I'm talking countries like, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic. These countries are all landlocked, are pretty minimal in terms of natural resources (I know Mali has gold and salt, Niger has uranium, Burkina Faso has gold, etc) but the transit links are minimal for them to even get the exports out of the country! In addition, alof them have undergone constant political turmoil with numerous coup d'etats and military juntas, and it seems like each new leader is only concerned with getting as rich as possible then living comfortably in exile. So do y'all see a future for them?
Is their any hope for the landlocked Sahelian nations?
- Thread starter Memorial Stadium Piru
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In my opinion mostly no hope. Again my opinion. I can maybe see Mali turning things around if they get rid of those jihadist. This is due to a good part of Mali(southern part) being in suitable areas compared to the others especially Chad and Niger.
How about Burkina Faso? (Rip Sankara)
Dont know much about Burkina Faso.
mbewane
Knicks: 93 til infinity
Usually CAR isn't considered as a "Sahelian" nation, but that's not the point. Anyways speaking of CAR natural ressources are plentiful, that's exactly our problem. Diamond, uranimum, wood, land, water, we got all of that, and with a very small population too. Unfortunately we're stuck between competing regional powers and have never managed to constitute enough serious political leaders to build some sort of loyalty to the country. TBH the country itself is a constuction due to colonization so it's hard to create a national sentiment. Seemingly we were on our way in the 60s and 70s but it's been going downhill ever since. Given the situation now, it's hard to be optimistic about the future.
would you change the borders of CAR and the Sahelian nations?
mbewane
Knicks: 93 til infinity
Ideally yes. I say "ideally" because in our current context I think any attempt to change borders will only increase violence and whatnot. It's counter-intuitive, but I believe we ffirst need strong central states with a reasonnable amount of economic well-being, democracy and physical security (meaning strong police and army) so that any discussion of changing borders will happen in a "secure" environment, kind of like what happened with Tchecoslovaquia (or what is happening in Spain now, where violence has been limited).
But yeah, I think that at some point we def need to have a serious discussion on borders because some countries really ae just patchworks set up by the colonizers. It's a very complicated issue because obviously you can very quickly spill into the worst forms of nationalism and ethnic cleansing, that's why I believe we first need to reach a certain level of economic development and democracry/rule of law so that proceedings can be limited to court houses, parliaments, civil society, etc...as opposed to random rebel groups "leading" the way.
On the other hand, one could hope that more and more regional integration would render borders de facto irrelevant. That would be even better imo, technically that's what the EU is aiming at and has already achieved in a lot of areas. Strangely it's at the same time harder and easier to do in Africa : harder because we don't have the physical and legal structures to build up effective regional integration, but easier because various countries don't have strong national sentiments (as opposed to EU nations), and have the same population group (cultural and linguistic similarities) living on both sides of the border, which is very porous anyway. So in a sense I believe that regional integration could lead up to borders becoming irrelevant and population groups organizing themselves in cross-border communities. Who knows though
