Article from Diplomatika magazine – N°03, By Yasmine Djellal Managing Director Third Culture Comms and Meriem Benzane Founder of OneLineStrategy

The perception of African risk directly influences the cost of financing, the attractiveness of investment and the negotiating capacity of the continent's states and institutions. Through the concept of « Collection premium »Yasmine Djellal and Meriem Benzane question Africa's ability to regain control of its economic narrative and make its data, results and credibility an instrument of economic diplomacy.

Paris, 1951. A young Senegalese doctoral student submits to the Sorbonne a subject of thesis which defends an idea as simple as immense. Africa has a history, and this story begins at home. University doesn't say no. She's worse. For almost ten years, no jury agreed to hear it.

He published his works elsewhere, stood firm, and finally removed his support in 1960, the very year in which 17 colonies became states. His name was Sheikh Anta Diop, and the largest university in West Africa is now named after him.

We tell this story like a victory, and it's one. But the battle he fought did not disappear. She changed ground. Yesterday, Africa was denied the right to tell its own past. Today, it is still elsewhere that the story of Africa is written, in the notes of the agencies, in the columns of the international financial press, in the risk indices compiled far from the markets they claim to measure.

Diop's question to historians now arises for diplomats and finance ministers, and it goes beyond the figures. Who has the power to say what Africa is worth?

Third sovereignty

In the last century, Pan-Africanism won its first battle, that of political sovereignty. Today it delivers the second, economic sovereignty, with an ambition unprecedented since independences. The Continental Free Trade Area marks a single market, the African Trade Fair in Algiers has signed record deals, partnerships are diversifying towards the Gulf, towards Asia, between countries of the South.

Senegal has set its own horizon in Agenda 2050, whose first slogan is precisely sovereignty. Part by piece, the physical infrastructure of African economic autonomy is assembled.

Yet there is a third sovereignty, still to be conquered. Narrative sovereignty refers to the ability of a country, or continent, to make international and local perception coincide with the reality of its trajectory.

Africa's economic narrative, which the world believes is aware of its risks, its institutions and the strength of its signatures, is widely written, evaluated and priced elsewhere by actors who, acting under restraint, primarily cover what is most visible and accessible.

In this game, those who organize their narrative presence have a structural advantage over those who do not. Diop understood it first and foremost. Settlement has not only taken over land and subsoil.

She first imposed her story. His intuition is still waiting for his economic translation. A continent can nationalize its mines and integrate its markets. As long as its credibility is manufactured elsewhere, its economic sovereignty stops where its note begins.

This dependence on evaluations produced elsewhere has a price, and it is quantified. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that less subjective sovereign ratings would save up to $74.5 billion to the African states covered by its study alone, in excess interest expense and in unmobilized funding.

This extra cost deserves a name. Let's call him the collection bonus. It is not a risk premium, calculated on verifiable fundamentals, but a tribute paid to the subjective part of the continent's gaze. Real risks exist, debt, governance, commodity dependence, and none of the following denies them. But where data is missing, perception fills the gaps.

But it remains shaped by old stories and continues to read a continent of fifty-five trajectories across the same general categories. When an African finance minister borrows, his country is not only judged on his accounts. It is also through a century of accumulated stories, condensed in a letter and a sign.

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