The Great Illusion of Nations

The Great Illusion: Why Developing Nations Fail When Imitating the West — and How Ethno-Corporatism Offers Africa a Path Forward

BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE

19 December 2025

Across the world today, developing nations repeat the same mistake: they attempt to mirror the systems, institutions, and governance models of the so-called “developed world,” believing that imitation is the road to advancement. They build replicas of foreign parliaments, adopt alien constitutions, copy Western policies, and declare grand national goals that do not align with the material realities of their economies. And each time the cycle repeats, public disappointment grows, political credibility collapses, and national progress retreats.

This is not a failure of intention; it is a failure of understanding. Developing nations are not failing because they are lazy, corrupt, or incompetent—they are failing because they are trying to recreate effects without the causes that gave birth to them. They are copying the fruits of prosperity without having the soil that produced it.

This is the great illusion of global development.

1. The Hidden Blind Spot: A World Obsessed With Mimicry

It seems logical: “if developed nations are wealthy and stable, then their systems must be what produced that wealth and stability. Therefore, if a developing country copies those systems, it will also become wealthy and stable.” This is the logic that underpins modern democracy-building, foreign aid, international consultancy, NGO governance, and development theory.

But it is a dangerous and false logic.

The systems used by the developed world today—with corporate lobbying, donor-led political parties, neoliberal markets, and sophisticated public institutions—are not the systems that produced their development. These systems existed after wealth was established, after industrialisation, after colonialisation had funnelled billions in resources to Europe, and after their domestic economies had matured.

They reached prosperity through protectionism, State intervention, centuries of resource extraction, and forced labour systems—not through the modern political models they now promote globally.

In other words:

The modern governance of the developed world is the management system of wealth, not the producer of it.

This distinction is precisely what developing nations have failed to grasp.

2. Why the Developing World Keeps Snapping Back

A developing country attempts universal healthcare, free university education, expansive welfare systems, or highly decentralised governance structures—but the economy cannot sustain it. Election seasons become theatres of unrealistic promises. Politicians boast, pledge, guarantee, and swear that the nation will soon look like Britain, France, or Sweden. When these promises collapse, the public screams “liars!”

But were they lying?

Not always. Often, they simply copied policies designed for societies with massive economic surpluses, without possessing the economic machinery to sustain them.

This is why election cycles in developing nations are emotionally charged and endlessly disappointing. Politicians promise Scandinavian outcomes with sub-Saharan resources—not because they intend to deceive, but because the global development narrative has deceived them.

Here is the truth developing nations fear to say out loud:

“We cannot provide universal free healthcare because our collective resources cannot sustain it.”

This honest statement would be more responsible and more patriotic than enshrining provisions in national constitutions that cannot be upheld. Because once unrealistic guarantees become law:

  • False equality becomes a burden.
  • Constitutional promises without resources become obstacles.
  • Idealistic policy becomes a breeding ground for corruption, shortcuts, political manipulation, and public despair.

This is precisely how nations fall into a cycle of permanent disappointment.

3. Aid-Policy Illusion: How the Developed World Misguides the Developing World

To make matters worse, the developed world often reinforces this illusion through aid policies. Their message is:

“Adopt our governance model and democratic structure, and development will follow.”

Whether knowingly or obliviously, Western nations promote the idea that: “Governance drives the economy.” But this is historically false. In reality: It is the economy that drives governance.

Western aid agencies encourage developing nations to focus on elections, human rights legislation, press freedom laws, decentralised governance, and multi-party structures—as though these features alone can magically lift a nation out of poverty.

Meanwhile, the economic base remains weak, agricultural productivity is low, industrialisation is stagnant, and the infrastructure is insufficient to support a modern welfare system. This is like instructing a man with no income to go buy insurance, invest in stocks, and apply for a mortgage. It is the teaching of effects, not causes.

Aid-policy is therefore built on a global misunderstanding—or, in some cases, geopolitical self-interest. A weak developing world is easy to influence, easy to access, and easy to resource-exploit. A strong, self-sufficient developing world is not.

