Everything black African countries do as regards "development" is basically wrong. It is amusingly tragic to watch. First of all, to fund their "development", they allow predator foreign countries to manhandle them for and fleece them of their natural resources. And then, spurred by a peculiar pervasive mental illness, the political elites steal a substantial amount of the money earned, to be used to purchase garish material things from and in the same predator foreign countries.

With no concrete long-term plans for the future or productive use of any funds, they leap into a cursed silliness by taking unnecessary loans and signing bad agreements like silly little children. To combat existing natural problems, they try to build expensive infrastructure like the ones in more developed countries (who can actually afford them), without much consideration of their own existing constraints and what makes sense within that context. With the hiring of foreign companies no less. Which has made sure that in 60 years after independence, no one in their own country has ever learned to do anything. Everything, however simple, has to rely on foreign technical expertise. It is a loop you see with everything everywhere. No one has x technical expertise —> hire foreign companies —> which means no one gets to develop technical expertise —> justifies the need to hire foreign companies.

Tertiary education is low-quality but also has nothing to do with the acquisition of skills relevant to the context of the poor local economy, but wholesale copying of brochures and syllabuses from much more developed countries. And therefore, you end up with tons and tons of tertiary school graduates whose lousy education is completely useless, rendering them either broadly underemployed or totally jobless. Meanwhile, there are no properly trained people in basic technical jobs like Plumbing, Electrical work, or any type of construction work, but lots and lots of low-quality graduates in different kinds of low-velocity pure, applied, and social science research fields in very poor countries with room for maybe 20 new graduates annually.

With actually practical and relevant fields of studies like the Health Sciences, Agriculture, and the relevant Engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical etc), because of all the familiar cultural issues, students are severely under-trained, young graduate professionals are maltreated, and everyone involved in these fields is underpaid and under-provisioned (equipment and facilities) so that absolutely nothing works.

It is absolutely true that black people feel profoundly inferior to most other human groups, especially whites. It is not a surprise that this is the case considering recent history. When everything about yourself (religion, language, name, tradition, etc) is proclaimed "not good enough", to be replaced by other things, from and by some other people, it is not a surprise that you lose your dignity and come to think of yourself mostly in terms of those other people.

It is apparent in how Africans (West Africans particularly) think of everything local to themselves in comparison to foreign stuff by foreign people. In the perception of locally-made material goods vs foreign (non-African) stuff. In the relationship to language: some West African status privilege is determined by how much distance you can maintain between yourself and your ethnic language.

It is visible in the obsession with emigration too. The highest aspiration of a West African isn't to do anything monumental to contribute to the development of their immediate society, it is in fact to abandon their homeland to be a slave in the metropole (UK/France), or maybe even the US.

There is a profound psychological problem with self-dignity in Africans which needs to be reckoned with.

It is contemporarily the in-thing to make fun of pan-Africanists. But while they are ultimately wrong as to who is correctly part of the in-group (not North Africans, Nilotes or Horners), they are intuitively directionally correct about scale as a tool for might.

Pan-Africanists are also wrong about the specific reasons for coming together. It's not for anti-colonial, anti-imperialist reasons. A losers' club composed of random groups standing against "Western imperialism" isn't going to do anyone any good.

The people who need to come together are a specific Niger-Congo group of people, for a singular reason: it was always meant to be this way.

The reason there are now tons of different Niger-Congo ethnic groups with differing genetic distances and out-admixture rates is entirely because of problems like poor epistemology and historical technological limitations.

Progressive liberals clearly believe that one of the fundamental functions of black people is to be the vanguard for liberal progressivism. It goes all the way back to slavery and then the fight for civil rights, extending therefrom forward to other things: gender inequality, homosexual discrimination, transgender discrimination etc.

Because of the absence of tangible long-term civilizational goals, progressive liberals seek meaning in life by pursuing arbitrary goals like absolute liberalism and multiculturalism, which are unfortunately pernicious.

