For me Vision 2030 is too far away to say.I'll just wait and see. It is true influence from the west is a reason we suffer but it can only work well when it is supplemented with corrupt leaders who would blind the masses.Africa is rich in resources but we don't add value to our products yet we buy the finished products at high prices. In defence you can say that we don't have the technology or capital to utilize these resources but that doesn't apply in all cases. The way forward for me would start by increasing trade within Africa and focussing on acquiring technologies that can allow us to leapfrog.

Africa is poor because of imported systems of goverment
The so called democratically elected goverments.
If early african forms of goverments like the council of elders were to be mordanised like in china things would be great here.
Good dictators like gadafi or castrol(but i am anti communist) could also help africa.
Moi was good its only that he let his kichen cabinet eat too much.

What we need to understand is that it is in the west`s interest for Africa to be poor. If they cannot rob from Africa, their economies will crumble. Gadafi understood this and that is why he was killed.If Africans rise up against Europeans we will be better off. Lets kick out the NGO`s and charities they are the worst.

However Africans should focus intellectually as well. We can copy the good technological aspects of the west, however we do not need to copy all their systems. China have done it by focusing and copying. There are still more poorer people in China than east, central and north Africa but we are worshiping them!!!We need to change our education system to empower our children and not make them slaves. From an early age we teach our kids to worship a white man, how do we expect them to have confidence and arrogance to grow?

Thank God.

About time someone started an interesting thread apart from the ones that I contribute to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1dTxYunIME

Same scenario. Does it ring a bell??

i think africa is poor partly because of the West's exploitation. We are also to blame for tolerating mediocrity in all levels of our lives, are we more submissive in general? I dont know

our birth rate does not help either hence the perception that we are poor. African poverty is at times blown out of reality in the Western media, the western in some instances has equally or poorer people among them who you ll never see on CNN or BBC

The way forward is to have focused leaders and our society in general should rethink our value systems. Do we have to be like the West to be 'not poor'? Cant we just get the poor a dignified existence with available resources and just be? Get the people health systems that work, clean water, get them an education they need (not everyone needs university education) and award merit in levels of lifeThen can we conrol birth rates for tunaomba serikali types?

All these can be done only with responsible leaderships at the top, not the tumbilis we have now and are likely to have for a while to come.

Vision 2030 is not a solution, its another way that we are copying the west 'blindly' and it ll have little impact on lives of locals.


I know it is easy to pontificate anonymously on the internet but those are my thoughts

I disagree.Case in point,Africa.We have droughts,poverty,disease,politics...we're needy and I can't see any innovation or inventions changing that.

@Chessmaster a drought is a "once in a time" phenomenon unlike eg winter which is guaranteed every year!

And using your case in point; the countries in Africa with the harshest weather & conditions ie southern and northern Africa are still the most developed on the continent!

This brings me back to necessity!

Even in east Africa.. countries like Uganda, Tanzania, and Congo are still very poor due to abundance whereas the barren land in Kenya has caused its people to be very hard working and industrious!

Btw poverty, disease & politics come from human behavior and not the natural environment!

The time reference. Too short. Africa, by the 'global' yardstick is young. Only 50 to 100 years old. In the 50's most of Kenya was just vast forests and plains. We are in the nascent stages of the West-dictated world order. The organized Roman empire dates back to the BC's,..the Mongolian Empire to the 13th Century AD ...by 1500 London was already a huge, organized metropolis.
All civilizations start like this, poor, diseased, disorganized, with bloody uprisings and conflicts until the intense pain and suffering systematically reduces the collective foolishness of a population. In fact, Africa's rise has seen less bloodshed than other places ...things like the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, these were nasty pieces of business. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/..._of_conflicts_in_Europe
That is a looong list of wars.
Europeans and others like to sneer at Africa, but they were in a similar spot, actually worse, a few centuries ago. The only thing is that Africa was interrupted from charting its own destiny, and other people's civilization rudely thrust upon us (as well as getting robbed and enslaved in the process). We live by a Western socio-economic model of development now, so this is a phase, a bad one with poverty and suffering, but it will pass (or abate) after another lengthy period of time.

thanks quicksand for bringing up the temporal angle. We forget that Africa had civilizations before what we currently refer to as African nations that were drawn up recently. The Malian empire reigned vast vast regions of what is now the Sahara desert (13th to 16th century). There also were the Songhai, Mali and Dendi kingdoms which eventually disintegrated. The Ghana empire was there even 1500 BC in present day Muaritania before the advent of Islam in Africa. Somalia had a thriving civilization back in 13th century, actually there is evidence of civilization in Somalia from back in 4000 BC. The question now is when did the rain start beating us? why did we slip so much back to be the poster child for backwardness and lack of development?

We even have our very own Gede ruins before vasco da gama 'discovered' our a$$ in Malindi
We can blame the west all we want but are we doing things any differently now that we are 'independent' (sic)?

I tend to agree that influence from the West causes poverty. Countries that have recently cut off Western Influence such as Brazil, China, Russia, Middle East, Argentina e.t.c have of late made huge leaps in reduction of poverty. Countries still flirting with the West such as Most of Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda ,TZ, Chad ,Indonesia,have very high poverty levels.