Why is Africa still poor?
foreignaffairs.com
foreignaffairs.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s
Note how he says to Mandela - "the assets of the white people - I have worked for my banks, my mines, my businesses, and my farms". The sense of entitlement he has that the mines and farmland of South Africa are "assets of the white people" is incredible. Also, who was working on those farms and down in those mines? Not Koos van den Merwe, I can tell you that.
I believe at sufficiently large scale, i.e. the company's product is the well-being and utility of the population of a country, it doesn't matter whether it's run by the state or a private enterprise - It'll require a huge administrative body to communicate with only a fraction the efficiency of a smaller entity. Big things with lots of moving parts are slow and cumbersome.
I'm sure Apple and Google are feeling this already - having tens of thousands of employees to manage is hard. Now scale it for running a country. I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of optimizations that could be made by eliminating political cruft, but a non-trivial level of complexity would remain.
That said, in some significant ways the companies listed above will be influencing how a population functions by providing the frameworks for communicating with each other. I wonder if it's a path to self-governance by way of facilitating our policing of each-others actions, interactions and morals while regulating the information that we have access to.
Private businesses have all the same challenges with building an empire and expanding scale and scope of what they do. The difference is that they have to do this or cease to be. It's a lot easier to push a private entity to the point of irrelevancy when it falls out of favor with its users. Unfortunately, we don't have that same power with governments. Sure, you can vote but the system is designed to greatly benefit those already in power and skirt direct responsibility, whereas the power a consumer has with his dollar is generally a lot stronger.
Peter Thiel explains it well when talking about the DMV:
> Consider a political analogue using this framework. Say you have to go to the DMV to get your drivers license. In some sense, you, as a voter, control the government, and the DMV is a part of the government. Voters elect government people. Those people appoint other people. Presumably you had some indirect control on who becomes the head DMV bureaucrat.
> But that head bureaucrat isn’t who you talk to after you wait in line. You have to talk to the people in possession: the window clerks and managers who actually run the DMV. They are the people who possess the ability to help you or not. You can tell them they suck. You can remind them that, under the theory of representative government, you are their boss. But that may not work very well. There is a misalignment between control and possession. It may not be a catastrophic one, but it is representative. Misalignment often happens when dealing with bureaucrats in government or, say, senior managers in the business world.
Right, I understand the principal. Though I'd argue that it's not that black and white - the market is not a natural force like the waves in an ocean. Companies seek initial investment for growth, which can boil down to how strong your PowerPoint or people skills are, not on the strength of your ability to produce a decent product or service. The strength of your shares are often tied to public perception and professional market manipulation. The public's perception of the product itself often has little to do with reality but how well you've manipulated them into believing you add value to a (sometimes non-existent) void. And when you buy a product you can't see the organizational bickering between product/service divisions and executives - you don't see the sometimes horrendous failure rate because QA has hopefully pulled them off the line before they reach stores.
Businesses don't need to open the kimono for all to see how, despite being somewhat dysfunctional and disorganized, they can still churn out a product. Businesses are made up of people, like governments, and so there are many parallels.
whereas the power a consumer has with his dollar is generally a lot stronger
In principal, yes. Though when we examine consumer choice let's look at, say, the mobile industry - despite starting with many different platforms and manufacturers, the market has naturally gravitated towards two primary platform choices and two primary hardware manufacturers. Humans are quite good at condensing complex options into binary choices.
Precisely, but not because of the second-half of your sentence. From my experience the problem lies in the revolutionary governments not being voted out: what has typically happened is the governments continue to fight the revolutionary war (which has long-since ended) instead of trying to fix the problems that the oppression of the past created. In some instances the government and governmental systems also become completely fixated on, in complete truth, getting revenge - this is especially true in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
One specific example (which is a very touchy subject). South Africa currently lacks electrical power production capacity: homes and businesses can expect up to 8 hours of blackout per week. The electricity utility company made the government aware of this issue circa 2005, at which point the power grid was nearing capacity. This was (and continues to be) because little-to-no capacity upgrades occurred. Instead the government was focusing on ending apartheid: even though that era had ended. It is this kind of focus on the past (instead of the future) that is driving portions of the continent into the ground.
I don't think it's entirely the fault of all of these governments either: they were born out of strife and it's natural that they would continue to cause strife. What should have happened is them being voted out: the problem there is that (due to apartheid and colonization) people were not educated enough to realize the change that needed to occur. The particularly villainous governments, being power hungry and revengeful, would also bribe the impoverished (with food) to vote for them or outright use violence and fear (Zimbabwe). Education remains a sorry story and it's thought that this is purposeful. In South Africa there is some hope, as I do believe Madiba did as much as he could to educate the people. This completely ceased when he stepped down, though. South Africa had so much potential during his reign.
A smaller, but still significant issue, is that Africa is being looted by the rest of the world. E.g. Anglo-Platinum: South Africa exports raw platinum only to re-import the refined product at a higher price. Building our own refineries is a blue sky dream because Anglo-Platinum would pull out, and, we don't have enough electricity to run such facilities. Many of our raw materials share this fate.
Keep in mind that this is not a universal result in Africa. I hear that Botswana is doing pretty well. This an opinion after living here for 28 years - so I may be somewhat jaded (although you may still find an insider opinion interesting), the truth may be out of grasp for many of us. I can agree with much of what is said in the article. Most assuredly Africa is a very complex place, which would lead to drastically varying opinions about it (especially for those living in it).
There's of course not going to be one reason why the continent as a whole is undeveloped.
Take the argument for example: "Scholars such as the economist William Easterly, for example, have argued that even now, the effects of the African slave trade can be measured on the continent, with areas that experienced intensive slaving still showing greater instability, a lack of social trust, and lower growth."
The slave trade undoubtedly had a long-term negative impact on Africa. But the slave trade itself was an indigenous African institution where intergroup conflict led to the capture of people from competing groups. The Atlantic slave trade just created an export market for people who might have just simply been killed otherwise, and the influx of guns and trade goods for slaves led to the formation of states that were more dependent on warfare and the slave economy, such as Dahomey. That's a combination of internal and external factors yielding a destructive system. But it also means the Congo was a place of intense intergroup conflict long before the Second Congo War.
It's a pretty great article for pointing out how internal factors (conflict, lack of political legitimacy, &c.) allow external actors like profiteering corporations to support bad governance in Africa.
But it's important to remember that a lot of progress and economic development HAS been made in Africa, especially in recent years. There has been lots of economic growth worldwide at the low end of the economic scale. And if extractive multinationals propping up corrupt local collaborators amounts to cover colonialism, well at least that's not overt colonialism.