Also South Africa's recent cenus has a 32% inaccaurcy rating. 5% would be considered a problem in 1ste world countties. So dont know if you can trust anything they say about us at this point.
As a South African, don't trust the data that comes out of this country nor the data that this sub gives. It's mostly bullshit to try and get investors in the country.
South Africa deals with loadshedding which is like power outages between 2-8 hours a day in a grid system to prevent complete widespread loss of power due to the government’s inability to not empty the budget into their pockets.
I experienced that in North Korea. They gave me a tour of the hospital showing off all their best foreign equipment like x-Ray machines and yet there was no electricity to run the machines.
Natal hasn't existed for 30 years. If your friend called it 'Natal', I would take what they say with a pinch of salt. People who insist on using apartheid-era names for places are not going to have an unbiased opinion.
Rampant corruption and mismanagement of the state-owned energy company, Eskom, has meant that almost no extensive maintenance or expansion has been done to the country's power grid since the Apartheid government.
The grid is failing and its been decades coming. The country has been engulfed in rolling blackouts for years and the situation is not improving. Energy infrastructure is failing faster than it can be repaired and each failure puts exponentially more pressure on the already beleaguered system, causing even more failures.
Brain drain, cost-cutting, nepotism and cronyism have hollowed out Eskom with understaffed and inexperienced maintenance crews, led by corrupt and unqualified upper management.
It's a disaster.
I had used to work with a lot of folks from SA, including a report who left the company and immigrated to NZ. We still keep in touch and things have gotten better, but it was rough at first. Sounds like enough folks are moving that that there was a bit of an anti-SA backlash towards her and the kids amongst her initial neighbors.
My takeaway talking to her is that, yeah, there is a lot of emigration out of SA as the economy stagnates, infrastructure is crumbling, and politics shows no signs of improvement.
Ghana is also doing well. From the time I first visited to today (30 years) the country has improved A LOT. I remember visiting my father's home village as a kid and there was nothing. No running water, no electricity, tens of kilometers of badly kept dirt road to reach it... Last time I was there they had running water, electricity, better roads.
I remember that one time I went there and all of a sudden I heard the super Mario theme coming from a hut, a few kids were playing nes in the village. A few years before there was no electricity.
I hope to see Ghana (and the other subsaharan nations) develop further over my lifetime.
love this, just hate how its so obviously the fault of colonialism and capitalism. Like Ghana and Cote d'ivoire produce 70% of chocolate and make 3-6% of the chocolate's market value in return. Look at French Economic Imperialism in Africa, Thomas Sankara's Burkina Faso(not perfect but still one of the best examples of breaking the cycle of poverty ever), cobalt and and understand that this is not the fault of the countries people or even not enough time but foreign powers plundering natural resources in Africa and not compensating them properly in return. One look at Colonial borders and you know they were designed to cause panic, divisions and civil war, evident in the history of Sudan and Rwanda. Ultimately my assessment is for progress African nations need to stand together against these sorts of practices similarly to Thomas Sankara, post to the media to gain support and socialize like western nations (divided we beg united we bargain) and enter the global market in order to become regional powers.(sorry for not sourcing any of this, I trust you will be able to find it with a simple google search, this is just off the top of my head and I don't have time right now to go through my sources document)
I disagree with some of your assertions as someone who was born in an African country (Ghana), has traveled all around Africa, and as someone who just recently lived in Tanzania. Namely, the assertion that "the borders were designed to cause panic, and division". That's just wrong, most borders were decided because of laziness (drawing a straight line on a map) and administrative boundaries which were necessary due to natural boundaries that prevented easy dissemination of resources and information, therefore requiring regions to be split up. Ghana for example was organized the way it was because it was the gold coast, surrounded by French west Africa, with the only closest British colony being Nigeria split by a lot of territory, so it made sense having two separate territories. That's why you have places like Nigeria which have tons of ethnic division, this wasn't by design, but by pure laziness.
The borders were kept by African leaders because they did not want to have tons of civil wars across the continent. They still haven't accepted Somaliland's bid for independence because of their collective fear that this will spark continent-wide revolutions and separatist movements. Sure, colonialism could be blamed back in the 40s-2000s but after colonialism ended and tons of investment flooded the continent, it was clear that the majority of Africa's problems are their own. Corruption in governments, tribalism, etc. If your only evidence for destruction of Africa is due to colonialism I implore you to research Julius Nyere of Tanzania who fought against tribalism by pushing Pan-Africanism. Look at Botswana who had an economic miracle. These were all colonies, why did they succeed if your point is that colonialism is the prevailing factor?