Why should black people need to continuously and continually fight racism within multicultural/multiracial societies instead of living exclusively in their own independent society where racism against them then doesn't exist?

Why should black people always be looking forward to celebrations of "the first black person" to accomplish x? Why should black people always be fighting for representation in x or y? Why should black people remain a pitiable underdog minority group in all things?

There are a whole lot of things that we have to do and we consequently need lots of exceptionally talented people to do every single one of them.

To achieve our goal of culturally conquering the continent for example, we need to know things. We need to understand specific details about each gathering of people. From large metropolitan areas, down to the tiny scale of villages of ten people, across all parts of sub-Saharan Africa which we care about (most of it).

To take over a society, we need to know everything about how everything there works, both material and non-material: Who is the most influential political person at each different level and scale? Do the children in tiny village x believe stoning stray dogs brings good luck? Which parts of what random remote area can become easily accessible with the fashioning of simple wooden bridges? We need to have access to incredible detail about a lot of little random things like this.

Gathering information and learning about different societies is enormously difficult work.

The fundamental reason Africa is so dysfunctional is cultural, and getting things working is all about reforming the deleterious general culture.

There are lots of cultural problems in African societies, some of them specific to each different society, and lots of them broadly general to as many as possible. There are lots of cultural habits which do not make any sense, are obviously socially destructive, and for which the gains from fixing are enormous, but no one ever does anything about anyway.

The following are some of the apparent downright stupid cultural practices easily observable in a specific part of the coastal West African region.

The bedrock of our transformational civilization agenda is an absolutely correct understanding of broad reality which will be popularly articulated through an existing framework familiar to human societies — a religion.

Religions have not existed historically in human societies for no reason. They have historically been ascribed the task of answering questions, even if only tacitly, about abstract things like what exists, why we exist, the goal of our existence, and what happens to us after we die.

That a power exists which is able to wrap the universe around its mind, which happens to be beyond our immediate comprehension, is easy induction.

God doesn't exist, like some people like to argue, because "there must be a first cause". We do not know enough to say that in an absolute sense. What is true though is that we have no practical examples of a fundamental thing coming into being without having been created. It is thus the most rigorous assumption that we can make that there is a creator behind our reality. But this is only true within our own reality. It may well be possible that things work differently outside of our current reality.

It is tragic how basically no one understands how anything currently works or should work. One of the popular but tragic ideas out there right now is that Africa desperately "needs to industrialize". And they always say it in exactly those terms — "needs to industrialize", vague, in that way, which doesn't reveal the specific things involved in the supposed "industrializing".

But of course what they mean is Africa becoming a superpower's vassal like lots of actually "wealthy" countries currently are, and attempting to climb the conventional economic ladder by which nearly every "wealthy" country has economically developed in recent history, and which remains recommended by Western Economists: focusing on a few things which they are great at producing and importing everything else.

The good thing is that we are not going to be doing anything like that. Naively taking Ricardo's Comparative Advantage seriously leads to eventual ruin. There is absolutely no good reason to leave your fate in the hands of outsiders.

The theory derives from a reverse-engineering of cultural and economic developmental failure among contemporary populations of people of black African origin to arrive at defective intelligence, and choosing to accept that as an A+ conclusion. But what about all the other possibilities you might arrive at when reverse-engineering from developmental failure? Why have they dismissed them?

Decisions which people make in societies in the now are what lead to eventual future outcomes... or fate. Which in societies of people of black African descent has been: perpetual developmental failure.

We do know that the idea of intelligence being responsible for black African underdevelopment is bunk because individuals in societies do not make decisions based on reason. People do not think for themselves peculiarly about what to do regarding most things. People usually simply do whatever is considered acceptable by their society.

People do not make decisions based on individual intelligence

Most parts of black Africa are terrible terrible societies. Almost nothing works: not physical infrastructure, or relationships between individuals, between groups of individuals, or between individuals and groups with the government. They clearly require fixing. So... why aren't sub-Saharan Africans trying to do anything about any of these problems?

