What's stopping progress in Africa!

I can’t speak for every country or community in Africa and obviously my perspective isn’t a general one, I’m going to give my point of view to what might be the biggest obstacles to progress. Africa is infamous for poverty and the lowest development in the world, we’ve been here for as long as everybody else and yet it seems we can’t match the pace of others, why is that? There aren’t many things that all countries in Africa share in common other than poverty, even the most developed countries in Africa still have a high level of poverty. How is that possible that so many countries on the same continent share the same fate? How come the level of poverty in Africa is persistently high even in a modern society where we are making rockets to go to the moon. Is it that we don’t have resources in Africa? or maybe we just don’t know how to make use of them? How come people are dying of hunger even in countries with the most food on planet earth.

There is another thing that all countries in Africa have in common, and that's “the Scramble for Africa”. I’m no historian, so I won’t go in depth, but I believe that the persistent poverty in Africa is due to what happened back then and the lingering consequences of that.

Competence & Literacy

Not being from Africa you may feel like there are just illiterates and incompetent persons in Africa and thats why there hasn’t been much progress towards development, you may look at the statistics and the low education levels to judge African countries as being mismanaged but you would be wrong. Africa is by no means incompetent, as a matter of fact, its blessed with countless very intelligent persons I just don’t have the patience to list here, I’ll just drop two names (Barack Obama, Elon Musk). Africans are humans like everyone else in the world, we can learn, we can grow and we can excel as well. The reason why the level of illiteracy in Africa is so high is just because of the lack of decentralization, most african nations are made up of countless tribes which all had to be self reliant and organize a hierachy by themselves. With the advent of technology, its difficult to break the ancient traditions and rules people have been operating by for millenials. To put it in simple terms, there are so many tribes in Africa who have been independent for so long that they don’t see the value in working together and couple with that even when tribes decide to cooperate, there is always a fight for power. These tribes usually had to fight against each other to survive, they lived apart and interacted very rarely with each other, in a modern society where cooperation is more valuable, these tribes still have a hard time putting their differences aside and coming together for the greater good. Thats why elections are always contentious, thats why certain parts of the country might be way more developed than others. Even though there are political leaders, there are certain areas which are governed by traditional leaders who don’t even answer to the president.

Political Issues

The whole political environment is still something very new in Africa, I may venture to even say that 90% of politicians haven’t received any formal training in politics. Basically, any person who just feels like becoming a politician can just take the stage and advocate the vision of the group. What's crazy about this is that even a person who didn’t receive any education at all can just become a politician and aim for the presidency, its literally insane. A person who doesn’t even know how to count to 100 could find himself leading an entire nation. Its for such reasons why the political atmosphere in Africa is always plagued with violence and fighting, people don’t know what else to do to get the populations' attention. You may get on TV and advocate for even the most visionary transformational plan for your country, but everyone would just be interested in which tribe you are from. Much of the political issues slowing down development stem from just tribal differences and preferences, even when its more logical to do something, most politicians give into their emotions and the emotions of their “brothers” from the same tribe in disfavor of the greater good of the whole country.

Individualism

There are topics which bring us all together, but for the most part, Africans are individualistic. As long as it works for you, then you don’t really care about the person who comes afterwards. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t hate each other or actively try to hurt ourselves, but it would be difficult for you to find people here to hold the door for you or let you cut the line in front of them. We all try to get our way as fast as we can and as long as the situation of the next person doesn’t impact us then all is good. It's this mentality which is really slowing the progress of Africa as a whole, the fact that it's so hard to do things just for the greater good but instead just caring about what happens to you and your family. When certain persons are blessed either with a good job or even a position of power, they tend to exploit that privilege best they can even at the detriment of an entire community. Its important to mention that not everybody is like this and there are people who actively combat this mentality.

We are all Poor

Its difficult to care about another person when you don’t have anything first, for the most part we are all poor. Its easier to give a piece of bread to your neighbor when you are certain of having more the next day but when you aren’t even certain of making it through another week then that becomes really difficult. We do help each other from time to time but for the most part, its very difficult for us to help each other because we all are living below the average. There are a few wealthy persons here and there but the trauma of poverty has left a bitter taste in their mouths and helping others is a sure way of ending up poor again, so they don’t want that. The fact that poverty is so widespread is what slows down development in Africa, we are actively combating poverty and there are many nations in Africa doing a great job at that. We need to get to a level where poverty will no longer be so widespread.

Crab Mentality

This is the act of dragging down those who want to succeed, to an extent I really understand this mentality. When you have nothing and you can barely get by each day, its a hard pill to swallow seeing a person like you make it through that same difficulty and come out a success. The person’s success won’t help you in anyway so you decide to bring down the person to keep you all at the same level. The problem with this mentality is that the crabs stuck in the bucket don’t think the other crab going out might throw them a rope. All the people successful today are actually creating the pathway for many more to be successful, they are showing to others that its possible and this is how to do it, pulling down people would just stop that path from being constructed. Most Aficans I’ve met always have a deep love and desire to give back to their community once they make it out, but its difficult to do when even the people you want to help are the ones who try to take you down.

No accountability

Democracy was built on a foundation of accountability to the people, whenever leaders are elected in a democratic system, they have an obligation to the people, they must meet their needs and give reports to them. The way the population gets to object to leaders they don’t like is through elections and protest and unfortunately corrupt leaders have understood these loopholes, so they make it impossible for the population to protest and rig elections. Now they don’t have to be accountable to anyone, no matter how good or bad they perform, there is nobody to stop them. Thats why you have presidents in Africa staying in power till death, very little development in certain areas and so much divide in the population, who is going to stop them, who is going to remove them? nobody. In their minds they feel like they are doing everything right and that their decisions are unquestionable so they impose their will on the people and its always a civil war to get them out of office. I believe democracy is a good system but does it really work in Africa?

Undirected Energy

The saddest part of this is the fact that some people think that Africans are lazy, thats just insane to think. You’ve got certain Africans working 7/7days for $5 per week and yet you have some people in the world saying $15/hr is small. Before you call an African lazy, you should trying working a job of $20/month then we can talk about it. Africans just have an undirected energy, because there supposedly isn’t any money in most countries, there are no jobs so many Africans stay idle with nothing to do, even though they are burning with energy to work and give it their best, very often the government can’t afford to recruit everybody, this translates to so many youths out in the streets and so many persons unemployed. If all this energy could be directed towards large scale development and innovation then Africa would have been developed long ago. I would say some African countries (if not most) aren’t Capitalist, money isn’t what makes the rules but rather so much power is packed into some individuals and they get to make decisions based on how they can secure their political futures. When companies come into Africa, they have to pander to these political figures and beg for their favor, sometimes they tend to make things just so difficult because they have an incentive not to help those companies. How else would you justify the absence of very big international companies and franchises from African countries? don’t tell me African’s can’t afford to pay for their services!

There are many more reasons stopping the progress of development in Africa, even the ones listed here are more complicated than just the few words I used but I think here are the major ones. You’d notice that there isn’t “illiteracy” in this list and thats because African countries already have competent persons to foster development in their countries to any possible scale and even if that weren’t enough, international cooperation is only getting better.

Thanks for reading!

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