Why Africa is a Hole

[bjre]

Heck no its not a lie its his opinion and its well stated. Just say you disagree with it.

No it has not, because there is no sufficient evidence to support it.

The reason of the poverty of Africa is because of the IMF, World Bank, I have described it in my previously post.

And because of the wars and conflict for "democracy" created by US and its followers.

The US and its Western Allies use military force, whether by an invasion or by creating a coup d’état within the country of interest. AFRICOM’s goal is to eliminate China and other countries influence in the region. Africa’s natural resources is another important element to consider because it includes oil, diamonds, copper, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, bauxite, silver, petroleum, certain woods and tropical fruits. Just to get an idea what’s at stake for US corporate interests, West Africa alone provides about 20 percent of the US supply of hydrocarbons. The US corporate interest in Africa needs natural resources to feed its appetite for profits, a fact that should not be ignored. The US would create conflicts to justify their presence in the resource rich continent by any means including a way to generate a crisis within their targeted area of interest. As Rahm Emanuel, the former Chief of Staff to US President Barack Obama once said “no crisis should go to waste” is a motto that Washington is obviously using.

In the beginning of 2012, the Tuareg Rebellion took place in the northern Mali conflict that involved several wars of independence against the Malian government in the Sahara desert region of Azawad. The Malian government lost its northern region to the Tuareg secessionists as a result. The Tuareg is a faction of nomadic people that live in the northern part of the country along with a local Islamist militant group called the the Ansar Dine. However, the Anser Dine was aligned with Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) an element of Al Qaeda who eventually displaced the Tuareg and imposed Sharia law. Mali’s Timbuktu eventually became a ghost town as the Ansar Dine and the Islamic Maghreb gained power. Ironically, both groups obtained weapons from Libya after the US/NATO led invasion.

The crisis began when the democratically-elected government of Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali was overthrown on in the southern capital on March 21st due to his mismanagement of the crisis. The leader of the military coup was Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo who was trained by the United States on “several occasions” according to a Washington Post article on March 23, 2012. It is obvious that Washington was behind the action undertaken by Sanogo.

Now the United States wants an invasion for “Humanitarian intervention” purposes. But as we all should know “Humanitarian Intervention” only means “Economic Intervention” because the criteria for such an intervention will lead to a vast of wealth including gold mining, oil and agricultural commodities that the US and other Western powers would want to exploit. The Western controlled United Nations (UN) wants sanctions imposed on Northern Mali because of its ties to terrorism. That is the first step of a coming intervention by the West. AFRICOM’s true purpose is to seek and destroy African nations and install puppet regimes that are obedient to Washington. How do they achieve such an outcome? Create the crises and offer the remedy. AFRICOM will be the answer.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-invades-africa-the-resource-war-and-the-invasion-of-mali/5315477

[?Impact]

Africa: 54 separate sovereign states, and 10 foreign controlled territories (Spain-4, France-3, and Britain, Portugal and Italy with 1 each). GDP is only 1/7th that of the US despite having 3 times the population, and I wonder how much of that is siphoned off by foreign interests. Yes, it is a hole but the real question is how did it get that way and what can be done to fix it. Benevolent foreign power sounds like an oxymoron to me, just an excuse to get to the oil and diamonds and such. Certainly Greece and Rome had an influence in Northern Africa many centuries ago, and then it was Turkey's turn. Spain, Portugal, and the UK colonized the coastal areas for a few centuries, and then along with France moved deep into the interior for the first half of the 20th century.

[-TSS-]

Ethiopia is the only real country in Africa. All the rest are more or less artificial creations.

[eyeball]

Ethiopia is the only real country in Africa. All the rest are more or less artificial creations.

Therein lie the roots of most of Africa's problems, the result of goddamn Europeans mucking around in other peoples lands.

[bush_cheney2004]

Africa: 54 separate sovereign states, and 10 foreign controlled territories (Spain-4, France-3, and Britain, Portugal and Italy with 1 each). GDP is only 1/7th that of the US despite having 3 times the population, and I wonder how much of that is siphoned off by foreign interests.

Are you comparing African states to the United States ? Do African states get massive subsidies from African taxpayers ?