We have, in the past, covered how one might seek to reform things in poor sub-Saharan African countries, both culturally, and economically, including the broader idea of seeking collaboration with one another for development.

If the things that need to be done do not require hidden knowledge, why aren't they being done? And if sub-Saharan Africans aren't doing them, what are they (sub-Saharan Africans) in fact doing instead?

What are people of sub-Saharan African origin doing?

Everyone has an opinion about to achieve economic growth and development in poor, third-world countries. Lots of laypeople believe it is simply by stopping corruption. I suspect that is the dominant view among the average person you might get to interview walking along a random street in a third-world country.

The sorts of people, decked in ill-fitting suits and ties (accompanied by a pair glasses on their eyes half the time), who get invited to talk about economic development at fancy events have their own theories too. These people, usually academic 'economists' or 'consultants' usually have never attempted to build anything on their own in the real world. Ever. Maybe they do do some 'research' some of the time at work, a third of which consists of handing out surveys to people (who as we all know, never tell lies) and publishing the results as being derived fact from real life environment (could you really argue with that?)

So.. development economists and consultants have lots theories about precisely how poor countries should pursue development, what to begin with (land reform, agriculture etc), or when to begin industrialization (after attaining what literacy rate, at what TFR etc). None of which you should take seriously if you are actually trying to do development from the ground up in a poor country.

What development 'experts' (economics academics and consultants) do is pattern-seeking and matching: they retroactively look at different countries in different regions with completely different conditions at different time periods that successfully went from being poor to non-poor, and extract what they believe to be common factors about how development happened in those countries at the time they did develop, mix in a little bit of what they imagine should work in theory... and voila! they have "theories of development", which they recommend to people in government in states seeking development.

The reason most black Africans migrate to the West is because their African countries of origin are frankly... shitholes. Because of that.. they seek welfare in higher-quality countries who will accept them... usually in the West.

How the UK charges exorbitant fees for visas and still frames the legal immigration discourse like it’s something they ‘hand out’ is beyond me. Students bring dependents to the UK, okay but is it free?

— Wale Lawal (@WalleLawal) May 24, 2023

archived record

Conventional pan-Africanism, the sort promoted by long-past, failed and incompetent Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkurumah (or the long-serving ex-Northern African leader who would eventually be deposed during the Arab Spring) which advocates for a continent-spanning single union is sorta kindda clearly a terrible idea. For lots of reasons which we will discuss.

Why might one want to organize the entire continent under a single government, and reasons not to?

— Economies of scale: Scale breaks down at some point, and almost certainly would, at a scale as large as the continental African expanse of land and that huge a population of people. It becomes far more trouble than it is worth.

— A mutual colonial history?
So... a losers' organization. Collecting all the losers together to... what? prove the colonial bullies wrong? To what end? And is that an important enough reason to come together?

Last time, we discussed governing competence as the ability of a central government to understand + perform the one job they were created to do.

What might that look like in an existing contemporary example in sub-Saharan Africa? Does any such example even exist given the state of the entire subcontinent?

The contemporary Rwandan government as a competent government

It is very well known the troubles Rwanda had in the 1990s, when all of the sorts of people who now question the competence and mandate of its government stood by and did absolutely nothing as tons and tons of people were hacked to death by their own very neighbors and friends.

First up, what does competence mean?

Competence means both the understanding of how to do things + the ability to get them done. For example, I am absolutely incompetent at boxing. For the clear reason that I have no expert knowledge of how to fight with my hands. How best does one make a fist, so as avoid breaking one's own fingers as they land their punches? Or move, to enable ease in evading punches thrown by one's opponent and quickly surging forward to land hopefully successful ones in return ... all without losing one's balance? I have no idea what answers to these questions are. And that's only the understanding part of the equation. Whether I have the right physical traits or mental strength (ability) to enable my boxing is a whole different matter.

Clearly, competence is a difficult thing to achieve, and most people are incompetent at most things. The same thing interestingly is true of governments. Most governments are incompetent at their job. What is that job and why do governments exist at all?

