Founding President of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Franklin Cudjoe, has identified policy indiscipline and institutional incompetence as major obstacles to building resilient economies across Africa, telling participants at a policy academy in Accra that the continent’s problem is rarely a shortage of good plans but a failure to follow through on them.
Mr Cudjoe made the remarks at the Students and Young Professionals African Liberty Academy (SYPALA) 2026, organised by the IMANI Center for Policy and Education in partnership with the University of Professional Studies, Accra, where The Vaultz News was in attendance.
The event brought together students, young professionals, academics, entrepreneurs and policy thinkers for four days of discussions on governance, economic freedom, development and public policy.
“You Can Build a Resilient Economy Only When…”
Mr Cudjoe told participants that resilience in an economy depends less on the ambition of its policies than on the discipline behind their execution. Summarising the day’s lectures, he said the sessions had converged on a single theme.
“Today’s lectures essentially were saying that you can build a resilient economy only when you have proper alignment with policy planning, the discipline in ensuring that you go through whatever plans you have, and then making sure that everything you do actually synchronises”.
Franklin Cudjoe, Founding President of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education
He framed that alignment, between what governments plan and what they actually execute, as the missing ingredient across much of the continent’s development record, rather than any deficit in the plans themselves.
Mr Cudjoe located the continent’s central development challenge in what he called asymmetry and policy illogicality. “I think the number one problem we have on the continent is what we call asymmetry and policy illogicality,” he said.
He illustrated the point with a direct question about fiscal governance, pointing to the gap between the laws countries pass and the conduct that follows. “How do you pass a law, pass two laws actually, Public Financial Management Act and Fiscal Responsibility Act, two years later, you are in debt?” he asked, naming legislation intended specifically to enforce budgetary discipline.
He argued that the contradiction reflects something deeper than poor luck or external shocks. “That means you don’t even respect the thing that you did,” he said, framing the failure as an institutional unwillingness to be bound by rules governments themselves had created.
Policy Indiscipline as the Core Diagnosis
Mr Cudjoe returned repeatedly to the language of indiscipline rather than design failure. “I think policy indiscipline has been the number one challenge facing that,” he said, before broadening the point to the continent’s policy landscape as a whole. “We have a lot of good policies, right? Plans here and there, but we are not disciplined,” he added.
The framing placed the burden of Africa’s development shortfalls on implementation and follow-through rather than on the technical quality of the plans governments produce, a distinction he treated as the day’s central lesson for the students and young professionals in the room.
Mr Cudjoe extended his diagnosis to the people responsible for carrying policies out, describing what he called institutional incompetence as a second major obstacle. “And I think that’s the theme that ran through today’s lectures: incompetence, institutional incompetence, where people are not competent to perform certain roles,” he said.
He argued that the problem often begins even earlier than execution, with officials who do not fully grasp the policies placed in their hands. “Also because the things they… the policies they are working with, they don’t even understand,” he noted, tying weak implementation directly to gaps in the competence and preparation of those appointed to key positions.
Delivered to an audience of students, young professionals and emerging policy voices, Mr Cudjoe’s remarks doubled as both a diagnosis of the continent’s governance record and an implicit challenge to the room.
His emphasis on discipline over design, and competence over credentials, framed the task facing Africa’s next generation of policymakers less as one of drafting better plans than of building the institutional capacity and follow-through to implement the plans already on the books.
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