Either he doesn't consider Eastern European softwware developers as colleagues or he thinks all of Europe is London, which it certainly isn't. The upper limit he gave is more than most Eastern European developers make.
Uh that's pretty decent anywhere in Europe for anyone doing actual 'programming', i.e. not management or consulting, so basically meaning all junior- to mid-level software development jobs. I'm not even sure what 'PhD level programmer' means - it's not like 'programming' is an academic exercise.
The only people making more are working directly for foreign entities or governments and that is a very small community of people.
In reality most people I worked with were making around 1400 dollars per year.
>Add to that, a good number of African countries have been blacklisted from PayPal.
I actually tried to set some friends up doing work on odesk and elancer. It is simply not possible this part of the world(west africa, cote d'ivoire, ghana, togo, benin, nigeria) is basically cut off from international money transfers unless you are part of a high income elite that qualifies for real banking. So they could do work, but would never be able to get the money.