward trade, setting reductions in assistance alongside growing business interest. His essay supplies that contemporary framing; it does not establish that investment replaces the services affected by aid cuts.

The distinction is functional. A commercial project needs a plausible source of returns. A public-health service or humanitarian response may be necessary precisely where its recipients cannot purchase what they need. An increase in one category of finance cannot demonstrate that the other category’s obligations have been met.

Investment can support public provision through taxable activity, employment and productive capacity. But each connection needs to be made. A government must collect the revenue, allocate it and deliver the service. A household must obtain work on terms that improve its position. Where those steps fail, the investment total does not repair them by being large.

This is not an argument for permanent dependence on aid, or for treating African governments as passive recipients of outside choices. It is an argument against an accounting substitution. If an official claims that commerce can replace assistance, ask which function is being replaced, for whom, through which institution and on what timetable.

The old obligation does not disappear because the new financing has a more attractive label.

Ownership Is a Distribution Mechanism

“Who benefits?” can sound like a moral question appended after the serious financial work. Ownership makes it part of the financial work itself.

An equity stake, a tax claim and a wage are different routes to income. A state may receive revenue without owning the operator. A domestic shareholder may prosper without representing the wider public. A foreign investor may earn a return while financing useful productive capacity. Nationality alone cannot tell us whether the arrangement is fair.

Cohen describes Gulf investors’ use of equity as an alternative to adding debt to borrowing states. The distinction is meaningful, but neither financing form provides a complete verdict. Equity raises questions about control and the allocation of future returns. Debt raises questions about repayment, guarantees and exposure when projections fail. Comparing them requires the actual terms.

For extractive projects, an existing institution offers a practical starting point. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s 2023 Standard sets disclosure and oversight requirements for implementing countries and the extractive companies operating in them. It is not a rule governing every African investment, and membership is not proof of compliance.

Under Requirement 2.4, implementing countries must disclose covered contracts and licenses granted, entered into or amended from January 1, 2021. The definitions address the underlying terms, including relevant annexes and amendments. That matters because a summary announcing an investment cannot substitute for the obligations it creates.

Requirement 2.5 addresses beneficial ownership: the people who ultimately own or control companies, with provisions for listed companies and state-owned enterprises. Its purpose includes enabling scrutiny of politically exposed owners and corruption risks.

These rules do not establish misconduct in any project discussed by Cohen. They establish what a serious inquiry can seek. Before declaring a boom broadly beneficial, identify the operator, the controlling interests and the public obligations. A national flag is not an ownership chart.

Follow the Revenue Past the Treasury

Public revenue is often where the promise of shared benefit becomes plausible. Even people who do not work at a mine or hold shares can benefit if its proceeds finance services they use.

But the relevant trail does not end with a payment to central government. It continues through the rules governing allocation and the institutions responsible for spending.

EITI Requirement 5.2 makes this distinction unusually concrete. Where extractive revenues generate mandated transfers between national and subnational governments, material transfers must be disclosed. Implementing countries must publish the revenue-sharing formula, where one exists, and discrepancies between the expected and actual transfers.

A formula, an entitlement and a payment are three separate things. Confusing them can make a municipality look funded on paper while leaving the question of what actually arrived unanswered. This is a risk the disclosure rule helps investigate, not a finding about a particular municipality.

For a resident or local reporter examining a project, the useful record would therefore include the applicable revenue-sharing rule, the amount expected, the amount transferred and the relevant local budget. Where no such entitlement exists, that absence should be made explicit rather than covered with general assurances about national growth.

Disclosure still does not prove that spending was effective. Procurement, service delivery and audit records belong to the next stage of scrutiny. But this approach makes the promise testable. It replaces “the country benefits” with an amount, an institution and an obligation.

Workers Are Not Just a Demographic Advantage

Cohen treats education and productive employment as conditions for realizing the potential of a young population. That qualification should remain attached whenever demography becomes an investment selling point.

For someone seeking work, the relevant result is not that a country has a large labor pool. It is whether an available job pays dependably, develops usable skills and offers conditions they can contest without losing their livelihood.

An assessment should distinguish construction jobs from continuing employment, direct hires from contractors, and announced positions from filled ones. It should examine wages and conditions rather than assume that all employment has the same value. These are proposed tests for evaluating projects, not verified findings about the investments in Cohen’s essay.

The same discipline belongs in claims about local business development. Buying supplies domestically can connect a major project to other firms. Whether those firms gain durable capabilities depends on the work, the payment terms and the opportunity to compete beyond a single customer.

There need not be a choice between welcoming investment and asking these questions. Investors need predictable obligations; workers and suppliers do too. Stability becomes a peculiar achievement if only one party is entitled to expect it.

The Right to Question the Deal

A government can make contracts reliable for investors while leaving citizens poorly equipped to challenge their consequences. The two conditions are compatible. That is why institutional quality cannot be measured only by how comfortably capital enters and exits.

EITI’s civil society protocol provides a narrower, practical counter-test within extractive governance. It examines whether civil society representatives involved in the EITI process can express views without coercion or reprisal, operate freely, communicate with one another and participate meaningfully. It also addresses access to public decision-making.

The protocol concerns the EITI process, not a universal veto over investment. Nor does its existence prove that the conditions it describes hold in any particular country. Its value here is to show that transparency and the freedom to use information are institutionally distinct requirements.

A contract can be online while scrutiny remains dangerous. A meeting can occur without affected people having the capacity to influence its agenda. A consultation record can document attendance without documenting an answer.

A coherenceist test starts at that gap: an arrangement is not legitimate merely because its components work smoothly for those already positioned to benefit. It must include the feedback of people who bear its costs. Information should help them question, correct or contest the arrangement, not merely understand why it has already happened.

That does not mean attributing a single view to workers, residents or civil society. They may disagree about a project’s value. Meaningful participation protects that disagreement rather than manufacturing a community endorsement.

The Boom Does Not Choose

Cohen’s strongest warning is that outside interest alone cannot deliver prosperity. His emphasis on electricity, functioning institutions and connected markets resists the idea that valuable resources are destiny.

The necessary extension is to follow success inside the country, not stop at the border. An economy can attract capital while distributing gains narrowly. It can also negotiate arrangements that finance infrastructure, expand productive work and strengthen public services. Neither outcome should be assumed before the terms and results are examined.

The next investment announcement can therefore be read against four concrete tests: who owns and controls the project; what workers and suppliers receive; what public revenue is owed and delivered; and whether affected people can challenge the terms. This is not a country ranking. It is a way to prevent a ranking from doing the work of evidence.

The forecast is conditional. Where enforceable public obligations accompany investment, a boom has a better route toward shared gains. Where they do not, confidence in the investment climate can coexist with public disappointment.

The boom does not choose its beneficiaries. People write the terms. Calling the outcome inevitable is one way to keep their signatures out of view.