4. The Economic Reality: One Who Lacks Cannot Mimic One Who Does Not Lack

A person who is hungry cannot imitate the lifestyle of a person who is well-fed. A village without water cannot adopt the sanitation customs of a city with flowing rivers. A country with limited resources cannot copy the policies of nations built on centuries of wealth accumulation.

This is why developing nations repeatedly leap forward by copying the West—and then snap back to their original condition like a retractable string. Because socio-economic conditions are not changed through imitation. They are changed through production, organisation, and collective economic intelligence.

A. The Taxation Trap: Why Revenue-Extraction Models Imported from the West Deepen Poverty in Developing Africa

One of the most dangerous manifestations of the Great Illusion—the belief that development is achieved by mimicking the institutional behaviours of already-developed nations—is the aggressive push for tax extraction across African economies under the guidance of Western governments, multilateral lenders, and financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Recent initiatives branded under technocratic euphemisms like Revenue Mobilisation Thematic Funds (RMTF), including newly forged tax-administration partnerships between France and Nigeria, and another one in Tanzania, exemplify this trend. They are presented as neutral fiscal reforms, yet in reality they represent a profound misunderstanding—if not deliberate misapplication—of economic theory to materially fragile societies.

At its core, taxation is not a development tool; it is a distributional instrument that presupposes an already productive, diversified, and infrastructure-complete economy. Developed countries tax surplus. Developing countries are being forced to tax scarcity. This single distinction explains why tax-driven governance models imported from the West consistently fail in Africa.

B. Taxation Presupposes Wealth; Africa Is Being Taxed in Poverty

In advanced economies, taxation functions as a recycling mechanism: wealth is generated first through industrial productivity, technological innovation, infrastructure, and capital accumulation; only then is a portion of that wealth reclaimed by the State to fund public services. In contrast, most African economies are characterised by:

  • Weak industrial bases.
  • Limited value-addition.
  • Fragile infrastructure.
  • High informal employment.
  • Low household disposable income.

Under such conditions, taxation does not recycle surplus—it extracts survival capital. When governments tax small traders, informal workers, micro-businesses, and struggling professionals in economies lacking reliable electricity, transport systems, healthcare, digital infrastructure, or social security, taxation ceases to be a fiscal instrument and becomes a mechanism of economic suffocation.

Empirical development economics consistently shows that premature taxation in low-income economies:

  • Reduces capital formation.
  • Shrinks small and medium enterprises.
  • Pushes activity further into informality.
  • Depresses consumption.
  • Increases unemployment.
  • Fuels corruption as citizens seek avoidance strategies.

Thus, far from strengthening the State, aggressive revenue mobilisation in developing contexts weakens both State legitimacy and economic vitality.

C. IMF Orthodoxy and the Fallacy of “Good Governance Through Taxation”

The IMF and its Western partners justify these policies under the banner of “good governance,” fiscal discipline, and domestic revenue mobilisation. However, this doctrine confuses administrative symmetry with economic reality. Governance structures cannot be divorced from material conditions. A State cannot tax itself into development any more than a starving body can donate blood to become healthy.

What is rarely acknowledged is that many Western States themselves did not develop through taxation-first models. Historical evidence shows that:

  • Europe industrialised through mercantilism, State-protected industries, colonial extraction, and infrastructure-first strategies.
  • The United States developed through land grants, tariffs, deficit financing, and massive State-led investment before modern taxation regimes matured.
  • Post-war Western welfare States emerged after industrial dominance and capital accumulation were secured.

Africa is being asked to do the reverse: to fund development through taxation before development has occurred. This inversion is not accidental—it preserves global economic asymmetry by keeping African States fiscally dependent, administratively overburdened, and socially strained.

D. Taxation Without Infrastructure Is Economic Violence

No serious development framework can justify imposing taxes on citizens who:

  • Generate their own electricity.
  • Provide their own water.
  • Build private roads around failed public ones.
  • Pay out-of-pocket for healthcare.
  • Self-finance education.
  • Operate businesses without logistics, credit, or State protection.

In such conditions, taxation becomes double payment: citizens first finance the State’s absence privately, then are taxed for its presence rhetorically. The result is not development but State parasitism, where the government feeds on an economy it has not yet built.

