Of course with the large number of countries there, that generalization is false. But it is overall close a enough to true.
You can't view Africa with such broad strokes. A West African country with British administrative norms like Nigeria is going to have entirely different outcomes compared to a former Portuguese colony impacted by the Colonial Wars like Mozambique.
Reality is, plenty of African countries do have the right building blocks, and are seeing a significant amount of capital investment from the Gulf States, China, and India because their investors understand how to operate in similar conditions from 10-30 years ago.
Whenever an African country like Nigeria or Kenya does something good, it's positive attributes as masked as part of "Africa" so Western donor organizations can continue to justify spending in basket cases like Rwanda or Mozambique, which is what this article itself is doing.
The Mini-Grid project in the article is a program that private and public sector players in Nigeria worked on, and only succeeded because of Nigeria's administrative apparatus and 10 years of hard work (started back in 2015-16).
The only learning this provides is that
1. You need a relatively competent bureaucratic system in order to actually execute on initiatives
2. You need to have a robust domestic private sector that works closely with the public sector and foreign investors
3. This can only be done through a profit motivation, not a local or international non-profit boondoggle, as that's the only way to unlock the economies of scale needed and incentivize execution
I have no idea how anyone did an analysis of the stability of African nations, and came out of it thinking Nigeria was an example to hold up as some kind of gold standard? It reinforces my belief that we Westerners, as a group, know very little about the African continent.
Absolutely not.
> reinforces my belief that we Westerners, as a group, know very little about the African continent
Or normies like you only listen to BTP Adviser funded submarine articles.
They spent dozens of millions of dollars on PR to make themselves the "Singapore of Africa".
I've documented this on HN previously [0][1].
Most notably, 20-25% of Rwanda's GDP remains Aid driven unlike their closest peer Uganda who now has 15% of GDP derived from ICT and an additional 10% from Finance. Yet Uganda doesn't beat their drum despite also being a personalist dictatorship. Museveni is a dick (and I went to school with some opposition members of his), but I will hand it to his administration - they concentrate on administrative capacity to a certain extent.
> Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system
They are not the most efficient, but the Nigerian Civil Service has drastically reformed over the past 15 years. Daniel "Dan" Roggers has been instrumental in this change [2], specifically by revamping the Nigerian Civil Service in the early 2010s as part of a World Bank bailout (he's now helping Lithuania and other Baltic States).
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38147110
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847829
[2] - https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/people/d/daniel-oliver-ro...
Ethiopia is threating to decend into a another civil war. Military Coups happens someplace every few years. ISIS is doing their terrorism in the north east. Lately Kenya has been one of the better countries in the region, but who knows if that will continue - I wish them luck.
Even in context of Nigeria, all your points miss the important fact that if the government isn't stable and protects you from crime/terrorists all investments are a waste as they will be destroyed.
Over 1 million solar home systems sold, avoiding 2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions
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It doesn't help that Africa is huge and the population density of most of it is damn near zero. Grids of any form make very little sense given those constraints.
An island of density in a sea of empty.
And Nigeria's grid has its own set of issues.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/iwnetim-abate-aims-extract-hydroge...
> In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village.
> Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas.
This is false, like logic wise even if your assumptions were true. You might say that supposed cost right now is fake. If it's actually much higher (accounting for batteries or NatGas) the ridiculous drop in price from panels still means that the cost is falling.
> If a country cannot build a basic power grid, they will remain a village, most likely with widespread poverty.
They are probably not gonna be smelting with arc furnaces in bumbfuck-nowhere, Nigeria; but that's also not happening in some hamlet in the UK. African cities and resource extractions areas already have power grinds, the problem are rural areas.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/rio-tinto-signs-massive-solar-an...
> There is no reason why, in some places, (firm and reliable supply) cannot be achieved via a mix of intermittent renewables, provided that this mix is ‘firmed’ via batteries and other sources.
> “The hurdle here is not technical, it is, … the overall net economic cost of the combined solution. This is materially helped by the continuous downward trend of battery costs, but the incremental cost of the last percentages of firming can indeed prove expensive.”
(Also of relevance, Australia is actually replacing some long distance grid connections with mini solar grids as a cost reduction move, which suggests mini grids are the right option for remote communities)
Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, and Ghana are all building competitive local financial markets and private sector players.
There are plenty of Sub-Saharan states are remain perpetually underdeveloped, but that's ignoring plenty of foundational work happening in plenty of other African states.
The main difference is administrative capacity - some states have relatively decent bureaucracies and administrative norms, others don't.
It's up to individual countries political and economic leadership to decide which track they want to take.
But we also have to be honest and concede that while the others may have usable rule of law to varying degrees, Nigeria has a looong way to go in this regard. Uganda could use a bit of help as well in that dimension.
There are others, such as forced structural adjustments (e.g. privatisation) and currency control (in the case of the French and former West African colonies).
Each African country has a different context, and it does a disservice to laggards and over performers to club everyone as "African".
There are unique administrative hurdles and innovations that African countries have to either spark industries or smother them.
Humans are the same irrespective of our country of origin - the main difference is how public and private institutions manage humans.