Some governments can force *Store to ban whatever they want. Some can't, so they have to resort to banning stores.
Today, right across Africa, governments are studying the possibilities of restricting foreign internet services. Both as a way of controlling the information their populations get to view, but also as a means of addressing high youth unemployment among educated workers by giving their domestic internet firms the room to take root. This is actually an interesting sideshow in the more global tendency towards balkanization. But take my word for it, young startup type guys from Entebbe-Kampala, (and, with AfCFTA, even places like Dar and Nairobi), will be very active trying to press their advantage.
The political side of this shutdown is predictable, but the interesting action is the long game. I think these kinds of shutdowns are dry runs for the sort of internet world African leaders are quietly pressing for in their future.
A headline of "Local President admits focus on internet censorship is driven by personal greed, not economic protectionism?"
I'm from Ghana, a country that's been touching the line of internet censorship from time to time, and I see nothing wrong with their statement.
It's laughably naive to imply that they're censoring outside services to prop up the local tech scene when they can hardly be assed to get kids a proper education without using it as a political bargaining chip.
Like saying they're playing 4d chess when they're not interested in checkers unless it suits them...
You're forgetting that authoritarian governments do not have to address these things by eliminating the root cause. They can just silence the opposition with arrests or execution [0]. Uganda is so famous for this to the point that there is an entire movie [1] about Idi Amin.
If you actually cared about youth unemployment you could address it with simple economic measures first and you would seek funding from western investors, not get rid of them.
Implementing tariffs in an industry that you are never going to be a world leader in is just plain stupid. Ugandan app developers can just develop for the Google and Apple store and get access to a bigger audience instead of restricting themselves to Uganda only.
It only works out in China because their internal market is bigger than EU+USA combined. It could work out for India (unlikely unless they address corruption). Uganda only has 44 million people it just doesn't make sense.
I was not equating blocking the app stores with addressing youth unemployment.
Silencing the opposition didn't quite work for Idi Amin, because the opposition became part if the military which topped him and tge next president.
There are probably some reasonable generalisations that are fair, but sometimes I feel people generalize a bit too much when it comes to Africa.