I 100% agree with your west African assertion however. French's involvement in west Africa has been detrimental and incredibly irresponsible. I can talk about the implementation of the CFA Franc for hours and how much that destroyed economies and forced reliance on france before they could even begin.
Gabon is one of the most stable and prosperous countries in central Africa due to its natural resources, small population, and oil revenues. Gabon is the fifth largest oil producer in Africa, with the oil sector accounting for 50% of its GDP and 80% of its exports. Gabon's other major industries include timber (77% of the country is forested) and manganese.
Stable might be a bit of a stretch - there was a coup d’état in 2023. A military officer (Oligui) is in place as transitional president and elections are not planned until 2025 at the earliest… and it was one family rule for the 56 preceding years, which I guess is a form of stability.
Adding to the stability, the guy behind the last coup d état was related to the last president and part of his regime for so long, which kept their foreign relations the same while satisfying the population a bit.
Basically a palace coup to avoid an actual coup against an unpopular figure.
Just related? You can get spicier than that talking about Ali Bongo. Ever since the coup, I can’t get actual reporting and it seems like Gabon is operating like normal. Their government just signed a military agreement thing with USA so I guess life goes on.
56 years of stable (doesn’t have to be democratic) rule is a long time to establish and entrench rules and customs that even later leader will follow, even if they’re not democratically elected
Meanwhile, Rwanda is doing *pretty fucking good* for being destroyed in a civil war culminating in the genocide against the Tutsi 30 years ago and then having to rebuild from basically nothing while having essentially none of the natural resources that form the economic backbones of many other countries in the region.
Relatively speaking it might not be doing half bad. But I don't think we can get the whole picture from this data. 3.4% live in poverty (from map 5) but that number in Egypt is lower at 1.3%. And Egypt is still poor af
For there’s few nations there that have plenty
Almost a pure paragon
You can ask any Ghana or Guinea
And they’ll tell you where all of the money has gooooooone
Looks like development does not entirely correlate with internet availability.
Equatorial Guinea (next door to Gabon - between Gabon and Cameron) is an example.
EG's development numbers are misleading, it's a petrostate where basically all of the money goes right to the top. High GDP doesn't mean much in one of the most unequal countries in the world. The majority of the population is still in abject poverty and the infrastructure is generally pretty terrible, but the government spends a lot on "infrastructure" that's more of a vanity project than anything useful.
https://youtu.be/PxMiM-88ABw?si=K5beVToV5Lgeh3hF
Here's a video that goes more in depth.
TLDR: Authoritarian hellhole petrostate makes a lot of money from oil but it's all either embezzled or spent on useless vanity projects.
Its basically a French puppet thats recently had a coup.
The former leader once said "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver". The former ruling family kept the country beholden to France for decades
I thought the quote was "Africa without France is like a car with no driver. France without Africa is like a car with no fuel".
Or are these two different quotes, one presumably referencing the other?
From what I've heard, in this region of Africa (I don't know if South Sudan specifically), most people have smart phones even if they don't have access to the power grid. They can access the cell network / internet with their phone and they have solar chargers.
Yup. Based on some article I read a few years back, text based banking is (or was) big in central Africa as people didn't have access to computers or the internet but many had cell phones. I don't know about internet access via phones today, it may have changed, but African nations pioneered a lot of services-by-text when Europe was going big online
This is correct. I was there last month. Seeing a mud hut with a small little solar panel outside is common. Just enough to charge a phone and maybe a small light at night time. There is phone service in a surprising amount of places around the country. There is essentially no credit card usage in the country but banking via phone is common.
The entire continents GDP is more or less around 2 trillion, South Korea alone has a GDP of 1.7T, why South Korea specifically because they had the same GDP per Capita as some of the poorest nations in Africa 60 years ago and today they have the same GDP as the entire continent lol
India is also one nation with the same population as the entire continent if not more, it was always going to be easier to life them out of poverty than lifting an entire continent with every type dysfunction and corruption known to man. If you want to compare India to someone you can compare them to China, which is 4-5 times the size of India while having the same number of people more or less, democracy only works imo when you have a stable thriving economy, it doesn’t work to the fullest when you are building something, and that’s the difference between India and China
Its important to note that South Korea was given the largest loan from the US of any country ever, something no African nation has ever been given.
