Africa Is Rich — So Why Are We Poor?
Africa is topping the charts in the wrong way: richest continent in resources, poorest in living standards. Gold in the ground, oil in the soil, cocoa in the farms . But go check the GDP per capita, and you’ll wonder if we’re living on the same land we read about in history books. The truth is simple and bitter: the system was built for extraction, not development. Colonizers designed railways, ports, and trade routes to take things out of Africa. After independence, we kept the same design. Today, cocoa leaves Ghana for a few hundred dollars a tonne, comes back as chocolate for thousands. Oil leaves Nigeria raw, returns as imported fuel at triple the price. The issue here is not lack of capacity. It’s politics. Weak governance. Corruption. Bad deals with multinationals. Leaders who get personal gain from contracts that sell out their people. Debt that keeps our economies tied to policies favoring raw exports. Markets so fragmented that it’s easier to export cocoa to Europe tha...
