The Graveyard of Good Ideas: How Africa's Election Cycles Are Quietly Bankrupting Its Future

Africa Brew Brief investigates

Every four to seven years, across capitals from Dar es Salaam to Accra to Lusaka, a familiar ritual unfolds. A new administration is sworn in. Cameras flash. Promises are made about a "clean break" from the past. And within months, a graveyard grows — not of people, but of ports, railways, farms, and factories that were, until recently, described as nation-defining.

This is Africa's most underreported development crisis. Not corruption. Not debt. Not even weak institutions in isolation — but the specific, recurring pattern of incoming leadership treating continuity itself as a political liability. A project's greatest risk in Africa is often not engineering failure or market collapse. It is an election.

## The scale of the problem

The numbers are not anecdotal. Nigeria alone is estimated to be sitting on around 56,000 abandoned projects nationwide, with a report on the Niger Delta alone finding roughly 1,587 terminated or abandoned projects worth over 612 billion naira. President Bola Tinubu's own administration has publicly acknowledged Nigeria's history of more than 11,000 stalled projects — a figure invoked, ironically, while commissioning a road that had itself sat dormant for years.

Ghana's most recent fiscal reckoning was more brutal still. An IMF review disclosed that the government had cancelled about 1,800 public investment projects and rephased or rescoped another 2,000 following a change in fiscal direction — leaving hundreds of communities stranded with abandoned roads, schools, hospitals, markets and water systems.

Continent-wide, the pattern is structural rather than accidental. Research on Africa's infrastructure pipeline found that for the six largest infrastructure markets on the continent alone, the development costs of projects still stuck in the feasibility-study phase amounted to $30 billion — money spent studying projects that never broke ground, in no small part because short political cycles challenge long-term commitments. Academic research is blunter: when new governments assume office, they often abandon their predecessors' infrastructure projects regardless of importance or near-completion status, largely as a signal of political differentiation rather than technical necessity.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. Industry analysis of Africa's infrastructure pipeline finds that around 80 percent of infrastructure projects fail during the planning or early implementation stages — the exact window in which political transitions do the most damage, before a project has enough sunk capital, public buy-in, or institutional memory to survive a change of guard.

## Case study: Bagamoyo — a $10 billion port held hostage by three presidents

No single project illustrates the "new broom" problem better than Tanzania's Bagamoyo Port.

In 2013, President Jakaya Kikwete signed off on what would have been East Africa's largest deep-water port — a $10 billion agreement with China Merchants Holdings International and Oman's State Government Reserve Fund, positioned to transform Tanzania into a regional logistics hub. Construction broke ground in 2015.

Then came a change of leadership. President John Magufuli took office in November 2015 and, within months, sidelined the project entirely, prioritising expansion of the existing Dar es Salaam, Tanga and Mtwara ports instead. By 2019, Magufuli had gone further, suspending the port outright and publicly accusing the Chinese backers of offering "exploitative and awkward" terms — terms his own predecessor had signed. Researchers examining the episode conclude the renegotiation was less about contract economics than politics: the stalled talks functioned as a strategy to shore up Magufuli's domestic standing, using nationalist rhetoric against a "colonial-style" deal to consolidate support.

Magufuli died in office in March 2021. His successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, moved almost immediately to restart the stalled Bagamoyo project as part of a broader effort to revive several of Tanzania's biggest suspended infrastructure schemes. By 2025 — twelve years after the original signature, and across three heads of state — construction had only just resumed, with the project now split into components with a broader mix of partners including Belgium, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the US, in an apparent bid to avoid the political exposure of over-reliance on any single foreign backer.

Twelve years. Three presidents. Half a decade of total suspension. The port that could have anchored East African trade before the AfCFTA even existed is only now, in the mid-2020s, beginning to rise from the ground it was cleared for a decade ago.