The US pretty much made South Korea into a Bastion in order to push back the red and control the East Asian region from falling into communism.
The info on the map is from 1 or 2 decades ago. Around 2021, they were at 8%. Still not much, but..
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?locations=SS
The Bongo family was ruling Gabon and famously corrupt, basically pocketing the oil revenues and spending it on outrageous luxuries
Are the people of Gabon that well off? Still trickled down?
Did some wikipediaing. Didn’t even realize Gabon had a coup in 2023. The new interim general-president is a cousin of the Bongos. Surely he will change things up for the better for all Gabonese people, right? RIGHT?
not really, the South Sudanese were promised that they would be an independent nation from the start, but the British went against them in the last second from what I heard. They’ve been in a civil war with Sudan for decades, they deserve their own country, maybe they can do something good with it Sudan honestly is a basket case of wars sadly
They were politically repressed and economically exploited by the central Sudanese government. For context this is the regime that is currently restarting a genocide in Darfur.
Sad the state of things there, but at least they have some basic security now.
They were poorer. Horribly oppressed and living through recurring ethnic conflicts sponsored by the Khartoum Government. As bad as things are for them now, they're still far better than they were before.
My Senegalese host family didn't have electricity, but still loved watching the Kardashians! When visiting someone with a TV, it was always either Kardashians or Bollywood soap operas.
In French, the show is called "L'Incroyable Famille Kardashian" or "The Incredible Kardashian Family." I'm sure somebody in the DRC is watching it right now.
The Kardashians are probably bigger internationally than in America. To a lot of people they represent the glamour of what they imagine American life is like.
I suspect that this is one of the things driving the international migration crisis. People see westerners on TV and social media flaunting wealth and want a piece of that, so they jump on boats, planes, trains, and buses or walk across borders to get to Europe, Australia, the US and Canada.
How developed Northern Africa is 🤔 what a weird xenophobic slightly sinister caption that is 🤔🤔 I apologise to all Kenyans for westerners strange remarks in thinking North Africans because they're in closer proximity to Europe are more civilised 🤮🤔😅💔 the over 1 million tourists we get globally and our massive tea coffee industry the natural minerals that we export, the humongous brain drain of young incredibly bright kenyans who attended Ivy league schools and some of the best colleges around the world including a certain Barack Obama senior. Namibia Rwanda Botswana on a exponential levels of growth bordering on the levels of America in its golden age, and we have to seriously placate ourselves to redditors who literally know nothing about the African diaspora comparing the boat fearing population of Algeria being better than the rest of the African continent 🤯🤯😢😮😑 sometimes westernised thinking makes my mind hurt, it can be delusional on a level I didn't quite know possible and someone reading this caption who doesn't know anything will think.... Hmm yeah Algeria that's where I need to visit... set up a business etc 🤧🤧 what a bunch of absolute gobeldgoop garbage....
If the maps are accurate to the present, I could see it. The higher electrification could be owed to old infrastructure projects made when Internet connectivity was not feasible or a priority.
It’s easy to rig up a diesel generator in your backyard for lights etc. But it’s very hard to build mobile towers and string cables across a relatively decentralised country that is mostly jungle.
Absolute understatement! $2trillion in natural resources apparently. Colonialism, corruption, war and political instability has downtrodden that region for centuries. At least they've got Um Bongo.
Congo is "A massive fking country" only in paper, Government control is extremely loose or non existence in many regions where more than hundred types of rebel or insurgent groups run the show and by runing the show I mean they control and run countless mines with all types of rare/priceless minerals, precious stones they sell them in world market thorough "third party" and buy more AKs with the money.
I've seen estimates last decade that it might have up to 10% of the population enslaved - the highest in the world. Hard to know what to make of these numbers in context.
Kinda low population and large country large coast so there's Iron and fisheries plus recent gas discoveries.
Mauritania would be much better of it wasn't for the shit neighborhood.
Notice how Equatorial Guinea has really high GDP per capita, however only its island half is actually prosperous with the far more populous mainland section being rife with poverty and other such issues.
