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Official capital helps African states endure. Affective capital helps African households survive. Portfolio capital prices Africa without building it. Corporate capital builds, and it has not come.

Africa’s pension funds, insurers and banks hold about US$4 trillion, by the APRM’s estimate, and less than 5 per cent of it is in anything rated. Foreign-currency bonds cannot feed another agency on fees. The neglected work is local-currency debt, where a factory actually borrows.

Unfamiliarity can influence the composition of capital that does. A financier reluctant to assess local customers, suppliers and operating conditions may prefer a transaction secured by offshore revenues or a sovereign guarantee.

Marx is the demanding place to begin, and the least read. In his account capital is not a thing but a social relation between persons, mediated through things. A machine’s steel says nothing about who owns it, who works it and who takes the surplus. Those relations are what the machine means.

The harder question, seventeen years on, is what any money, from any sender, requires of the economy that receives it. Changing the money's supplier does not, by itself, change what the money asks of the economy. Her remedies were never tested against that standard. This paper puts them to it.