Nepad accepts that colonialism, the Cold War, and "the workings of the international economic system" have contributed to Africa's problems, but the primary responsibility rests with "corruption and economic mismanagement" at home. Few would deny that these have played a significant role, but nowhere in the document on which the plan is based is there any mention of the far more consequential corruption and mismanagement by the nations to whom they are appealing.

Africa's underlying problem, as the continent's leaders acknowledge, is debt. Nepad implicitly accepts the rich world's explanation for this debt: that previous African leaders have frittered away their economic independence through poor planning and personal graft. Nowhere is any context given: that Africa's deficit is merely one component of a vast and growing global debt, affecting consumers and nations in the rich world as well as nations in the poor world. Nowhere is any mention made of the "fractional reserve banking" system which causes it, and which arose as a consequence of corruption and mismanagement in western nations. The system ensures that the only way debts can be discharged is through the issue of more debt.

This problem, as poor nations know but dare not acknowledge, is compounded by the policing system developed by the rich world in 1944. Rather than the self-correcting mechanism proposed by John Maynard Keynes, which forced creditors as well as debtors to discharge the debt, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were introduced as a means of persuading only the debtor nations to act, in the certain knowledge that this couldn't possibly work.