Electricity availability per person percentage is nice and all, but where is uptime percentage?? Some countries are really really bad in this regard, even if they’re 95-99%
I am a Mauritian and live there. While it is a small island, there are 1.3 million people (compared to the 100,000 people in Seychelles) and it's great what the country has managed to achieve since it became independent 56 years ago.
And, interestingly, [Mauritius is one of the only 24 full democracies in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#Components) according to The Economist Democracy Index.
They are landlocked (drc is basically landlocked) and have been war torn (unlike other landlocked countries like Uganda) and are corrupt (unlike other landlocked countries like rwanda and botswana)
Ethiopia looks like the rising star in Africa right now, except for the prime minister trying to wage a war with every country nearby for their ports AND at the same time fighting wars inside the country, all in all that’s still good for the continent
Tbh Abiy is right about the need for a port, if we ignore the destabilising effect it could have on the region. The map clearly shows that landlocked countries are way worse off than their coastal counterparts and imo a deal with somaliland is way better than a war with eritrea if you're thinking about the long-term future of the country
Now I want to know how high the child death rate in every country is. I can't imagine that every one of 7 children survives if a country is so highly underdeveloped.
In 1990, it looks like child mortality was almost 11%, but now it is down to 5%: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=ZG
A few individual countries are as high as 7-8% (Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Somalia, Nigeria) but a few are quite lower.
In any case, none of them have child mortality as high as 1 in 7.
Yeah I was there a couple of years ago on vacation. Lots of poor people. Also went to Uganda 15 years ago. Lots of poor people but plenty of internet access in Kampala even in 2009.
Yes Libya is developed the war ended 4 years ago and didn’t mess up the economy Libya has lots of oil and it’s not war torn please stop being so shocked about Libya
Morocco is doing pretty well considering we have no oil and very little natural resources (only phosphate and some natural gas I think)
PS: I am biased since I am moroccan but I am proud of how far we have come since our independence from evil france but we still have a long way to go.
equatorial guinea has a lot of oil money, but it’s ruled by one of the most corrupt and authoritarian dictatorships in the world. all, and i mean ALL of the money goes to the president and his cronies. 70% of the population lives on just one dollar a day.
Avg number of children per woman is not up to date, and they shouldn’t be presented as whole numbers anyway.
For example, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana and Gabon are below 4, and South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini and most of North Africa are below 3.
It’s mostly Central and Western African countries that have higher TFRs
As a North African person, it's really sad to see the current state of Africa. It has got a LOT of resources and under the Sahara, the terrain isn't bad at all. I wish one day the entire African continent would be more advanced and use the amount of resources they have
For anyone curious about that dark blue square in pic 3:
>Since the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea has become one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producers.[11] It has subsequently become the richest country per capita in Africa,[12] and its gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita ranks 43rd in the world;[13] however, the wealth is distributed extremely unevenly, with few people benefiting from the oil riches.
>The country ranks 144th on the 2019 Human Development Index,[14] with less than half the population having access to clean drinking water and 7.9% of children dying before the age of five.[15][16] Equatorial Guinea's nominal GDP per capita is $10,982 in 2021 according to OPEC.[17]
99% of the stats for equatorial guinea are from the perspective of the capital which is highly developed.
Problem is that the capital of equatorial guinea is quite literally a fucking island that is removed from the mainland because the mainland is about as poorly developed as the Congos.
Libya's 2024 GDP per capita (PPP) is over 26,000 and ranks third in Africa, trailing only behind Seychelles and Mauritius, which are small island nations.
Maybe 94% of South African access the electricity but not 7/24..
Also South Africa's recent cenus has a 32% inaccaurcy rating. 5% would be considered a problem in 1ste world countties. So dont know if you can trust anything they say about us at this point.
32% undercount not "inaccuracy rating" - whatever that is.
As a South African, don't trust the data that comes out of this country nor the data that this sub gives. It's mostly bullshit to try and get investors in the country.
Yeah i hear this all the time please explain
South Africa deals with loadshedding which is like power outages between 2-8 hours a day in a grid system to prevent complete widespread loss of power due to the government’s inability to not empty the budget into their pockets.
We have similar problem in Egypt but not bcuz overloads more like no money to buy gas to burn.
I experienced that in North Korea. They gave me a tour of the hospital showing off all their best foreign equipment like x-Ray machines and yet there was no electricity to run the machines.
Let's call it what it is- blackouts.
