In Cotonou, on March 21st, there was something almost counterintuitive in this packed Congress Palace. Presenting his society project for the upcoming presidential election on April 12th, Romuald Wadagni, the man of great balances, the minister who spent a decade talking about debt, sovereign signature, budget credibility, tax reforms, and fiscal discipline, chose not to focus on finance and debt.
Or rather, to only talk about it indirectly. The finance minister, crowned for the first time as the best African Finance Minister by Financial Afrik in 2018, way before the IMF and the World Bank followed the trend, places health and education at the center of his society project. As if the time had come, after financial orthodoxy, investment in infrastructure, to emphasize the chapter of dividends. The society project of the duo Romuald Wadagni-Mariam Chabi Talata (First Vice President of Benin) is, in our opinion, in a social-liberal orientation that reaffirms the power of the State, the need for a clean economic framework, guaranteeing healthy competition and the development of the private sector with the supreme goal of improving the daily lives of Beninese people. “Prosperity is only worth it if it comes down from aggregates to existences, from macroeconomic tables to the classroom, the health center, the electricity connection, the rural road, the modern market,” explains this Beninese banker who believes that Wadagni’s programmatic offer is neither liberal nor social but rather “pragmatic.”
Trickle-down after restoration
The guiding thread of Wadagni’s candidacy is clear: to succeed the restoration period with a period of trickle-down. The term, obviously, is not neutral. The so-called “trickle-down” theory does not have a single father in the strict sense. It comes from an old liberal genealogy, from Jean-Baptiste Say and his confidence in the dynamics of production to the modern formulations of supply-side economics popularized, much later, by American Reaganomics. But the expression itself is often more polemical than doctrinal: it designates the idea that a well-started growth, once the investment engines are unleashed, ends up spreading its benefits throughout the rest of the social body. Wadagni, on the other hand, seems to want to propose a less doctrinal, more concrete version: trickle-down, yes, but managed, territorialized, instrumented.
In essence, his reasoning can be summed up in one sentence: a decade has been spent putting the State back on its feet; the next one must serve to make this recovery palpable.
The numbers, from this perspective, already tell a transformation. Between 2015 and 2025, the income per capita has increased from less than 600,000 FCFA to over 900,000 FCFA, which largely explains the country’s position in the category of middle-income economies. Economists close to the candidate speak of a movement combining both a gradual take-off of average wealth and an expansion of the national economic base. In the same interval, growth has gone from 1.8% in 2025 to 8% in 2025. In economic terms, Benin has moved from a growth of inertia to an expansion regime. The national budget has more than tripled, exceeding 3,500 billion FCFA: a budgetary translation of a State that has regained the ability not only to collect taxes but also to have ambition.
In other words, Wadagni comes before the country with a simple argument: there is now something to redistribute, not in the sense of assistance, but structurally. The reconstructed public wealth can become collective capacity.
This financial order produces a new grammar. Budget deficit reduced to 2.8% of GDP, debt contained at 53.2%, well below the UEMOA community ceiling, public revenues increased from 745.7 billion FCFA to 2,257.8 billion. These are the markers of administrative sovereignty and leeway to allow the country to access the international financial market under relatively comfortable conditions compared to peers (countries rated in the same category). Benin, in short, no longer completely suffers from its finances: it makes them a lever for economic and social transformation. The focus is therefore on deliverables.
In health and social protection, the Beninese State has moved from a logic of occasional relief to a logic of social architecture. The ARCH project, by extending health coverage to the most vulnerable, is part of the idea of human capital that must be protected as a national asset. Productive social safety nets, which reach nearly a million Beninese, reflect another conviction: vulnerability is not only treated through transfers, but through capacity. As for the SWEDD program, with over 500,000 empowered women and young girls, it establishes a simple but decisive truth in the landscape: in African economies, the female issue is primarily a question of general productivity.
Education also becomes the place of incarnation of trickle-down. Success rates in the CEP, BEPC, and baccalaureate exams have respectively jumped from 42% to 89%, from 16% to 77%, and from 30% to 73%.
Behind these percentages, one must read more than just administrative improvement: the return of a republican promise. The construction of 9,000 classrooms, the recruitment of over 37,000 teachers, the extension of school canteens to 1.3 million students outline an infrastructure for social mobility. In clear terms, if macroeconomics has given breathing space to the State, it is so that the State can give children a chance.
The same narrative can be seen in agriculture. The quadrupling of irrigated areas, increased to over 26,000 hectares, signals the transition from a climate-dependent agriculture to a controlled agriculture. The doubling of rice production and the tripling of soybean production indicate entry into an intensification economy. The rank of the top African cotton producer confers a mass advantage. Here again, the numbers are not bare: they tell of a change in productive model.
The same story is read in the industry. The GDIZ, with over 20,000 jobs created in less than three years, is not just a zone; it is a bet on the rise of value chains. Benin no longer intends only to export raw materials or capture transit rents; it seeks to transform, assemble, package, industrialize. This is a very concrete way of giving a productive backbone to trickle-down.
Prerequisites for takeoff
Infrastructure, finally, plays the role that Rostow would have called the “prerequisites for takeoff.” Three thousand kilometers of paved roads, 77 connected communes, an electricity access rate increased from 30% to 61%, 633 new electrified localities, over 100,000 streetlights installed: this is not decoration, it is circulation. Circulation of goods, people, services, opportunities. Despite the popular expression “you can’t eat the road,” development is never anything other than a gradual reduction of distances, a reduction of logistical costs for access to a good or service at the lowest possible price.
And here is perhaps the most interesting part of the project: its territorialization. With the perspective of six territorial development poles, each with its regional agency, Wadagnism outlines an economic geography of trickle-down. Will it succeed in decongesting Cotonou? The experience of development policies shows that decentralization requires connectivity, the distribution of basic infrastructure throughout the territory, and the territoriality of opportunities. In short, substituting the passive expectation of a cascade effect with a mesh engineering.
This is where the candidate is most awaited by Benin and, we would say, by all of Africa in search of its model of administrative and economic decentralization instead of the post-colonial State model that has led to imbalances, rural exodus, and migratory flows.
Certainly, Wadagni is not the candidate of romantic rupture, nor that of populist and electoralist redistribution. The minister acclaimed by global financial markets and donors (of which he is the de facto candidate, despite himself) presents himself as the man of a second generation of reforms: after order, accessibility; after credibility, capillarity; after the restored State, the State that distributes access.
If elected, the successor to the pragmatic Patrice Talon will have the task of demonstrating that a disciplined market, a modernized administration, and a coherent investment strategy can produce something other than flattering curves – namely, a denser, better-equipped, more mobile society.
In this, Romuald Wadagni has the opportunity to continue a program that is already 10 years mature. His strength lies in finding the ideal position of the cursor between the State and the market for a fruitful tension. A regulated market produces wealth, the State directs it, and society reaps the effects. A classic ambition, certainly. But in our region, it is already a program.
In essence, Wadagni’s bet is clear: to bring macroeconomics down from the realm of technocrats to the households. To give a human face to budget discipline. And to convince that, in the coming Benin, growth will no longer be just a number, but an experience to be lived daily in the streets and in the pockets.