This is why tax-collection drives like RMTF do not expand prosperity—they compress it. They increase government cash flow while shrinking the productive base, creating the illusion of fiscal responsibility while deepening structural poverty.

E. Why Imitation Fails: Developing Economies Require Inverse Logic

The failure of developing nations when imitating Western fiscal systems stems from a fundamental principle ignored by international policy advisors: Economic structure must dictate governance mechanisms, not the other way around.

Developed economies can sustain:

  • Progressive taxation.
  • Welfare redistribution.
  • Large bureaucratic States.

Developing economies require:

  • Infrastructure-first investment.
  • State-led production.
  • Protection of domestic enterprise.
  • Non-extractive governance.
  • Resource pooling rather than revenue stripping.

To impose Western tax regimes on African economies is akin to installing advanced software on broken hardware—it leads to system crashes, not optimisation.

5. Ethno-Corporatism: The Missing Logic of African Development

Ethno-corporatism offers an entirely different paradigm—a paradigm rooted in African communalism, endogenous economics, and realistic development grounded in material conditions.

Ethno-Corporatism: Production Without Taxation, Provision Before Extraction

Ethno-corporatism directly addresses this failure by rejecting the taxation-first dogma entirely. Under an ethno-corporatist framework:

  • The State does not fund itself by impoverishing citizens.
  • The economy is organised around collective production, State ownership of strategic resources, and non-monetary national provisioning.
  • Public services are funded through direct control of productive outputs, not coercive revenue extraction.
  • Economic planning replaces fiscal punishment.
  • The legitimacy of governance flows from provision, not enforcement.

In such a system, taxation does not exist—if it exists at all, is marginal, contextual, and never imposed where infrastructure, productivity, and material sufficiency are absent. Development is achieved not by copying Western fiscal rituals but by rebuilding the African economic logic from its own historical, communal, and productive foundations.

In an ethnopublican system:

  • The economy directs governance, not the reverse.
  • Society expands provisions only when the collective production can sustain them.
  • Government policies adjust dynamically based on real resources, not wishful ideology.
  • Public frustration reduces because promises match reality.
  • Politicians cannot overpromise what the economy cannot support.
  • The people collectively determine what is possible and what is not.

This eliminates the anxiety of governance and the theatrics of politics. There is no compulsive need to mimic foreign nations. There is no pressure to guarantee free services without the means to provide them. There is no illusion of grandeur.

Instead, there is honesty, stability, and economic realism.

6. Africa’s Path Forward

Whether through colonial disruption or post-independence imitation, Africa’s trajectory has been derailed not by lack of potential but by lack of economic truthfulness. The continent has tried to copy systems built on wealth, instead of building systems that generate wealth.

Ethno-corporatism brings African civilisation back to its foundations: communal production, shared responsibility, proportional distribution, and governance that listens to the economy.

It gives Africa the courage to say:

“We will do what our collective resources allow us to do—no more, no less.”

And this is not weakness. It is wisdom. It is sustainability. It is sovereignty.

Conclusion: The Age of Imitation Must End

Africa does not need to mimic the West to succeed. It does not need to adopt impossible promises. It does not need to fall into the trap of election fantasies. It does not need to be guided by aid-induced illusions.

The Tax Brigade Is a Symptom of the Illusion

The current wave of tax-collection initiatives sweeping Africa is not a sign of progress; it is a symptom of conceptual captivity. It reflects a governing class trained to believe that development emerges from administrative mimicry rather than material transformation. Until Africa abandons the illusion that it can tax itself into prosperity—and rejects externally imposed fiscal orthodoxies that ignore its structural realities—it will remain trapped in cycles of extraction, austerity, and underdevelopment.

Ethno-corporatism offers a rupture from this cycle. It restores the correct sequence: production without taxation, infrastructure before extraction, economy before governance. Only by reclaiming this logic can Africa chart a genuine path forward—one rooted not in imitation, but in economic truth. Africa needs systems that are honest, grounded, ancestral, and economically coherent. Ethno-corporatism offers this.

Because when governance follows economics—when policies reflect reality, not imitation—societies grow, stabilise, and finally become capable of offering the benefits they once only promised.

The age of mimicry is over. The age of African-authored development should begin.

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