Neither Will nor Capacity? Rebuilding Statecraft and Public Ethos in the Post-Unipolar World

Why have many developing countries struggled to translate ambitious policies into tangible outcomes, and what role do statecraft, institutional capacity and public ethos play in overcoming this gap?

 Why do many states struggle to convert vision into results?

In a new multipolar order, the Global South seeks new development pathways and stronger governance to deliver.

Busani Ngcaweni, the secretary general of the African Management Development Institutes Network, explores the challenge of restoring the statecraft, leadership and public ethos needed for national renewal.

A quiet yet profound public value crisis is entrenched in the Global South governance systems and state machineries.

We know this and often attribute it to institutional fragility or faltering policies.

At a deeper level, however, we recognize a more extreme reality that we have been reluctant to engage.

We stand as onlookers to the constant churning of inspiring policies for a better future, yet we have not seen the change these policies are meant to drive.

This reflects a massive disconnect between authority and agency, between the moral purpose of public leadership and the skills required to enact it.

In our haste to throw solutions at the crisis, we have not sufficiently grappled with its underlying causes.

Our thinking has vacillated between whether states lack political will or execution capacity, losing sight of the interconnection between the two and how they have reinforced each other over time.

This is not an academic puzzle but an existential fault line across the Global South.

It is the result of a governance paradigm that systematically eroded state capacity under the guise of modernization and the supposed reinvention of governance.

The private sector, as a template for best practice, has unfolded in various forms, sometimes as mildly contesting approaches to managing public institutions.

The cruder expression of this approach falls under what is widely known as New Public Management, a paradigm exported to developing countries during the height of the neoliberal era.

The core of this reform ideology, often imposed through external conditionalities, emphasized privatization, performance targets and managerial control.

It ushered in the tyranny of the log frame, where governing was reduced to measuring inputs and outputs, with little emphasis on context, capability or the political economy of

programmes.

It promised efficiency and accountability but delivered something far more insidious.

In much of Africa, the wholesale adoption of the reinventing government approach led to the outsourcing of core functions.

This was particularly evident in South Africa’s deeply entrenched state tender system.

One central consequence, aside from widespread abuses, has been the fragmentation of the state into a series of relatively autonomous entities with reduced policy coherence and limited collective implementation.

Mainstream departments were encouraged to create entities that minimized politics and maximized financial gain for the few, supposedly under a more sustainable private sector-infused model.

This shift hollowed out institutional capacity, turning capable leaders into contract managers and beneficiaries of the very systems they were meant to govern.

Talented individuals became process bureaucrats, stripped of their confidence, agency and core competencies.

The real work was outsourced to private firms.

Many saw this coming, but few anticipated the extent and depth of its impact.

Red tape became entrenched, and corruption proliferated, along the lines that Abhijit Banerjee contemplated in A Theory of Misgovernance.

Today, we face the full consequences of this hollowing out, as our public institutions falter in response to a rapidly evolving global order.

Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, in The Big Con, aptly argue that the public sector has been infantilized, especially in the Global South.

It no longer initiates or shapes markets but merely reacts to them. Strategic vision has been displaced by an obsession with compliance. Innovation has been outsourced to private entities focused on cost saving and private returns from public value-driven policies.

Public leadership has been reduced to survival through rituals of risk aversion.

A clean audit has become a zeitgeist more prized than any other measure of public value.

There is now a profound loss of any shared understanding of the state’s value for current and future generations.

We have witnessed the collapse of a governing ethos.

The late African intellectual Thandika Mkandawire reminded us that the post-independence African state was once imagined as an ambitious, central agent of transformation.

It was not perfect, but it was politically confident.

Neoliberalism eroded that confidence, replacing it with managerialism, cost-cutting and the illusion of private efficiency.

Mkandawire argued that today’s challenge is to reverse this trend by reasserting the state’s transformative role, not as an abstract ideal but as a practical, accountable and adaptive institution.

As power becomes more diffuse and development pathways less self-evident, the capacity of the state to act strategically and the will of its leaders to do so becomes ever more critical.

Tragically, our indecision on this crisis has created space for African leaders, elected or appointed, to be absorbed into systems that deprive them of the imagination, tools and resolve to govern effectively.

Many preside over bureaucracies they neither inspire nor control. Surrounded by technocratic intermediaries and consulting firms that thrive in the vacuum of disoriented leadership, politics has been reduced to procedure and governance to a reactive theatre of drift.

All that often remains are a bunch of bandits ready to enforce the supreme leader’s stay in power. Statecraft is lost.

Between political will and execution capacity lies the critical notion of statecraft.

It thrives on clarity, coherence and courage. It enables us to move beyond the tired refrain that there is no political will or that leaders lack the ability to manage the state.

To rebuild statecraft, we must understand it not as mere administration but as a leadership, professional and moral vocation grounded in strategic capacity.

