African agency at the crossroads | Dan Banik

Let me start with the room in Addis Ababa.

The first thing many participants wanted to talk about was the geopolitical moment we're living in, the dramatic cuts to American development aid, the shock to the humanitarian system, the retreat of multilateralism, the redirection of European budgets towards defense and toward Ukraine.

This was rarely framed as a catastrophe.

One Ethiopian participant called the disruption a blessing in disguise.

Another said the country had been living, in his words, "In warm water, comfortable enough not to notice the temperature," and was now being forced to confront reality.

A third put it rather bluntly, "This is a wake-up call." I heard the same instinct echoed in Blantyre, where the stakes are even sharper.

Nearly 40% of Malawi's national budget has historically been funded by development partners.

Malawi owes the IMF something on the order of several hundred million dollars, and as one civil society leader pointed out fairly grimly, there's no plausible way that debt is going to be repaid through current revenue.

So when participants in Blantyre talked about the future of aid, the talk was full of teeth.

One NGO director put it this way: "The future is bright, but to when and by whom, that is the problem.

We had Vision 2020.

Now we have Vision 2063." He was almost laughing as he said it.

Vision 2063 is a very convenient deadline because most of the people making the promises won't be alive to be held to them.

Another participant offered the line of the morning.

He said, "If we don't do away with aid, then aid will do away with us." Meaning, if we don't take the lead in shaping what comes next, the collapse of the old model will simply consume us.

That morning, as it happened, the front page of The Nation in Malawi carried the headline, "Malawi, EU Shift Focus From Aid To Production." Whether that headline turns out to mean anything substantive remains to be seen, but it is one more sign that the conversation is moving.

But not everyone was sanguine.

In Addis Ababa, one scholar pushed back hard.

"I'm not sure," he said.

"We can describe the collapse of the international order as an opportunity.

How exactly can we benefit from a world in which there is no order and might makes right?" That tension, opportunity versus disorientation, ran through every gathering, and I think it's the right tension to start with.

The most useful frame I heard came from a participant in Addis who reached for Antonio Gramsci.

"We're living through an interregnum," he said, "a period where the old order is no longer functioning, but the new order has not yet emerged." The post-1945 system, he argued, was never truly rule-based.

It was power-based.

The rules reflected the preferences of the victors of the Second World War, and now that hegemony is genuinely cracking, but nothing has yet replaced it.