Africa has been scaled poorly on every western map for as long as I can remember. It's true size is understated, people forget how large it actually is. People also like to lump it all together and then forget how many DIFFERENT ethnic groups reside on that landmass.
I am posting from my phone so pardon how these links may appear without code. I will edit when I get near a laptop later on.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/daily...11/cartography
People forget that aside from the high population skews that African cities give the continent is largely still empty. 800 million people hardly fill up half of the land mass and when you start talking infrastructure and connectivity the realities do coast quickly start to dominate. Africa is nearly double the size of Russia, nearly three times the size of Canada, yet nobody faults Canada for being balkish on infrastructure construction over it's vast land. We only recently developed a national twin lanes highway and to my knowledge is still might not be complete from coast to coast as of yet. Canada's rail lines have grown inferior and it's expensive to fly across Canada for many reasons aside from simply distance. All these issues we face here African nations face also as they are increasingly more large then they need to be realistically. The costs of re-forming already laid infrastructure which connected artificial trade and commercial points that were of efficiency to colonialism and not to actually classic and historical trade patterns of the continent have staggering costs to take on. One country may have the means, but next door the other country might have other issues more urgent then seeking to re-align a rail road or super-highway. Again, look at Canada which took nearly 60 years to have a twin-lanend national highway, when America built theres in 10 years. Canada still has no coast to coast energy pipe-line either, most of the hurdles to those projects has been politics and costs.
That leads to my next point is the bogus and non-functional political boundaries present in Africa. The 54 nations that make up Africa have very little actual merit. The land mass is a complex grouping of hundreds of different ethnic groups. The small sizes of nations such Rwanda mirror the real size of African-first-nations in respect to their natural and historical homelands. We don't fault Europe for drawing blood for 300 years to establish these borders, so why the ignorance towards Africa when it has attempted to do the same post colonialism? For my homeland of Nigeria for exams you have a fractured nation of Christians and Muslims that should at the very least be two nations. But even from that even smaller nations exist either that "simple" two way part.
If you were to have a real "nation" map based in the different ethnicities present in Africa it would look something like this:
This would alone already balloon and likely double If not triple the 143 countries we have present in the globe today. Also, if you think off the ramifications of what this would have in global institutions such as the United Nations, among others it becomes staggering.
It's hard to run a model of governance with this type of set up unless you are set up in a staunch Stateist model in India, or are slightly or heavily totalitarian as we see with China. People
Can marvel at India but it's model has kept it back 50 years from where it should be as the rigid state model within the framework of democracy has slowed everything down in that country to molasses. So saying Africa just needs "democracy and less corruption" is true but a small and nieve fix. It would just be India but with more chaos, which is really what it is today for the most part (India is still rampant with corruption). The Chinese model would no work on the scale and scope of the land mass either. The best system that would work for complex Africa would be a frame work of autonomous ethnic nations either the larger framework of a institutional and economic bloc; I.e the EU model. Where infrastructure and development can be centrally funded while still having nation states take on local challenges. This was the course of action present in Africa when the African Union was taking serious steps towards providing fiscal weight to the union with a currency and development fund.
If this ever sees the day of light then overnight you shift the most powerful bloc of countries to the West, to Africa, almost overnight. It's all competition here and for the West that has little prospects of resources, declining birth rates, energy source issues, environmental issues, etc it would not even be close to the upward potential Africa sits on with tens of trillions in resources and wealth beneath their feet. For Europe their greatest fear is that Africa rises up and takes things personal to take revenge on a hundred plus years of torment by shafting them economically just as they did to Africa. Shafting them back for doing such things as overcharging obscene amounts for Africa to use EuroSat satellite wave bands until Africa developed it's own.
More on this, as EuroSat was a hustle mainly ran by France that charged African nations XX% up-charges of usage fees to maintain Africans vast mobile/cellular networks. It was $500 million a year being dumped into Europe for this until the African Development Bank teamed up with prominent African leadership and help spearhead RASCOM which implemented it's own satellite program to by-pass the hustle that Europe was imposing on them. RASCOM cost the African continent a one time payment of $400 million and as a result has stabilized the growth of the largest cellular network on the globe. China as Russia now have open hands in sharing technology with Africa and this is the turning point where the stars will slowly start to align.
To isolate Europe has been European greatest fear and they have done all they can to hope that Africa remains the chaos that it currently sits in.
Lastly, to the European kids in Africa. Yes. You see countries like Angola with its Portuguese language base and 7-10%+ in GDP growth per year as very lucrative. Many Portuguese youth are fleeing the depressed homeland to go chase economic opportunities in Angola and Brazil. Many Germans youth can be found in Nigeria working for engineering firms doing projects there.
This is your "third world" Africa:
Luanda, Angola is one the fast developing cities as one of the most priciest cities on the globe. Africa is more then squalor and chaos. It has a lot away to go but it is simply ignorance that exists in the West on many topics related to the continent.
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