## Case study: the steel mill nobody will finish

Nigeria's Ajaokuta Steel Company is the continent's starkest cautionary tale of political abandonment compounding across successive governments. Conceived under one administration, contracted under another, and left to rust under nearly every one since, the plant has swallowed roughly $8 billion and has been abandoned by successive governments since 1978 — a project so persistently orphaned by changing political priorities that Nigeria now spends around $4 billion annually importing steel it could, in theory, be producing domestically. This is not a single election-cycle casualty. It is what happens when abandonment becomes institutional culture, repeated by administration after administration for nearly five decades.

## Case study: agribusiness — the land deals that outlive nobody's promises

Political risk does not spare farmland. Tanzania's Kilombero Plantations Limited was once held up by the G7 and the World Economic Forum as proof that large-scale commercial agriculture could transform African farming. Instead, it became the collapse that symbolised a decade-long, donor-backed drive to attract foreign agricultural investment gone wrong, launched under one presidency and left to founder as political sponsorship, land governance, and community trust shifted under the next.

The broader academic literature on land deals across Sub-Saharan Africa confirms this is systemic rather than exceptional: a large share of land deals in the agricultural sector are scaled back, perform poorly, go bankrupt, or are simply abandoned, with the land actually farmed by investors routinely far smaller than what was originally acquired. In Zambia, one heavily studied European agribusiness investment had, nine years after launch, developed less than 7,000 hectares of the land it had secured — a shortfall researchers trace not just to market conditions but to shifting political sponsorship and community relationships that changed as local and national leadership changed.

For agribusiness specifically, the lesson is uncomfortable: land concessions, off-take agreements, and export incentives that depend on one minister's or one president's personal enthusiasm are not investments. They are options — and options expire the moment the signature that created them leaves office.

## What it costs, precisely

Africa's annual infrastructure financing need sits at $181–221 billion per year through 2030, according to the African Development Bank, against a persistent shortfall estimated at $68–108 billion annually. Political risk is not a side issue in that gap — it is one of its primary drivers. Financing gaps persist because of perceived investment risks and political uncertainty, and risk advisory firms tracking the sector confirm that African governments are turning to PPPs specifically to address the continent's roughly $100 billion annual financing gap, even as those same PPPs remain acutely exposed to the political cycles that keep killing them.

The compounding effect is brutal. Delayed and abandoned projects don't just lose their own capital — they poison the well for the next investor. Every cancelled PPP raises the risk premium the market demands on the next one, in the same country, sometimes the same sector. It is a tax that African governments impose on themselves, paid not in a budget line but in the interest-rate spread every future project must now clear.

## What agribusiness must learn

Three lessons stand out for operators like RIC Brands, Africa One Fund, and every serious agribusiness player watching this pattern from the inside.

**First, de-politicize the paperwork.** Agreements anchored to a specific minister, president, or party — rather than to statute, parliamentary ratification, or binding multilateral guarantee — are agreements with an expiry date tied to someone else's election calendar, not your project timeline.

**Second, build local constituency, not just political sponsorship.** Projects that survive transitions tend to be the ones with genuine buy-in from smallholders, cooperatives, and local government — the actors who don't leave office when the presidency changes. A deal that only a departing minister can explain the value of is a deal a new minister has every incentive to cancel.

**Third, structure for staged, visible delivery.** Long-horizon mega-deals with no output until year eight are the easiest targets for a new administration looking to make a symbolic break from the past. Phased delivery — where communities and successor governments alike can point to something tangible already working — is far harder to politically justify killing.

## The way forward

The continent doesn't lack capital, ambition, or ideas. It lacks continuity. Until PPP frameworks are built to survive the people who signed them — through binding multi-year legislative ratification, independent infrastructure authorities insulated from ministerial reshuffles, and genuinely shared local ownership — every election will remain, in effect, a hidden clause in every major contract on the continent: *subject to cancellation by whoever wins next.*

Africa's next great infrastructure and agribusiness wins will not be won by the boldest pitch decks. They will be won by whoever figures out how to make a good idea outlast a single term in office.

---

Africa Brew Brief: Investigating the trade, policy, and value chains shaping Africa's agribusiness future. Follow the series for more deep dives at the intersection of African trade sovereignty and global market access.