Idrissa Diabira : “Good governance” is dead. Long live performative governance!

By Idrissa Diabira*

Over the past few years, in several countries of West and Central Africa, institutional breakdowns or threats of breakdown have multiplied, revealing a malaise that goes far beyond the Sahelian space alone. International reactions have focused on the breach of constitutional order and the violation of democratic norms. But the message expressed by a significant share of the population is of a different nature: a demand for real sovereignty.

This demand—often articulated around the presence of foreign military forces, the CFA franc, or inherited dependencies—has been widely mobilized by juntas to justify their coups, without resolving the deficit of effective sovereignty they claim to denounce. That said, it cannot be reduced to mere ideological manipulation. It is profoundly practical. Populations are not rejecting democracy as a value; they are contesting a model of governance incapable of producing security, livelihoods, and the dignity they expect.

What is faltering today is not the democratic aspiration of African societies, but the capacity of states to make democracy function as a system that produces results

In other words, what is faltering today is not the democratic aspiration of African societies, but the capacity of states to make democracy function as a system that produces results.
 Independence carried an ambition of total sovereignty. But the debt crisis and structural adjustment programs of the 1980s durably weakened the economic and institutional capacities of states, leaving economic sovereignty unfinished. It was in this context that the paradigm of “good governance” emerged, elevated as a presumed condition for development from the late 1980s onward. Thirty years later, the causal link between institutional compliance and economic transformation has never been established.

Populations are not rejecting democracy as a value; they are contesting a model of governance incapable of producing security, livelihoods, and the dignity they expect

Governance has been assessed through procedures—elections, laws, agencies—rather than outcomes. States have learned to master the language and rituals of reform without building the real capacity to produce tangible effects. Constitutional revisions and hollow electoral cycles are not anomalies: they are the logical outcome of a system optimized for appearance rather than performance.
 Comparison with East Asia shows that growth has a lasting effect only when it is institutionally transformed into human capabilities. A seemingly small annual gap in progress on the Human Development Index—around 1.25% in East Asia versus 1% in sub-Saharan Africa—corresponds to a pace of progress about 25% higher, which, through cumulative effects, has enabled hundreds of millions of people to escape extreme poverty.

The problem, therefore, is not the absence of governance, but its inability to produce results

The consequences of Africa’s challenge are also visible in the sectors that matter most to citizens. Nearly 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity, even though markets have been liberalized, regulators created, and legal frameworks aligned with best practices. The problem, therefore, is not the absence of governance, but its inability to produce results.
 This gap between an abundance of rules and a scarcity of results is not unique to Africa: it now runs through many democracies, including some of the oldest, confronted with a silent crisis of public action and state credibility.

The root of the problem lies beyond formal institutions. Development depends on an operational ethos: a set of shared norms, professional practices, and organizational capacities that enable institutions to function effectively. The decisive difference lies less in the norms themselves than in their cognitive appropriation.

Real sovereignty is not proclaimed; it is built through the daily capacity to produce security, essential services, economic activity, and collective well-being

This is where the notion of performative governance comes into play. It does not simply refer to high-performing governance, but to governance whose rules, norms, and public policies actually produce the results they promise. Unlike normative governance, it judges states by their ability to ensure effective access to essential services—energy, health, education—and to the productive capacities that enable households and businesses to live and work with dignity.

Such governance is performative when it transforms norms into capacities, and capacities into observable results. It recenters public action on invisible infrastructures—accounting, legal, professional, informational, and cognitive—without which norms remain formal and capital remains invisible.

In other words, performative governance is the institutional engineering through which invisible capital—informal, latent, or undervalued—becomes operational capital capable of producing economic and social value.

Concretely, this type of governance is what allows an SME to have reliable energy, access to productive finance, and rules that are effectively enforceable: rules that secure contracts, make information reliable, and enable the real execution of rights, not merely well-written laws.

The recent wave of coups must not be idealized. Military power is not a sustainable alternative, any more than populist regimes or democracies without results. Everywhere, people are not demanding less democracy, but institutions capable of making it work—that is, of rendering the social contract effective. For real sovereignty is not proclaimed; it is built through the daily capacity to produce security, essential services, economic activity, and collective well-being.

*Idrissa Diabira is an international consultant and founder of SherpAfrica.
 He works on public policy, performative governance, and operational excellence in Africa.