It involves aligning long-term vision, institutional design, bureaucratic coordination and policy tools to govern effectively amid complexity.

This erosion of leadership is rooted in decades of political marginalization, institutional fragmentation and the decay of public ethos.

Public ethos refers to the shared moral orientation that binds authority to purpose. In the context of statecraft, reskilling is not a technocratic fix but a multidimensional transformation.

It entails cognitive development such as systems thinking and adaptive governance, scenario planning as well as ethical formation grounded in justice, integrity and service.

It involves learning to manage institutional ecosystems, political contests and complex policy environments.

This is a political and pedagogical imperative, equipping public leaders with technical competence, reflective capacity and an ethical compass.

This vision aligns with Professor Mashupye Maserumule’s advocacy for a governance model rooted in ubuntu and post-colonial thought.

For him, Africa’s governance crisis stems not only from weak institutions but from a lack of ethical leadership grounded in local values, communal responsibility and moral accountability.

Rebuilding statecraft, then, is not just about competence.

It is about cultivating an ethos rooted in dignity, service and historical consciousness.

This ethos, standing in contrast to the private-sector model of reinvented government, supports a tradition in which leadership is both intellectual and ethical, rooted in the lived realities and aspirations of the people. Yes, the people, not just market agents.

Guy Mhone’s concept of democratic developmentalism offers a powerful theoretical framework for this renewal.

He urged African states to overcome their enclave nature by developing integrated, democratic and developmental capacity.

This means reclaiming policy space, planning strategically and embedding public leadership in broader struggles for inclusion.

Effective governance must be transformative, distributive and politically embedded. Building public leadership is itself a strategic capacity.

Boon Siong Neo and Geraldine Chen, writing in Dynamic Governance: Embedding Culture, Capabilities and Change in Singapore, argue that strategic capacity involves aligning vision, resources and institutions to navigate complexity.

Experiences from Singapore and other Asian nations demonstrate that capable governance is not accidental but the result of deliberate leadership development, institutional learning and merit-based recruitment.

Francis Fukuyama puts this succinctly in a paper titled The Patterns of History.

Even the most capable leaders must navigate institutional resistance.

As Samuel Bacharach explains in The Agenda Mover, leadership is not just about ideas but about shepherding those ideas through institutions, aligning stakeholders and managing obstacles. Leaders must therefore be equipped not only with vision but also with strategic tools to realize it.

Examples of renewal abound. Indonesia’s post-Suharto reforms cultivated a new generation of leaders with political and policy skills. Vietnam’s Communist Party instituted five-year leadership training cycles tied to national planning targets.

Rwanda has invested in data-driven delivery and disciplined bureaucracy.

India’s digital public infrastructure shows how strategic intervention can unlock developmental potential.

In the Gulf, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have introduced governance innovations, signaling a move toward strategic capability in a post-oil era.

China’s long-term vision has produced unparalleled industrial and poverty-reduction achievements.

Kenya’s Huduma Centers illustrate the importance of both digital infrastructure and a public service ethos.

South Africa’s ongoing challenges, policy drift, institutional incoherence and state capture, highlight the perils of failing to build strategic capacity.

The growing disconnects between the governed and the governing is unsustainable.

These international examples are not blueprints but provocations.

They show that institutional inertia is not destiny.

Governance is not passive. It is an active expression of collective purpose.

In a recent (April 2025) dialogue hosted by the National School of Government and Fudan University, Professor Kishore Mahbubani, author of The Asian 21st Century, urged African leaders to reskill and master governance as an intellectual and ethical craft.

His call is timely.

Our future depends on leaders who can think strategically, act decisively and govern ethically.

This requires bold reskilling, not a return to orthodoxy but a forging of new pathways rooted in African traditions, comparative learning and a sober view of global realities.

The work ahead is not only institutional renewal.

It is the reassertion of the public good as the organizing principle of governance.

To lead well is to think well, plan wisely and act ethically.

It is time to rebuild the infrastructure of public leadership, not as a technocratic task but as part of a broader political project to restore the dignity of the state, the purpose of authority and the soul of governance.

From the foregoing we can distil three frontiers as a conclusion. National, regional and international development must progress along three critical dimensions …

reskilling for effective decision making with a focus on mastering statecraft and moving beyond pomp and ceremony

… building resilient institutions (both hard and soft) that diligently implement development plans.

… and forging domestic and global compacts to manage national and geopolitical contradictions.

All of this depends on the Global South countries cultivating developmental elites — men and women who are obsessed with development, unwavering in their pursuit of meaningful change.

As the Inanda proverb goes: ultimately, effective governance is not just about leading by the rules, but making rational and ethical choices in the best interest of society.

We learn from history that capable states are characterized by the diligent management of public affairs and courageous pursuit of society’s aspirations for economic justice and social cohesion.