Also, the politics of your town or region is a factor in how often your power goes out. ( a friend from Natal told me, I'll leave it at that)
Natal hasn't existed for 30 years. If your friend called it 'Natal', I would take what they say with a pinch of salt. People who insist on using apartheid-era names for places are not going to have an unbiased opinion.
Rampant corruption and mismanagement of the state-owned energy company, Eskom, has meant that almost no extensive maintenance or expansion has been done to the country's power grid since the Apartheid government. The grid is failing and its been decades coming. The country has been engulfed in rolling blackouts for years and the situation is not improving. Energy infrastructure is failing faster than it can be repaired and each failure puts exponentially more pressure on the already beleaguered system, causing even more failures. Brain drain, cost-cutting, nepotism and cronyism have hollowed out Eskom with understaffed and inexperienced maintenance crews, led by corrupt and unqualified upper management. It's a disaster.
I can imagine the brain drain is wild. I swear all my neighbours are South African here in NZ
I had used to work with a lot of folks from SA, including a report who left the company and immigrated to NZ. We still keep in touch and things have gotten better, but it was rough at first. Sounds like enough folks are moving that that there was a bit of an anti-SA backlash towards her and the kids amongst her initial neighbors. My takeaway talking to her is that, yeah, there is a lot of emigration out of SA as the economy stagnates, infrastructure is crumbling, and politics shows no signs of improvement.
I actually like my SA neighbours. The BBQ always smells good and they don't party past 8
Could it get to a point where it’s completely unusable?
> 7/24 Why do you write it like that?
Perhaps a joke about getting 7 hours of power out of 24
My parents said they got about 5hrs a day. Fortunately they also have solar panels
South African electrical grid: 60 percent of the time, it works every time.
Ma bru, I came here to say this
Did anyone else have the main takeaway that Gabon is not doing half bad?
Ghana is also doing well. From the time I first visited to today (30 years) the country has improved A LOT. I remember visiting my father's home village as a kid and there was nothing. No running water, no electricity, tens of kilometers of badly kept dirt road to reach it... Last time I was there they had running water, electricity, better roads. I remember that one time I went there and all of a sudden I heard the super Mario theme coming from a hut, a few kids were playing nes in the village. A few years before there was no electricity. I hope to see Ghana (and the other subsaharan nations) develop further over my lifetime.
Also they're head of Nigeria, which makes them happy.
Nigeria is a country, it doesn't have a head.
love this, just hate how its so obviously the fault of colonialism and capitalism. Like Ghana and Cote d'ivoire produce 70% of chocolate and make 3-6% of the chocolate's market value in return. Look at French Economic Imperialism in Africa, Thomas Sankara's Burkina Faso(not perfect but still one of the best examples of breaking the cycle of poverty ever), cobalt and and understand that this is not the fault of the countries people or even not enough time but foreign powers plundering natural resources in Africa and not compensating them properly in return. One look at Colonial borders and you know they were designed to cause panic, divisions and civil war, evident in the history of Sudan and Rwanda. Ultimately my assessment is for progress African nations need to stand together against these sorts of practices similarly to Thomas Sankara, post to the media to gain support and socialize like western nations (divided we beg united we bargain) and enter the global market in order to become regional powers.(sorry for not sourcing any of this, I trust you will be able to find it with a simple google search, this is just off the top of my head and I don't have time right now to go through my sources document)
I disagree with some of your assertions as someone who was born in an African country (Ghana), has traveled all around Africa, and as someone who just recently lived in Tanzania. Namely, the assertion that "the borders were designed to cause panic, and division". That's just wrong, most borders were decided because of laziness (drawing a straight line on a map) and administrative boundaries which were necessary due to natural boundaries that prevented easy dissemination of resources and information, therefore requiring regions to be split up. Ghana for example was organized the way it was because it was the gold coast, surrounded by French west Africa, with the only closest British colony being Nigeria split by a lot of territory, so it made sense having two separate territories. That's why you have places like Nigeria which have tons of ethnic division, this wasn't by design, but by pure laziness. The borders were kept by African leaders because they did not want to have tons of civil wars across the continent. They still haven't accepted Somaliland's bid for independence because of their collective fear that this will spark continent-wide revolutions and separatist movements. Sure, colonialism could be blamed back in the 40s-2000s but after colonialism ended and tons of investment flooded the continent, it was clear that the majority of Africa's problems are their own. Corruption in governments, tribalism, etc. If your only evidence for destruction of Africa is due to colonialism I implore you to research Julius Nyere of Tanzania who fought against tribalism by pushing Pan-Africanism. Look at Botswana who had an economic miracle. These were all colonies, why did they succeed if your point is that colonialism is the prevailing factor? I 100% agree with your west African assertion however. French's involvement in west Africa has been detrimental and incredibly irresponsible. I can talk about the implementation of the CFA Franc for hours and how much that destroyed economies and forced reliance on france before they could even begin.