Why governments exist

Imagine that you became the leader of a poor, failing sub-Saharan African country — which became independent from its European colonizers sometime in the 20th century — with absolute power.

The country's administration has progressively declined since the colonizers left. Nothing works... not public infrastructure which is supposed to be available to all the people: the roads are terrible which hinders transportation and distribution of goods, hence makes them more expensive than they could be. Power (electricity) which powers all of our machines is lackluster. A huge portion of the people lack toil-free "access to clean water all over the year independent of geographical season". Think about all the usual banal problems facing people in black African countries. Your people really battle every last one of them.

Aside these infrastructural problems, there exist people problems too, which are probably even more deleterious. Relationships between individuals are completely shot. And rule of law only exists on paper. All of the governments before yours consistently betrayed the "mandate" of governing, and the citizenry has absolutely no trust in the government. Maybe they in fact consider government agencies and affiliates to be adversaries.

People cannot enter into business relationships between one another either because of a lack of trust (there's no legitimate 3rd-party arbitrator in the case that they do), maybe betraying the trust of other people is even culturally glorified as clever behavior. People also are used to bad behavior going unpunished, so that their morality suffers: not because they are inherently bad people, but because there is nothing to be gained in behaving well, and nothing to lose in bad behavior. And therefore their morality slacks.

Some contemporary liberal progressive black people with a sub-Saharan African origin take stances against the idea of race and believe it unworthy of being taken seriously since race is only about arbitrary skin color and no substantial commonalities. Ethnicity (people of the same local culture and language), they say instead, is an identity which is real and only what should be embraced.

In reality, race doesn't seem to only constitute skin color/tone. Racial groups when examined have several other phenotypical differences... including hair type (texture, length), general body height, the size and shapes of different body parts (skull, eyes, nose, ears etc).

By phenotypical differences, there are huge similarities between people of different ethnicities around the same geographical environment. There are these similarities for example between (Liberian, Gabonese and Angolan) people, (Eritrean, Somali) people, (Korean, Japanese) people or (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) or (Syrian, Saudi Arabian) people.

These clearly are real phenotypical differences in people in different parts of the world. And the fact of their consistent replication over several generations proves these differences are genetic. I don't think progressive black liberals who refute the idea of race would dispute that fact. Consistently reproduced similarities in phenotypes of people in different parts of the world are real, and that is what 'race' is. Could the word 'race' have lost its original meaning, but the concept we have just described be real? Yes.

— Discrimination against a group can happen for different reasons: (i) the discriminating people feeling insecure and with a need to put down some other group. This seems to be inherent in humans. There's a consistent ingroup vs outgroup dynamic everywhere on lots of different axes. (ii) the avenging of a perceived slight by that group against the now discriminating group (iii) outright bullying for a perceived weakness.

— Some discrimination against black currently seems to exist because black people are thought of as undesirable: poor, uncultured and stupid. Discrimination on race doesn't occur against blacks alone. It does again other races too: Indians (all of the subcontinent), West Asians and North Africans (Arabs, Bedouins etc), Latinos, east Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese etc) etc. But black people seem to bear the worst of it, and western Caucasians, the least. So maybe there is an order of races in order of increasing amounts of melanin... from western whites to African blacks? But why?

Is it based on economic and cultural success in the modern world.. around and after the beginning of industrialization? Or economic and cultural success before then? Granted that interaction between people from different places used to be rare and difficult, was there ever a time when black people were thought of more highly, and western caucasians were not at the top of the pyramid? Say in the 1300s? What civilizations were the most economically productive then, and what did each race think of one another?

Black Africa clearly is the most economically underdeveloped part of the world. There's been lots of explanations proposed for this: some of them are geographical, others are genetic (they claim black people are just outright stupid). So maybe this is why racism against blacks is the worst of all of them? What if black Africa became as developed as western Europe? Might there exist anyway this sort of discrimination against black people? Is it about the color of our skin, instead?