How would you fix Africa?

Most of the states in Africa are not natural and thus are forever prone to civil strife. Some need to be broken up, and others need to be merged together. The less states in Africa for the sake of states, the better. Not saying the continent should be one big nation, but certainly less than the 50 plus currently there.

No, there needs to be more countries in Africa. Splitting them is more effective, as it cuts dwn on civil wars and allows successful regions of one coutnry to succeed on their own.

That logic of yours causes roblems, not solves them.

And which states does this apply to especially, since some people here aren't exactly well-versed on African international politics...

edited 24th May '12 1:07:38 AM by JosefBugman

Nope. Instead of civil wars, it'll be normal wars as they fight over resources.

Africa is in flux specifically because of these artificial borders. Creating more will do nothing but instill chaos. And yes, the bargaining power of these states will vanish and once again they will be chess pieces (as in the cold war).

And while amalgamating like societies together would be costly in the beginning, within a generation, there would be dividends from economies unhindered by strife.

Likewise, while cheap little states would be easy to manage (in a vacuum), dealing with the wellbeing (or there lack of) of the people would mean they would need more money anyway.

Thread Hop:

I wouldn't do anything to fix Africa because I don't think there is anything to fix. It's our job to treat them as equals both in politics and in trade, and it's up to Africans to decide how they want their governments to be run. I don't think it's our job to rescue or fix anything. Decades of selfish aid has done absolutely nothing to help them. We didn't even build roads with the billions we poured in. Yet, in five years of just basic "oh my god they don't care about human rights" trade with China, they've schools/rails/hospitals/stadiums and so on.

edited 6th Sep '11 7:49:05 PM by breadloaf

Precisely: creating union states is just more artificial boundaries. By letting counties secede, people have their way.

Africa can grab trade power through the African Union, or another economic thing, but combining their countries is pointless.

Besides, to jumpstart the African economy you need to encourage small businesses and get people working.

That would work if the African governments had the same kind of ruthless sense that China had—and if many of the countries in Africa had governments.

Also, you, as a Canadian, may not have any specific responsibility to help fix the Third World, but the former (and arguably, still-current...) imperialist powers damn well do...

Well crappy African governments are... unfortunate but I think it problematic if we approach the issue as "We must fix stuff". That's not really our responsibility. We can share in cooperative tasks, we can engage in trade and we can avoid our massive market manipulation in the region. Africa is about the only continent we can even use a lot of peacekeepers but considering how little we deploy, it's rather funny how much we talk about how something we don't do doesn't work (that is, we talk about how peacekeeping fails when we don't deploy any peacekeepers in the first place).

Imperial powers have a sort of historical responsibility for creating most of the mess of today but I think it's that they should be more aware that they should learn to treat others as equals. The main reason Chinese trade is working to help Africans is because they're being treated as equals. That's why, even though the Chinese business practices are very ruthless and uncaring about human rights, it's an improvement. If you tell China, I want 100 schools for giving you oil, that's exactly what they give you. They won't lie/cheat/steal or whatever, they do that. If you tell them, build the schools with local labour or we won't tender the contract, if Chinese businesses think it's worth it, they do exactly that.

The way we operate is that we spend 5 years about "human rights", telling their government to do this and that, employ this fiscal or monetary policy. Forget that ethnic group, support this one. Take a photo op of protecting some random group, while supplying arms to the government to kill another (while at the same time, complain that China sold them some trucks that have camo paint on them). The duplicity of our actions and our obvious continuation of corporate imperialist tactics is my issue.

Wow, well said!

@Erock You presume the unions I speak of would be artificial. You must have forgotten I had said unions between like peoples, the same peoples split by the colonialist powers.

As for "let the region be on its own", most likely that will happen. We're an internet forum, we like to talk. Don't like the topic, don't bother. There are those who actually wish to build toward the future.

Further, no where did I say the UN or foreign nations should do it. I said merely what must be done. Best done by local powers, but the point is, it must be done.

Cape to Cairo!

edited 7th Sep '11 10:21:38 AM by Shichibukai

-ignore-

edited 24th May '12 1:10:19 AM by JosefBugman

Ah yes, who can forget the tolerant regime of King Leopold II.

I'm sorry, but this displays a total lack of understanding of history. Belgium's colonies were frequently considered one of, if not the, most brutal places on earth. When other colonial powers consider you beyond salvation and contemplate a humanitarian war against you, you know you have problems.

The people of the Congo were virtually enslaved. Wives were kidnapped by the state and used as hostages until their husbands could fill their quota of rubber. Young children had their parents killed because only orphans were fit for salvation. For every bullet expended, the soldiers would have to return one right hand or be severely punished. As each soldier could not realistically meet this quota, they were periodically forced to go on 'harvests' across the countryside. Officials were advised to rape and pillage villages to inspire fear and submission in others.

There is nothing redeemable about what Belgium did in Africa. Nothing.

edited 7th Sep '11 3:17:48 PM by Pentadragon

...it's kind of weird to think of little Belgium as a serious violator of human rights. Seems like it's not only size on a map that determines a country's total possible maximum dickery level...

Just look at North Korea, right?

But seriously, I wonder if there's ever been a person who ''actually, really' thought that the size of a country determines something like that about it.

