Afrika is not poor, it is terribly managed | Hacker News Reader

Afrika is not poor, it is terribly managed

iafrikan.com

48 pointsiafrikan28 comments

I too would like to see Africa talked about more on a country by country basis instead of as an amorphous continent, its such an odd standard reserved exclusively for Africa.

There are a lot of similarities between many country’s circumstances but there are a lot of nuanced differences too, with many on separate, interesting economic paths to prosperity.

Its just such a large place.

This +10 (if I could).

Africa has ~3 times the land area of Europe (and that's measuring Europe all the way east to the Ural Mountains), ~60 different countries, ~1,250 languages, and ~1 1/4 billion people. Unless you're a geologist talking about continental drift, stuffing all of Africa into one pigeonhole is extremely misleading.

The blob of land from Guatemala to Tierra del Fuego is treated pretty amorphously in the US media too. I guess that's not as big a deal because there are mostly only two languages involved, and it doesn't have the elephant-in-the-room baggage that Africa does.

Overall it seems like a well reasoned article.

But as a side note, I have often seen people say something like "despite being blessed with natural resources" when talking about poor nations. While it feels reasonable to think that a nation with lots of natural resources should be relatively well off, it's not.

Or rather, it is 19th century (and earlier) thinking. Sure, natural resources can help a nation reach wealthy status. But only by 19th century standards. Not by modern standards (unless they have a truly astounding amount per capita). Contemporary levels of wealth only come from manufacturing and knowledge industries.

"The Resource Curse" explains why its even worse than that.

If a dictator can get rich by letting foreigners come in and take your resources then they dont need to invest in the country beyond building a road to the nearest port.

I am African and I do live here, this article is mostly accurate, there is no one African country that is close to a western standard of living, why? Corruption is rampant, poor institutions (mostly nepotism to blame) and other countries still offering money to us despite these two facts.

They never ending cycle:If I give you money and you do not use it the way you said you would, why would I give you more?

But yet they still do...

>It is actually like a pyramid (scheme) of patronage, with decisions at every level made in favor of whoever the next upper-level patron is. So, for example, instead of hiring the best people and deploying the best available technology to address any particular problem, a solution and people that do things that benefit the patron are entrusted with developing solutions.

So they are hiring and allocating capital based on reasons other than merit?

I cannot speak to this directly, not being African myself, but from my few visits there, I'm inclined to completely agree with this. From my limited impressions, this seems to be the power hierarchy, but people outside of it (of which they are many) are excessively disgruntled about it.

Being there and seeing the kinds of corruption there helped me see better the kinds of corruption we have here now that I am back in the states. Healthcare+Insurance is probably the most similar kind of scheme, especially in the powerlessness it evokes. Not imagine that level of extortion for housing, groceries, social circles, cars, etc. Everything business-wise has a significant "tax" on it at every step of the way (let's say, for example, if it's a 15% skim then you get .85^(number of tiers of leadership) of the initial money through. And even then after it exits that chain, there's a good chance the next chain of command will skim it out too. So it's basically guaranteeing that that money goes near to 0 very quickly.

I'm way beyond my experience at this point but I'd venture this heavily discourages investment, innovation, and hard work because the guaranteed money needed to live comes from securing a place in the hierarchy. And if you do not do that out of principle, someone else starving is willing to do that as well. I'd consider it a disease and everyone talks about "corruption bad" but I got this sneaking feeling that when corruption "happened to" play in people's favor, more blind eyes were turned. Everyone has stories they tell themselves, I suppose, and I can't say whether or not I would do the same in that situation. I don't like starving or living in slums where the mud smells like a diahrrea and urine latrine when it rains because there's now sewer system or really much running water to boot. I empathize with it, it's I think a very bad locally nash-optimal solution* (*I think I'm understanding this right, not sure) that only can be escaped if everyone basically (up to a small percentage tolerance) refutes it, pushes against it, and revolts against it.

