As democracies struggle with paralysis, centralized states prove that speed, coordination, and discipline may deliver development more effectively than debate.
By Otunba Segun Showunmi
In international policy circles, it is often considered impolite to ask the most important question in global development:
Why is it that when China lifts 800 million people from poverty in four decades, we call it authoritarianism but when the British Empire industrialised through famine, forced labour, and colonial extraction, we called it progress?
The question is not moral but empirical. For all the West’s discomfort, the evidence is difficult to ignore: concentrated authority, when competent and strategically deployed, has proven capable of generating growth at a speed liberal democracies can rarely match. The world’s economic map reflects that reality, even if its rhetoric does not.
The Efficiency Paradox
The central debate is not about values but about results. Which governance model democratic or authoritarian has shown greater capacity to deliver rapid industrialisation, infrastructure, and poverty reduction?
Liberal democracies champion deliberation and inclusion, yet increasingly struggle to convert consensus into action. Their political machinery rewards short-termism; policymaking is constrained by electoral cycles, populist pressures, and media noise. The outcomes are often predictable: stalled infrastructure, incoherent industrial policy, and social frustration.
By contrast, systems of centralised authority in China, Singapore, and South Korea during their developmental years have demonstrated an ability to mobilise capital, coordinate planning, and execute long-term strategies. They are not democratic, but they are decisive. They can act at scale and at speed.
In business, such concentration is celebrated. Corporations rely on clear hierarchies, defined authority, and rapid execution. Yet when governments employ similar structures, the language shifts: efficiency becomes autocracy, discipline becomes control. The double standard is revealing.
Democracy’s Development Dilemma
The liberal democratic model, though still normatively dominant, is struggling to deliver the developmental outcomes that once justified its global prestige. Its promise of freedom and accountability is increasingly undermined by institutional fatigue. Democracies today are louder but less effective. They produce elections, but not direction; expression, but not execution.
The policy paralysis evident across much of the democratic world ageing infrastructure, gridlocked legislatures, and delayed energy transitions contrasts sharply with the technocratic precision of East Asian developmental states. The gap is not simply economic; it is psychological. Citizens accustomed to visible results are losing patience with systems that substitute debate for delivery.
This does not mean authoritarianism is morally superior. It is not. But the dichotomy between “freedom” and “control” is analytically lazy. Many of the most successful developmental states have operated within constrained political environments prioritising competence over pluralism. In these cases, the absence of liberal democracy did not preclude social progress; in fact, it often enabled it.
History’s Inconvenient Truth
The history of modernisation offers an inconvenient lesson: no nation industrialised through procedural democracy alone.
Britain’s rise was built on the enclosure acts, child labour, and imperial exploitation.
The United States’ industrial boom occurred under the monopolistic excesses of the Gilded Age.
South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all now hailed as democratic success stories were authoritarian during their formative developmental decades.
In every case, prosperity preceded political liberalisation. Democracy was the outcome of development, not its engine.
The Global Double Standard
Western analysts often treat authoritarian growth as exceptional or unsustainable, yet the data tell a different story.
China’s per capita GDP has grown more than twenty-fivefold since 1980.
Vietnam’s poverty rate has fallen from over 70 per cent to under 5 per cent.
Even Rwanda, often criticised for its political rigidity, has achieved one of Africa’s highest growth rates and most efficient public service systems.
These outcomes challenge the assumption that democracy is a precondition for prosperity. If the purpose of governance is to improve lives, reduce poverty, and expand opportunity, then the record demands a more pragmatic framework one that evaluates systems not by their electoral form, but by their developmental performance.
A Question of Outcomes
The question, then, is not whether democracy is “good” or “bad,” but whether it remains effective in an era that demands speed, coordination, and strategic foresight.
In a world facing climate urgency, infrastructure deficits, and technological disruption, governance cannot afford permanent debate.
Political systems must be judged by outcomes by their ability to deliver stability, competence, and prosperity at scale.
The ballot box alone cannot light homes or build bridges.
The twenty-first century may therefore belong to states that combine disciplined governance with selective participation systems that prize expertise and continuity as much as they do consent. These are not rejections of democracy, but recalibrations of it: models that blend authority with accountability, direction with feedback, results with legitimacy.
The Hard Choice Ahead
Liberal democracies face a reckoning. Their ideals remain noble, but their institutions increasingly appear unfit for the speed and scale of modern challenges. If they cannot adapt if they cannot deliver tangible prosperity for their citizens they risk ceding both moral and practical ground to systems they have long dismissed as inferior.
History suggests that the pursuit of freedom and the pursuit of progress are not always synchronised.
The challenge before the global order is to reconcile them before the credibility of democracy itself becomes a casualty of its inefficiency.
This piece was inspired by an Oxford Debate at the Oxford Union where my friend Aisha Salis led and won on a global academic environment.
Otunba Segun Showunmi is a thought leader interested in focusing on governance and development in emerging economies.
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