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.

The traditional prestigious professions in the first place (Medicine and Law) are totally the wrong things to focus on. While healthcare is important, material production of things (agriculture, engineering) is a lot more important. No one in a position of power understands that production (and thus industry) is by far what matters most.

And while the traditionally prestigious professions are bad enough, the modern professional aspirations of young people are much much worse: being a reality TV or social media celebrity and socialite. The dream job for lots of young people now is being a media content creator with lots of money and fame.

Aside education and jobs, another part of life in which Africans are doing development falsely is with lifestyle and culture.

There is a tiny "middle class" (people with the economic power of residents of developed countries or close to it) whose entire lifestyle has nothing to do their own local culture but entirely on attempting to replicate the lifestyles of people in more developed countries via a literal importation of all goods and services. These people are role models in their local African society and set lots of terrible examples.

The individual goal of tons of people is becoming personally wealthy and beginning to live in absolute material splendor. There is often an ostentatious display of individual wealth (relative to the societal poverty) in the form of elaborate but garish buildings (with architecture unsuitable to their local climate, by the way) amid dilapidated structures of the impecunious masses and debilitating poverty.

This is while there is a lack of basic services like sanitation/waste-management and primary health care for this same group of people. They import all of the material things, just not the processes for managing quotidian life.

All of the media too is filled with filth. Everything in the media is a replication of stuff from foreign societies. And especially with the advent of the internet and the loss of central control of media programming via the limited and manageable real media in the form of Radio and TV stations, the explosion of independent media on various online platforms has completely democratized what media content gets streamed to the people (tedious, brainrot content), helping along a pernicious decline in popular culture.

No one seems to realize the effects popular media has on people. The popular belief is that as long as people can post sparingly on social media to criticize the government and organize half-hearted protests where people sing popular music and share food, everything is fine. Media is working correctly.

Every facet of life is being piloted incorrectly and inevitably in the path of long-term misery in this way while being cheerfully hailed as "development".