I think this next part is up to personal interpretation, but after seeing the layers of corruption and how most well-intentioned NGOs can cause a lot of communal harm, my political views swung through conservative to small government liberal. UBI in particular as a form of support. It has some obvious weird corner cases (why pay taxes on something you get right back or vice versa?), but I think I realize now why something like that has appeal -- in its strictest form (i.e. "everyone gets $2k a month"), admin overhead is excessively low due to scale and more importantly there is almost 0 overhead for corruption due to admin/population decisions. It's one valid opinion of many, I know, but coming back from the coastal villages and hearing how sustenance farmers (no money to buy food at market obvs) are starving because global warming disturbed the near-perfectly-constant rain cycles, and that they can starve there or maybe miraculously make it to the slums of the city and be effectively in slavery for a while, that plus a lot of other things changed my perspective on my contribution to society and my responsibility for a social safety net. I guess to many it may seem weird but we all have our reasons, and for me, it's a combination of guilt and shame about myself over what I've seen, and a love for these people that I hope to one day proximally help even if it's through higher tax levels or a kind word to a stranger.

Much longer than I planned, but hope that helps explain more of the situation at depth.

Best of love,

T&co.

In what ways do you think UBI (in any country, not just Africa) would be insulated from the kinds of corruption you just described that occurs with groceries?

I'm not sure exactly what you're meaning here, but basically no corruption surface (basically) in terms of surface area for decision-making that could create perverse incentives based upon the actions of people choosing where money could go.If everyone receives a (very basic) UBI payout relatively frequently that's direct deposit, there could be fraud but not the weird large scale territorial abuse seen in many bloated welfare systems today. It's not a perfect answer by any stretch, but like a good lambda function, despite the occasional inefficiencies it is much more understandable, simple, and side-effect free. It sort of is a tool that can shift the degree of power law around the economics of a population without entirely obliterating motivation to compete in the marketplace, build things, and generally innovate/conduct business. I'd consider it a good regularizer, and it also puts sideways pressure on jobs to compete for people to fill them due to QoL being more commoditized since one is choosing between "work or live extremely frugally" vs "work or starve and maybe die". Bit of a drastic comparison but you get my drift.

Greece was growing 5% per year in the 00s. It was doing quite well despite the supposed corruption. The truth is that corruption doesn't go away. Your economy just gets big enough to support the parasites. This is probably the biggest reason why we must have economic growth every year. If the economy grows then nobody will notice that funds are being redirected to special interests.

UBI is only good for revenue neutral taxes. For example a UBI funded by land value taxes effectively grants every citizen an equal portion of the country. If such a system were to be adopted globally then there would be no need to conquer land forcibly. War happens exactly when we fail to reach an agreement through peaceful means.

Revenue neutral CO2 taxes grant every citizen equal rights to pollute their country, effectively democratizing pollution.

Negative interest rates paid to the central banks should also be redistributed through an UBI.

However, using a UBI as guaranteed minimum wage is a huge error. You're living off other people's efforts. That's exactly what a land reform and negative interest rate is supposed to avoid. Lowering the interest rate floor to 0% means goodbye to vast forms of exploitation. Work for yourself, if you have too much money then donate it today, not 50 years later in some grand self congratulatory farce right before you are about to die. Don't insist on jamming the economic machine to gain power exclusively for yourself.

"So they are hiring and allocating capital based on reasons other than merit?"

You are saying this as if it's a totally alien concept in the West, Half of British leadership comes from one degree program at Oxford -

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/ppe-for-peop...

"It’s worse when you consider that today, almost all the world’s knowledge is not only available in books, but also in most cases for free on the web.

Cool, so suppose you may want to take advantage of this knowledge - you need a reliable internet connection for a start and power supply, probably also running water. Some places lack that (more specific statements are impossible because the article has drawn 'Africa' as a single entity)

Alright, so suppose you decided that you can improve your community and want to order some farming equipment - does aliexpress deliver to your location? Does a package arive to you without getting stolen on the way? Suppose it arrived and you produced something, can you ship it to global market, is infrastructure for that present? Does a container of good reliably reach Europe (for example, large market) on time and at competitive price?

Suppose you are a city mayor, and you need to provide power to your residents, and you know you could isntall solar panels and they would pay for themselves in 10 years. Many western countries enjoy 0-2% interest rates, they can finance such projects and make a profit - but many developing nations can only access loans with 10% interest or even higher, making it impossible to finance simple projects with clear return on investment.

This article fails to address any of the structural disadvantages that developing nations suffer from, the fact that both South Korea and West Germany have recieved more aid that all of Africa combined - so yes, it is poor, in addition to being terribly managed.

That's even before we begin to address various underhand tactics, for example such as were deployed against south-american governments to prevent them from banning children from smoking.

Poorly managed countries are nice resource taps for wealthy nations and pose no threat as economic competitors.

