One must be guided by several precepts when considering community-based development. The first is that if you do not know something, do something. It is only by doing that one really sees what is possible and what is not.

Development objectives must be driven by realism, not sentiment. This means we must have sentiment to guide moral actions, but moral actions manifest in the real world.

Development must have a guiding philosophy – the delivery of public goods. This includes ensuring that the most marginal and remote populations have access to things they would not otherwise be able to access.

The aim of development is not to build a market for public goods; rather, it is to see market mechanisms as a tool to deliver public goods. The obsession with the idea that the market is the solution can work against the key outcome: delivery of public goods.

States that outsource their duties to the market – that is, private and social entrepreneurs – abdicate their responsibility to citizens.

Several weeks ago, I attended a T20 meeting on community connectivity projects and looked at the financial sustainability of these models, as it is the goal of the Sustainable Development Goals that we increase connectivity. Digital connectivity is a right, just like water and electricity, and there is a need to ensure that such connectivity facilitates capabilities, new opportunities, and personal and collective development.

As has been argued here previously, the continent needs a lot of electrification, the best public good States can deliver to citizens, which will not only enhance household income and economic productivity but also ensure wider and cheaper sources of connectivity. Connectivity, in turn, opens the world to ideas, which are the engine of economic growth.

In the last decade or so, the world has moved further towards the idea that basic services and capability provisions must, with time, be market led. This means they must be addressed through the market. And if they cannot be solved by the market the conclusion must be that there is market failure. The premise here is that self-sustaining initiatives must do away with the State.

It depends on how one sees this because, in some cases, it is the case that generous subsidies go to private entrepreneurs, and not to recipients directly. Here, the State steps back from delivering a public good and relies on the ‘ingenuity’ of private entrepreneurs to fix knotty problems. Such ingenuity must be rewarded because of the risks taken in most marginal and difficult-to-break sectors, regions or consumer bases. In the end, the State loses its own ingenuity by abdicating its primordial place in public life.

The entrepreneurs may reap profitable outcomes, but when the subsidy well dries up, they move to the next subsidy trough. It is not that Elon Musk built the environmentally friendly electric vehicle without subsidies – he sought additional support when he ploughed into the US federal government, seeking to bring providence to his firms by cutting regulation, securing more contracts, and directing more subsidies his way.

You subsidise profitability through uncontained market power or ensuring regulations favour your products scaling in new markets. These are favours given by the good State in exchange for no real payback to its coffers.

The most marginal and hard-to-reach members of our society need access to public goods. They should not be treated any differently to those in dense urban environments, where marginal unit costs of delivering water, electricity, public transport and connectivity are lower because of economies of scale.

Non-State social actors, such as philanthropies, civil society organisations and corporate foundations are often asked to step in when the State fails. In so doing, we often do not ask why there is no good State in the first place. By good State, we mean an accountable political authority that sticks to the dictum: ‘Of the people and for the people’. Sometimes, in stepping into the role of the State, we continue the pattern and prevalence of the absence of the State. Even with the good Samaritans being applauded, the idea of the good State never really comes to fruition.

As aid declines and governments service more public and private debt, they lose the ability to service the needs of their people. Then, perhaps, one will see more pirate flags hoisted by Gen Z during street protests – pirate flags are the symbol of the new youth rebellion. In all of this – street voices and messages – the resounding consternation is that question: where is the good State?