While not every African country is, as we speak, a corrupt dictatorship, the history of African governments makes such evaluations highly ephemeral. From the mid-50’s to the mid 80’s, there were, what, 60 military coups in sub-Saharan Africa?
60 in 30 years doesn’t make for stability. It could make for terrific ratings on the evening news if anyone in the west gave a rat’s rear end anymore, but after about the rate of one coup per year, folks sorta lost interest.
An example of a non-basket case country becoming a bona fide basket case: Zimbabwe used to be a) called Rhodesia, b) stable, c) able to feed itself and export food besides, d) not a basket case. Oh, but the fact that a white minority was running the show offended western intellectuals, including one Henry Kissinger (remember him?). The whites running the show were pressured into allowing elections, and Mugabe came into power.
Since then, it has been a one-way road downhill for Zimbabwe. Now they’re importing food, they’ve run white landowners off their farms as a result of “land reforms” and handed the lands off to Mugabe’s merry band of thugs. For folks who aren’t farmers, here’s a clue: when you hand a farm off to a non-farmer, it takes only a couple years before the place is wrecked and it takes a huge effort (in both capital and labor) to make the land productive again.
Zimbabwe is headed down the road to permanent food insufficiency and becoming Yet Another Case Of African Political Famine.
All this is the result of western meddling. Even today, some countries in the EU are treating Mugabe as a perfectly normal national leader, giving him legitimacy. So in 30+ years, the west replaced white anti-democratic rulers that could keep the population fed with black anti-democratic rulers that can’t, and we used democracy to accomplish this.
Way to go. All we proved in the process is that giving democracy to a population with a primitive tribal view and understanding of civics is like giving a toddler a hand grenade: sure, it might be entertaining from a distance, but it will almost always be messy.
As for the insanity of our projects in promoting Democracy in the Third World, see Democracy In The Third World.
William Flax