“Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”.

Mao Zedong’s May 1956 statement, motivated by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in February the same year, was designed to permit greater freedom of thought and speech by Chinese intellectuals.

Africa faces a unique moment to create a demographic dividend in letting its own thousand (or more) flowers bloom. Just like Mao’s plan, this will hinge on opening up the system to openness. But unlike Mao, it will demand that the government actually lets go in creating the conditions to allow countless flowers to bloom.

The continent is fast heading from 1.6 billion people today to a projected 2.5 billion in the next generation. This is not the only seismic change in a population that registered less than 500 million in 1980, when 30% lived in urban areas. By 2050, over 60% of Africans will live in the continent’s towns and cities.

This rapid growth rate will make Africa, along with Asia, the driver of global urbanisation. Africa already enjoys the world's youngest population. Some 60% are under 25. The median age is just 19 (with Niger the youngest, at just 15). The 400 million Africans aged between 15-35 years will provide the source of the rapid population expansion in the next generation.

This growing population can become an asset should Africa make better development choices today for tomorrow. Africa is poor, the recent Spier Dialogue heard, because many of its leaders have made poor choices (the Spier Dialogue is a high-level, pan-African governance and policy forum that brings together heads of state, cabinet ministers, academics, and global stakeholders to discuss pressing issues shaping the continent's future). Rather than being in the interests of the majority, such choices were aimed at rapid wealth accumulation among a small group, thereby maintaining their grip on power.

This hold has been enabled by weakening democratic conditions. For Africa is hardly poor, with a treasure of critical and other minerals, along with the world’s greatest store of arable land.

Democratic Deterioration

Yet Freedom House surveys show how in 2025/6, political rights and civil liberties deteriorated in 18 of 54 African countries. Just eight African countries (Botswana, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, and South Africa), comprising less than 7% of Africa’s population, are considered “free”.

Madagascar and Guinea-Bissau are the latest countries to suffer coups, the eighth and ninth since 2019, joining juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, and Niger. Recent fraudulent and violent elections in Uganda and Tanzania and ongoing executive machinations in Zimbabwe, which include changing the Constitution to extend the presidential term limit and switch the election from direct to indirect, amount to coups against the population. None of this is likely to produce better governance given the close empirical correlation between democracy and robust growth across Africa.

As a consequence of the combination of low economic and high population growth, the per capita income of Africans is (in real terms) just $1 589 compared to the global average of $11 852. Revealingly, the share that sub-Saharan Africans have of the global average income has decreased from 41.4% in 1960 to 13.4% (i.e. in 1960 the average per capita income of a Sub-Saharan African was 41.4% of the global average, that has now shrunk to 13.4%). In the circumstances, the continent is now the largest repository of the world’s poor, some 460 million, or nearly one in every three Africans.

But this level of relative poverty means, too, that getting a few things right, including infrastructure is vital. For example, just 58% of Africa's population has access to electricity, leaving roughly 630 million people without power. While North Africa has near-universal access, sub-Saharan Africa houses over 80% of the world's unelectrified population.

Simple improvements in transport logistics (in using digitisation for trade, removing the scope for malfeasance) and skills can also make a tremendous difference given the scale of the catch-up growth and the low cost of African wages.

The question is, however: What is needed to turn challenges into opportunity?

While the specifics vary from country to country, the Spier Dialogue pinpointed several key actions to ensure a demographic dividend, notably that the problem is fundamentally one of (a lack of) economic growth.

The basic formula for growth is well-known, and rests on the openness to capital, technology, and skills, policy predictability, central bank independence, political stability, and the rule of law.

To ensure these conditions, and to address this failing, Africans should be as exercised about the lack of economic regeneration as they routinely are about the colonial past, the Dialogue heard, or about the role of outsiders. Robert Solow’s maxim of capital, labour, and the residual of technological progress, institutional and individual efficiency, and innovation, commonly known as total factor productivity (TFP), still holds.

Harnessing theDemographic Dividend

Improved healthcare and education as well as birth control are all part of TFP and are necessary to turn the demographic moment into a dividend, extending lifespans and reducing the number of dependants in society.

Infrastructure has to connect people with industry and manufacturing, but should avoid investing in sprawl at the expense of the economies of scale offered by densification. This links to a need to devolve revenue and its mechanisms towards cities and towns at the expense of national government.

Regional integration, too, has to be devised and managed in ways to expedite flows of trade, knowledge, and capital. All this has to be founded on an expectation of a duty of care and security – of people and property as well as the country’s borders. Though security is the primary responsibility of any government, in Africa this is honoured often more in the breach than observance.

Finally, leadership has to be committed and not corrupt, possessing a relentless drive in not only setting priorities but seeing them through to the finish.

Mao’s “thousand flowers” campaign foundered on the upsurge in public criticism of Beijing. A crackdown on such dissent in 1957 developed into an “Anti-Rightist Campaign” against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology, with widespread arrests, detentions, and executions. It was followed by the disastrous “Great Leap Forward”, the forced industrialisation campaign to transform China from an agrarian to an industrialised society, which caused perhaps as many as 50 million deaths by the time of its conclusion in 1962. China only embarked on its period of growth after Mao’s death in 1976 and the accession to power of its once “number two capitalist roader” in Deng Xiaoping.

Deng ensured a demographic dividend through his recipe of special economic zones encouraging foreign investment, constitutional term limits, a one-child policy, compulsory education, and promotion of technology in moving away from a command economy.

Mao’s failure and Deng’s success hints at perhaps the key aspect overall in instigating more rapid transformation across Africa: a system of responsive government that ensures accountability and the competitiveness of ideas.

Quality and Accountability of Governance

The binding constraint on Africa's development is not its demographics, not its resource endowment, not the global environment – though all of these matter – but the quality and accountability of its governance, and the willingness of government to allow in the private sector to do the things efficiently that government cannot.

The demographic dividend will not materialise without it. Cities will not become productive without it. Migration will remain a source of strain rather than dynamism without it, risking its weaponisation as a political tool. Growth will remain insufficient without it.

The Spier Dialogue heard that Zambia's turnaround, the Western Cape's tech sector, the spread of mobile money across the continent, the service revolution in South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs through rapid digitisation, and the entrepreneurial energy visible in African cities are evidence that the capacity for transformation exists.

The question that Spier left open is whether the political conditions for releasing that capacity can be built, and built fast enough, in the time the continent has.

Khama is the former President of Botswana. Biti is a former Minister of Finance of Zimbabwe. Franceschi is a former Assistant Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. All are members of the Platform for African Democrats, which co-hosted the Spier Dialogue.