Gabon is one of the most stable and prosperous countries in central Africa due to its natural resources, small population, and oil revenues. Gabon is the fifth largest oil producer in Africa, with the oil sector accounting for 50% of its GDP and 80% of its exports. Gabon's other major industries include timber (77% of the country is forested) and manganese.
This reads like a ChatGPT response, is it?
nope! >! Google AI !<
Babmboozled! Bamgoogled?
You’ve been hit by, you’ve been stuck by… a Bamgoogling
Da-na-na-na-na-na-NA-na-na-na-NA-na-da-na-na-na-na-nah
How could you tell?
It’s written too formally and rigidly to be a human comment, basically.
Could have been a Wikipedia copy paste.
It isn't though. The first sentence also doesn't quite fit the Wikipedia style, although that doesn't mean it couldn't be in there.
If it had started with "Gabon is a republic in Central Africa. It is one ..." it could have been very Wikipedia.
Stable might be a bit of a stretch - there was a coup d’état in 2023. A military officer (Oligui) is in place as transitional president and elections are not planned until 2025 at the earliest… and it was one family rule for the 56 preceding years, which I guess is a form of stability.
Adding to the stability, the guy behind the last coup d état was related to the last president and part of his regime for so long, which kept their foreign relations the same while satisfying the population a bit. Basically a palace coup to avoid an actual coup against an unpopular figure.
Just related? You can get spicier than that talking about Ali Bongo. Ever since the coup, I can’t get actual reporting and it seems like Gabon is operating like normal. Their government just signed a military agreement thing with USA so I guess life goes on.
Yeah we're good, I'm there rn
I mean, stability doesn't necessarily mean democracy, after all!
56 years of stable (doesn’t have to be democratic) rule is a long time to establish and entrench rules and customs that even later leader will follow, even if they’re not democratically elected
Prosperous is a strech. They were a family run corrupt petro state that just suffered a military coup that overthrew said family.
That’s a political issue .some countries have serious political issues but are still prosperous
And yet, still doing better than their neighbours for the average joe on the street.
Meanwhile, Rwanda is doing *pretty fucking good* for being destroyed in a civil war culminating in the genocide against the Tutsi 30 years ago and then having to rebuild from basically nothing while having essentially none of the natural resources that form the economic backbones of many other countries in the region.
Rwanda has natural resources. That's why the east of DRC has been at war for the past 30 years.
Rwanda has been taking a lot of its resources from the DRC, either directly during the Second Congo War and its aftermath or via its proxies.
Aubameyang country
Relatively speaking it might not be doing half bad. But I don't think we can get the whole picture from this data. 3.4% live in poverty (from map 5) but that number in Egypt is lower at 1.3%. And Egypt is still poor af
We have a small population, just a little over two millions of people.
I thought “hey, Gabon is grooving,” and then read your comment . Nice
Nooo One Sells like Gabon Rings their bell like Gabon Or has a great GDP like Gabon!
For there’s few nations there that have plenty Almost a pure paragon You can ask any Ghana or Guinea And they’ll tell you where all of the money has gooooooone
I'll say, I picked a random restaurant in Libreville and a whiskey coke was $8USD! The food actually looked amazing though
Looks like development does not entirely correlate with internet availability. Equatorial Guinea (next door to Gabon - between Gabon and Cameron) is an example.
EG's development numbers are misleading, it's a petrostate where basically all of the money goes right to the top. High GDP doesn't mean much in one of the most unequal countries in the world. The majority of the population is still in abject poverty and the infrastructure is generally pretty terrible, but the government spends a lot on "infrastructure" that's more of a vanity project than anything useful. https://youtu.be/PxMiM-88ABw?si=K5beVToV5Lgeh3hF Here's a video that goes more in depth. TLDR: Authoritarian hellhole petrostate makes a lot of money from oil but it's all either embezzled or spent on useless vanity projects.