(Rhetorical question; answer is probably yes, as there have been literally millions of crazy people in the world and chances are at least one of them has probably stumbled on almost any illogical notion of geopolitics like that.)

It's less that I think "little countries are harmless" so much as "big countries are more dangerous." Then again, I live in the US, so anything less than the size of one of the mid-level States is basically beneath the average sweep of a map unless it has nukes...

edited 7th Sep '11 3:24:29 PM by USAF713

Yeah, that's a very weird kind of perspective, and when I first saw it online, I was frankly overwhelmed by the surprise of it. I never imagined that there could be adults who didn't know almost anything about countries other than their own or the world in general, though obviously I've met people like that in my own country since that.

I can't imagine how it would come to pass that an adult couldn't point out every continent on a map, or how it could be that someone couldn't name the 5 countries with the highest population in the world

But I know that it does indeed happen.

/derail

edited 7th Sep '11 3:31:36 PM by BestOf

A) The OP of the thread is "given carte blanche etc."

B) If the objective of your policies listed below isn't "fixing" the country, what are you doing it for?

That...sort of contradicts your first few sentences.

How and where would you deploy peacekeeping forces? What kind of mission mandate are they given? Are they hamstrung from hell to breakfast by regulations or essentially given carte blanche? Somewhere in between?

Others answers have been addressing these questions.

Snrk. Chinese treating them as equals. I have a hard time swallowing that.

They merely play for the most money they can get.

To be fair, I don't think any western governments would do this nowdays. Perhaps I am wrong. Western businesses, on the other hand...but such is a free market.

I'll agree with you on the arms supplying, but freely allowing supplies to both sides doesn't strike me as particularly better. China would sell them better weapons if they could, I'm sure. Also, propping up dictators is probably the single biggest source of anti-US sentiment in the world, imo.

As far as corporate tactics, well, again, free market. How much can we regulate what corporations do in other countries?

edited 7th Sep '11 3:34:18 PM by deathjavu

Well, there's a difference between "I don't really care about them because it's not relevant and/or a problem - and they have no reason to care about us either, so..." and "I don't care because I'm too lazy to learn anything."

To tie into topic, this is a really big reason why nothing gets done: too far away to be an issue to most people.

For the record, I knew the first three most populous countries, and I might have guessed Brazil. I would have said that Russia has more people than Indonesia though...

@FF: Well, then you just suppose African countries will merge on their own accord? Why? They're trying hard enough as is.

It's already happening. The East African Community (which is a trade and customs bloc) is shooting for unification of its member states (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda) in the next few years. Those economies are doing well right now and weren't hurt by the global recession. They're in the integration phase right now. Not only that, but there are talks for future expansion (in South Sudan for example) once they've settled everything and have already unified. This union is also a natural one for several reasons, such as a sharing of language (both the colonial English and the local Swahili), culture and ethnicity. Mostly Christian and animist, but all have significant muslim populations. Not dominated by the former colonial power like West Africa, and currently the darling of East Africa flirting with the Chinese and the Indians at the same time.

All I'm saying is that these efforts should be lauded and encouraged.

@ deathjavu

I wouldn't call NAFTA as Canada trying to fix the United States, so I don't see how cooperation and whatnot should be seen as attempting to fix African states. There's no contradiction in what I said.

If we were straight with African nations, they'd be a lot happier to deal with us. The primary reason the Chinese are easier to deal with than are Western businesses is because the Chinese actually enforce the contracts they sign, whereas our "free" market is nothing but government-backed bullying where we have them sign obviously bad deals and then still screw them over and they can't sue us. The Chinese actually do what they say they'll do and that's how they treat them as equals. You can make weird noises all you want but guess what, we're assholes and they're not. I've seen repeated number of journalist articles on the issue where they set out to find how bad China's actions were only to discover that even the staunchest anti-Chinese African workers have to grudgingly admit they're getting paid more and actually receiving infrastructure for their resources.

The best example is Sudan. We all know about Darfur. Does anybody know when Darfur was actually happening? It was during the time period where the Swedes and Canadians were heavily buying their oil, we didn't give half a shit about any of the ethnic cleansing. The Chinese offered them more than zero for the oil and the Sudanese immediately switched to them. They've railways across their main urban areas, hundreds of schools and hospitals. I don't care if you want to say things like "I bet they were build shoddily" or whatever, with us, they got exactly ZERO stuff, so I rather have a school that's a bit rickety than nothing at all. But all day long, we talk about how the "evil Chinese" don't care about Darfur. And it's true, they don't. But neither did we when we were buying their oil. And right now, Canada has like 1 peacekeeper in the region, while China has 300-400. The rest of Europe combined has maybe 10 in there.

So why is peacekeeping failing? You can talk about Ro E. You can talk about "hamstrung by regulation". But when America commits like 1 non-military personnel to the area, Canada commits 1, Europe commits like 10, while the region affected has millions of people... I don't think regulation is your problem.

This is partly why West Africa is the worst of the lot after Somalia. The French policy in their former colonies there, since 1960, has been mostly that of pseudo-colonialism, except without the benefits to the locals that tend to come with actual colonialism.

The Chinese are treating them well and getting dividends for it. Hell, Gaddafi treated them well and they all backed him up in the recent war. You can't bully that kind of support, but you can buy it.