How would you fix Africa?

edited 24th May '12 1:05:35 AM by JosefBugman

Which country in Africa doesn't?

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

-ignore-

edited 24th May '12 1:10:10 AM by JosefBugman

Stil, Africa is not a good place to live.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

What about Somalialand? they had free elections and a very peaceful transfer of power.

Dutch Lesbian

It's still pretty inhospitable land.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

-ignore-

edited 24th May '12 1:10:29 AM by JosefBugman

You did a class on this? That explains.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

It's worth remembering, that Africa isn't just grass huts and war-torn cities. Many countries have highly developed cities, with an upper class that kinda likes to pretend they're not a part of the continent. Which is admitedly a part of the problem. The ruling elite try so hard to get the superficial luxuries of the North *

, and think that if the country has internet in the big cities, the wealth trickles down to the sticks.

Somalia is actually really interesting.

Somaliland is basically doing OK, but unfortunately isn't representative of the other half of the country, which is mostly controlled by the ICU (Islamic Courts Union,) a militant Islamist organisation that wants to impose Sharia law in all its stone-age glory (stone-age despite that it was invented much later).

In addition to Somaliland, there's Puntland, which no one recognises (not to imply that other countries recognise Somaliland, either - they don't.) Puntland, if I recall correctly, is also doing fairly OK, though not as well as Somaliland.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

"Highly developed" is pushing it. Their cities now aren't very well off.

edited 5th Sep '11 3:38:26 PM by Erock

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

^ Yeah. Outside Cape Town and the Sahara countries you are really hard pressed to find a "modern" city in Africa.

Johannesburg and Pretoria don't look too shabby.

Granted, both of those are also in South Africa, but it would bad form to single out one city from the country as the only "modern" city there at the expense of more important ones.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

...so, South Africa is only a peg below Mexico?

That actually sounds pretty good, by African standards...

I am now known as Flyboy.

The way I read that post, a peg better than Mexico. Less armaments for the gangs, natch.

Personally? I'd hire people that presumably have better ideas than me, people who can demonstrate a clear knowledge of the various situations there and devise plans to make Africa better.

It may sound like a cop out, but part of being a smart leader is knowing when you don't know enough (there's no way one person could know enough about all of Africa, by themselves), and finding people who do.

Relieving any debt sounds like an obvious, fairly simple fix, as does farming for sustenance in the locations with the best soil.

edited 5th Sep '11 5:03:38 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I meant it's a peg below in terms of comparative severity of suck-ish-ness. It was, I admit, an awkward way to phrase it.

I think that is the clearest difference between a good leader and a great leader.

I am now known as Flyboy.

Gabon doesn't appear in the news that often: That's because by African standards, it's stable and quite civilized. IIRC, there are still some violent groups, but not particularly remarkable: Standard guerrillas.

It's one of the few countries in Africa that don't persecute homosexuals, for starters: Presumably the Islamists and the Dominionists haven't brainwashed the populace yet. Their GDP per capita doesn't suck completely, they got oil, and they're no more corrupt than the average Banana Republic.

edited 5th Sep '11 6:49:17 PM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

I wouldn't endorse the standard that countries that fail to appear on the news often are problem-free or have fewer crises than ones that do make headlines. There are many factors that impact the attention that a crisis gets from media, the most notable one being time.

Let's imagine that Libya, instead of reaching a reasonably high Human Development Index and many (but not all) of the things that that implies, had been a total hell hole throughout Gaddafi's regime.

In the early 70s, then, there would've been an abundance of headlines, articles, interviews and other features in all kinds of media regarding social injustice, persecution, internal conflict, famine and disease.

But if these crises continued throughout the 80s and 90s, the press wouldn't have made much noise about it because it's not new. It's not enough that an event is current; it has to be new to attract the attention of international media.

In fact, current matters so little that anniversaries of major past events are prominently featured almost constantly, at the expense of news that are actually current.

There probably are plenty of countries all over Africa that are undergoing crises that have lasted for a long time that don't make the headlines unless something major happens or there happens to be a slow day at a major international newspaper's office, at which point they'll look into long-standing issues on which they've probably had analysis and supplemental material waiting for a while to fill the paper on just such an occasion.

So suddenly you get "10 000 child soldiers currently engaged in conflict in the jungles of West-Central Africa" (I invented that story just now, and sincerely hope that the figure I gave there has nothing to do with reality,) even though just 3 years ago, there were 15 000, and they're the descendants of the child soldiers of the 1990s, who in turn were preceded by their fathers, the child soldiers of the 1970s.

And if you've only been reading the papers for a decade, you wouldn't know squat about it.

edited 5th Sep '11 7:09:17 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Do you have any knowledge of how they could be a model, Savage? I.e. why they didn't suck when everyone else did?

Best Of, that was mostly intended as a half-joking prod at the media, not an honest way of measuring such things...

I am now known as Flyboy.

Well, their situatio is hard to reproduce: They got oil and a long string of populist leaders who were comparatively quite into spreadin' the wealth around. They're less fundie than those in the surrounding countries.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

South Africa is a poor example because of its stark economic inequality. Most of the wealth is still in the hands of whites, which means it was probably originally imported. Imported wealth does very little good for the rest of the continent.

Anyone mention Namibia yet? I only glimpsed it in a documentary, but it looked fairly developed and stable. Then again, I suspect it has similar problems as South Africa in regards to inequality.

As for how to "fix" Africa, I would say priority #1 is stopping the wars. It CAN be done, even without foreign intervention. Look at Liberia, which suffered from corrupt rulers and civil war for decades. Finally, a group of (mostly) Liberian women decided they had had enough and staged nonviolent protests to pressure the warring factions to come to a peace agreement. Amazingly, it worked, the war ended, and the very first African female head of state was elected shortly afterward.

It won't automatically fix Liberia's economic problems, but having a good, educated, non-corrupt leader who cares about the progress of the country is an excellent start.

Economic integration would be a start, once the violence is over with. Start with states that already like each other, then move on to neutral states. Do like East Africa is doing and eventually merge the markets...then the political structures...

No. Africa doesn't need that sort of integration, it needs strong national independence.

edited 6th Sep '11 5:39:50 PM by Erock

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

^ After a swift kick in the ass.

Well maybe.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.