Justice & Law Quote by Steve King

There is an entire development ideology packed into King’s brisk chain of cause-and-effect: constitution, rule of law, capital, electricity. It’s the politics of sequencing, delivered with the confidence of someone who wants the messy realities of state-building to read like a checklist. The intent is clear: reframe material deprivation not as a failure of resources or history, but as a failure of governance. If you want lights on, he suggests, start with paperwork.

The subtext is where it gets sharper. “Capital will come” is treated like a natural force, as if investors are rain clouds that simply need the right legal climate to drift in. That phrasing quietly absolves wealthy countries and corporations of any obligation beyond waiting for “proper” institutions to appear, while also implying that people living without reliable power are, in some sense, living downstream from their own political inadequacy. The line flatters a familiar Western faith: that markets are the reward for moral/legal seriousness.

Context matters because constitutions and rule of law are not neutral technologies; they are contested settlements. Many countries have constitutions on paper and predatory enforcement in practice. Electricity doesn’t “follow” automatically; it follows public spending, technical capacity, stable revenue, and often political choices that cut against pure market logic. King’s rhetoric works because it offers a clean story audiences want to believe: order first, prosperity next. It also works because it turns development into a discipline narrative - behave correctly, and modernity shows up - sidestepping how frequently “rule of law” gets invoked selectively, to protect property more reliably than people.