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.