From an economic perspective it is only obvious that all Africans must migrate to Germany so that Germany can export to the rest of the world. After all that is what Germany wants. It wants to be an "export champion" while being fully aware that such a thing is impossible to sustain forever.

Is there a reason this article (mostly) spells Africa with a k? Is this an expression of something?

About the management, I really liked what "the dictators handbook" had to say about this.

As I recall,it argues that a country rich in resources is more likely to be poorly managed. One of the reasons is because in that case the leaders only have to worry about that resource. In a less resourceful county they need to care more about the people, because the people are required to generate wealth.

It seems to be because this is published by an organization called “iAfrikan Media”. No indication of where that name came from but could have been a brand differentiator.

https://business.iafrikan.com/

BTW Afrika is how the name is spelled in German.

Possibly from the Dutch spelling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Empire

I am not African nor lived there, but you have to make a distinction between places and people. There is not one "Africa" at all.. it is an old place

I am not African, either, nor have I lived there, nor do I know much about its history, cultures or peoples, but I'm going to express my opinion about it anyway.

> nor do I know much about its history, cultures or peoples

I think you added that part, not me

I think this is well known for people who come from developing countries. If not as explicitly as mentioned in the article, but implicitly. It is mostly people from developed world who mainly assume lack of development is due to lack of money (partly due to what happens in their country on a local scale, and partly due to media articles focusing more on poverty than other aspects when talking about developing countries).

This seems to just push the question one level deeper. If African countries are poorly managed, why us that? What causes, for example, European countries to be managed better at scale than African countries?

Many factors. Post-colonial divisions resulting in continual social strife and unstable governments. Agrarian economies, lack of education because of poverty.

Basically: It is expensive to be poor, especially when fighting others endlessly.

The west pushing democracy doesn't help either. It's not great when the majority can't even read and large chunk don't even have electricity while a few in cities have iPhones and western media. Look what totalitarianism did for china. Not that I support china/ccp but they lifted themselves up from poverty largley thanks to the unified vision and execution of a stable central government.

In the US there is all this talk of equity vs equality. Same thing in Africa, they're catching up on self determination, especially now that China is offering alternatives to the west for commerce and other relations (despite their predictable malice)

> they lifted themselves up from poverty largley thanks to the unified vision and execution of a stable central government.

No. They lifted themselves up from poverty by industrializing and trading cheap labor. This was irrespective of living under a corrupt, autocratic, extractive regime. And, now, because there were no stable institutions through which people could invest their savings, China is in an economic tailspin as their housing bubble popped.

How can you trade cheap labor if people vote to not have cheap labor? In reality the people will vote for one good speaker that may not be competent because he sounds good and makes right promises. Lack of education and literacy would prevent them from even knowing that industrialization and cheap labor is good in the long run as opposed to sticking to agriculture like their ancestors. China struggled with famines like african nations too, the cycle you see there where someone takes power in the name of communism or democracy but is just an imperialist dictator would have crippled china just as well. It was in fact their central government that coordinated nation wide changes and forced terrible but profitable laws like the one child rule.

China being able to have a housing bubble is a miracle to the Chinese in itself. You think if china as a first world country in crisis but a but over a decade ago it was a 3rd world country needing aid from the US to feed people. They don't put up with the CCP because they agree with its politics, they do so because they feel chauvinism/national pride over their great transformation and like their economic prosperity. Much like how americans never mess with the messed up two-party pseudo-democracy.

My response was to your statement that China's prosperity is due to the vision and execution of their government. I dispute that. Every nation that has ever industrialized experienced similar leaps in prosperity, irrespective of their government. Britain, the US, Japan, Russia, Korea, etc all had different forms of government, but similar leaps in prosperity when their societies moved from agriculture to industry. China became prosperous despite their government, not because of it. The economic failure the Chinese endure now is directly due to the extractive policies of their government, however. This is clear.

Again I don't feel like that's pushing at the real root of the question. Maybe it's impossible to know and you just go round and round in circles, but what lets China create a stable central government and unified vision but not Africa? And on the other hand, Europe seems to have industrialized well without a centralized vision. After all Europe is a group of separate countries each with distinct languages and governance. There is the EU but that came post-industrialization.

So is Russia.

Like one Russian said: "We have the most of everything: water, land, gold, steel, coal, wood, wheat, whatere you can think of. But our lives and living standards are so bad!"

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