WITHDRAWN

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) has emerged as a critical component of development practice, especially in African contexts where donor legitimacy and accountability are upheld by demonstrable quantitative impact.Typically seen as a technical endeavour, M&E is frequently presumed to yield impartial, objective assessments of societal advancement.This paper contests that assumption by proposing a philosophical redefinition of M&E as performative ritualism, a fusion of Judith Butler's theory of performativity and Victor Turner's anthropology of ritual.The analysis employs a critical conceptual methodology and normative critique.Butler's explanation of performativity shows how indicators and reports work not just as reflections but also as performative utterances that have an "impact" through their repeated use in rituals.Turner's ritual theory shows that evaluation cycles baseline, midline, and endline act as rites of passage, turning ambiguity into symbolic closure for funders and policymakers.Post-humanist insights further expand these frameworks, illustrating how dashboards, algorithms, and artificial intelligence tools now operate alongside human evaluators, reinforcing evaluative categories through automated repetition.The findings indicate the cultural and ethical conflict of these activities within African cultures.Western evaluation rituals focus on linearity, abstraction, and bureaucratic closure.In contrast, African communitarian ethics focus on relational accountability, oral testimony, and cyclical processes of responsibility.The difference shows how theatrical imported evaluative systems are; it also shows how to recreate ethics by thinking of evaluation as participatory storytelling and communal debate instead of a bureaucratic audit.The article finds that monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is not a neutral tool, but a symbolic system that enacts legitimacy and authority.Thinking of M&E as performative ritualism brings out its cultural and philosophical sides and makes room for hybrid models that mix computational tools with community-based, relational practices.The paper provides a novel framework for examining development evaluation in the algorithmic era, rooted in African ethical philosophy.