Beyond Panacea: Digital Governance, AI, and the Political Economy of Public Benefit in African Development

This paper examines who benefits from artificial intelligence (AI) governance frameworks in Sub-Saharan Africa and identifies the institutional conditions under which digital governance reforms generate public value rather than enabling elite capture, rent-seeking, and technologically mediated dependency. Drawing on a critical synthesis of peer-reviewed scholarship published between 2020 and 2025 and institutional evidence from major multilateral and practitioner sources, the study integrates four analytical lenses: decolonial and digital-colonial critique, public administration and policy learning, political economy of procurement and contracting, and Ubuntu-informed normative epistemology. The analysis is further anchored in four theoretical frameworks: polycentric governance, rent-seeking political economy, digital colonialism, and institutional dualism, to explain why AI governance in low-capacity states is structurally prone to capture. The study demonstrates that AI governance outcomes depend less on the formal elegance of national strategy documents than on the interaction between state capacity, procurement incentives, data governance, and informal institutions. Where these conditions are unfavorable, AI governance produces an illusion of efficiency: measurable process improvements coexisting with deepening exclusion, opacity, and the redistribution of informational and contractual power toward political elites, donor intermediaries, and international vendors. The paper’s principal conceptual contribution is the AI Governance Outcome Matrix, a two-dimensional diagnostic framework mapping likely governance trajectory across four quadrants defined by state capacity and institutional alignment. The matrix identifies simultaneous reform along both dimensions as the necessary condition for durable movement toward public-value-creating governance. Ubuntu philosophy is engaged as a substantive governance epistemology rather than as rhetorical decoration, providing a normative counter-framework to Western-centric AI ethics models by reconceptualizing data as communal stewardship, algorithmic accountability as collective obligation, and public benefit as relational flourishing. The article concludes with ten actionable recommendations spanning open procurement, infrastructure sequencing, distributed oversight, participatory design, and iterative policy learning, directed at policymakers, development finance institutions, and governance practitioners operating within the 2025-2030 African Union Continental AI Strategy implementation window.