This paper studies the controversies surrounding Salah Bouakouir, the highest-ranking Algerian functionary in the colonial administration, who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 1961. After his death, one of the major throughways in Algiers was named the Boulevard Salah Bouakouir in his honor. Yet in 1992, Mohammed Boudiaf, the short-lived president, decided that the Kabyle planner was a traitor and changed the name of the street to the Boulevard Krim Belkacem, after one of the historical leaders of the Algerian War of Independence. The polemic surrounding Bouakouir continued in 2010, when the Algerian Minister of the Interior, Daho Ould Kablia, claimed that Bouakouir had been killed by the French secret services because he had been providing Algerian nationalists with sensitive information leading up to the Evian Accords. This paper studies scholarly accounts as well as the Algerian media in order to analyze the anxieties that underpin the relationship between official memory and economic development in Algeria. It also investigates Bouakouir’s key role in drafting Constantine Plan – a French developmental program introduced during the war of independence – which made him an ambiguous figure in Algeria’s nationalist pantheon. By analyzing the polemics surrounding his status as a “hero” or “traitor,” this paper uses controversy to interrogate a question that underpins the ongoing process of political legitimation in Algeria: to what extent did organisms and structures inherited from the colonial period influenced the post-colonial state? In other words, by studying the rumors and disagreements concerning Bouakouir, this paper shows how developmental efforts in Algeria continue to serve both as a symbol of nationalist pride as well as a reminder that economic planning has been a historically transnational discipline.