[Pateris]

Right now China does not need cheap labour it has billions to enslave.

Having done business in China, there is already a push to find cheaper labour, and automation is starting to happen in China because it is cheaper than paying workers. Recently, a major contract shoe manufacturer in China, who makes products for the major western brands, invested $2B in building a factory in Ethiopia because they could hire workers cheaper than in China and because the factor is closer to markets in Europe.

I am involved in work being done in a few Asian countries, and wages there are rising extremely quickly, particularly for skilled labour. Much like manufacturing moved from America and Japan to India and China, the move now is to lower cost places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Africa.

Technology will also shift some of this back to Western Countries, but without the associated jobs. 3D printing technology will allow bespoke manufacturing closer to the consumer, but the only jobs associated with be programmers and printer maintenance, which are both high skill jobs.

[-TSS-]

Therein lie the roots of most of Africa's problems, the result of goddamn Europeans mucking around in other peoples lands.

Europeans out of North-America then, dont you agree?

[eyeball]

That would be nice but unrealistic

[A.W.]

'Credit talks and bullshit walks' is what everyone here is missing as to why Africa is such a shithole. And credit ain't nothing new,  folks! We are speaking of THOUSANDS of years of basically the same regime of credit distibution since the origins of gold and silver as a commodity currency. Credit's spread from Asia in prehistory entered Africa to facilitate the procurement of slave labor (to the great profit of African chieftains) to places like the Fertile Crescent, the 'cradle of mankind ', and it's been downhill for Africa ever since.

[cannuck]

I/we have been involved with and within Africa for only the last three decades, but I think I am getting a bit more of a realistic picture of why it doesn't work.

When Livingston arrived in Darkest Africa, he didn't find a world of science, technology, education, literature, etc., it was a collection of ancient, tribal cultures (as was the case in much of the Americas).  Again, as with the Americas, there is a LOT of natural resource wealth.   So, since Africa has been in contact with the rest of the world even longer than the Americas, why is it that Western civilizations seem to be more successful than those in both North and sub-Saharan Africa?   The answer is to look to the tribalism that still to this day defines African cultures.  Within those cultures, the idea that one is to succeed by benefiting for one self or one's family at the expense of everyone else is completely backwards from the mainstream of other Western cultures where the welfare of the body politic takes precedence.  

There are no absolutes in this case, but the generalizations are valid.  Yes, people in Africa TALK about raising the overall level of their fellow citizens, but the organization of their tribalistic governance simply pays nothing but lip service to that social conscience.   It all takes a back seat to the mechanism for personal benefit -corruption of financial transactions.

Blaming the West is absolutely BS.   As has been noted: RSA for instance was a far safer and more prosperous place when the Afrikans ruled the land.  Mandella was not the saviour of RSA, he was DEEPLY involved in the corruption, terrorism, racism and tribalism that resulted in it returning to the status quo of corrupt, dangerous, violent, tribal shithole.  Until there has been some kind of radical shift in culture (which obviously MUST come from outside, as it hasn't evolved over the last few hundred thousand years) it will continue to go nowhere.

Edited January 6, 2020 by cannuck

[Argus]

I think if you want to see why Africa is a mess you don't have to look much further than it's food problems. Africans habitually starve. We are always getting stories about this or that country in Africa being on the verge of starvation and needing international help. There's some excuse for that up north, but not down south. Why are they starving? Because Africa mostly has small farms headed by illiterate farmers. They don't have the size of farm or make enough profits to mechanize in even the way North American farmers were a generation or two ago. They don't know how to properly use fertilizer and crop rotation. There's tons of untapped water resources but almost all irrigation has to come from rain because there's nothing else. Which means if the rains don't come there's no crop. And even when they do produce a bumper crop the transportation system throughout Africa is an absolute mess, so much of it rots before getting to markets.

Meanwhile the governments are universally corrupt and largely incompetent, and instead of improving their rail and road networks or training farmers they feed the money into their bank accounts and those of their families and friends.

The best thing which could possibly happen to any African nation today would be if a Western country took it over as a colony.

Edited January 17, 2020 by Argus