Claiming that it is impossible for an African nation to develop beyond "another century of grinding poverty" without accepting a foreign agenda from a power player is bullshyt defeatism. Why do you believe that non-African nations could develop without African cash, but African nations can only develop with American/Chinese cash?
African nations, in fact, already have a massive head start as all the knowledge is already available. The necessary education, the necessary skills, the necessary blueprints, all those are available. Take advantage of them. Since the wheel doesn't need to be reinvented, development in Africa could be even faster than development anywhere else was. But
don't take their money if it makes you beholden to their agenda, because their agenda cannot serve Africa's long term interests.
We argued this already
in the Nigeria thread and I'm not going to rehash it all again. But you don't need giant amounts of foreign money in order to develop. Israel's GDP didn't break $20 billion until the 1980s. Nigeria, Finland, and Norway all had GDP of only about $10 billion in 1970, yet all had self-sufficient agriculture and strong light manufacturing sectors that put them in a perfect position to develop. Nigeria chose to focus on quick money via oil deals with other nations and saw their self-sufficient sectors atrophy, while Finland and Norway developed on their own and are in a great state today. (And yes, I'm aware that Finland/Norway have much smaller populations than Nigeria, I'm just proving that you don't need large foreign cash reserves to create development, it can be done even with a small economy.) The myth created by the West is that you can only develop if you buy billions and billions of dollars worth of stuff from the West, but this is a self-serving narrative they create which assumes that only Western development is true development and no African nation could ever make it on their own.
Does Kenya have the necessary people to develop the nation? Yes.
Does Kenya have the necessary resources to develop the nation? Yes.
Can it develop as fast with the available resources if it chooses to develop on its own rather than serving a larger nation's interests? No.
Does faster development mean better development? No.
Does creating Kenyan pollution and draining Kenyan resources in order to produce Chinese food and Chinese energy while importing half-a-billion dollars a year in Chinese manufacturing products that crowd out Kenyan manufacturers put Kenya in a better long-term position? No.
And on loans, I'll repeat again that loans always export more value than they bring in. That is the very nature of loans. You take a certain amount of cash, and you promise that you'll give them all that cash back
plus interest. They get more than you got. And they won't give you the loan unless they're convinced that they're gonna get more, because no one ends up with billions of dollars to loan unless they're very good at knowing they win in the end. The history of "development loans" to Africa don't look a hell of a lot different than the history of payday loans in the hood, it's exploitative and predictably serves the same interests every time.
Some of ya'all just eat up the exact macroeconomic narrative that was developed by the West and created to prop up their own interests, and don't even realize how self-serving that narrative is.
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Riiiight like how "cac tactics" like crack and welfare programs didn't destroy the American black family, which remains dysfunctional with the highest out of wedlock birth rates and highschool dropout rates to this day. How's that for a "distraction"?
. Wedlock rates dont tell the whole story, and those dropout stats change from one to another one saying highest next one saying "Graduation is improving" etc. but do you