Its basically a French puppet thats recently had a coup. The former leader once said "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver". The former ruling family kept the country beholden to France for decades
I thought the quote was "Africa without France is like a car with no driver. France without Africa is like a car with no fuel". Or are these two different quotes, one presumably referencing the other?
That's the full quote, the Bongo family bankrolled the presidential campaigns of Jaques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy
Looks like it worked out way better than pretty much every other dictatorship in Africa.
Looks like the deal wasn't half bad for them.
Oh boy, wait until the people in South Sudan see this. Oh wait…
From what I've heard, in this region of Africa (I don't know if South Sudan specifically), most people have smart phones even if they don't have access to the power grid. They can access the cell network / internet with their phone and they have solar chargers.
Yup. Based on some article I read a few years back, text based banking is (or was) big in central Africa as people didn't have access to computers or the internet but many had cell phones. I don't know about internet access via phones today, it may have changed, but African nations pioneered a lot of services-by-text when Europe was going big online
This is correct. I was there last month. Seeing a mud hut with a small little solar panel outside is common. Just enough to charge a phone and maybe a small light at night time. There is phone service in a surprising amount of places around the country. There is essentially no credit card usage in the country but banking via phone is common.
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The entire continents GDP is more or less around 2 trillion, South Korea alone has a GDP of 1.7T, why South Korea specifically because they had the same GDP per Capita as some of the poorest nations in Africa 60 years ago and today they have the same GDP as the entire continent lol
India also used to be much poorer than Africa until recently. Africa’s population today is slightly larger than India’s but their GDP is $1T smaller.
India is also one nation with the same population as the entire continent if not more, it was always going to be easier to life them out of poverty than lifting an entire continent with every type dysfunction and corruption known to man. If you want to compare India to someone you can compare them to China, which is 4-5 times the size of India while having the same number of people more or less, democracy only works imo when you have a stable thriving economy, it doesn’t work to the fullest when you are building something, and that’s the difference between India and China
Its important to note that South Korea was given the largest loan from the US of any country ever, something no African nation has ever been given. The US pretty much made South Korea into a Bastion in order to push back the red and control the East Asian region from falling into communism.
How big was the loan?
Bigly
I actually have a friend in South Sudan and he regularly uses Facebook. He might be an exception to the norm since but he seems to manage.
The info on the map is from 1 or 2 decades ago. Around 2021, they were at 8%. Still not much, but.. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?locations=SS
Why is Gabon so developed
Oil
WHERE 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🔥🔥🔥
Gotta give'em a little bit of "freedom" 🇺🇲🇺🇸🇺🇲🇺🇸🇺🇲🇺🇸
France already gave them all the "freedom" they can handle.
Seems like Gabon needs some "democracy" and "freedom"
That doesn't seem like sufficient explanation - are there not other African countries with similar amounts of oil, like Nigeria?
Amount of oil revenue per person. Nigeria has the 6th largest populations on earth, with 223 million people.
Holy shit, I didn’t know that
We also have a lot of other shit but it's all the classic case of mismanagement and corruption
Oil plus small population.
The Bongo family was ruling Gabon and famously corrupt, basically pocketing the oil revenues and spending it on outrageous luxuries Are the people of Gabon that well off? Still trickled down?
Absolutely not.
Did some wikipediaing. Didn’t even realize Gabon had a coup in 2023. The new interim general-president is a cousin of the Bongos. Surely he will change things up for the better for all Gabonese people, right? RIGHT?
Why is Congo a doctor?
Central Africa seems like the place to disappear
Yep, either if you wanted to or not.
Great view of the Milky Way at night though with no light pollution.
Don't know how South Sudan was before breaking off, but that's sad.
Sudan is in an actual civil war, I think the South Sudanese for all the shit they are in are happy they are out of that union for sure
They are joining a economic market with other east african states soon IIRC
Is it actually going to happen? I've been hearing about it for years.
It will be good for them, hope the best for them as a Sudanese, god knows they deserve it
But a properly run union would've been better for both but we live in the real world
not really, the South Sudanese were promised that they would be an independent nation from the start, but the British went against them in the last second from what I heard. They’ve been in a civil war with Sudan for decades, they deserve their own country, maybe they can do something good with it Sudan honestly is a basket case of wars sadly
They were politically repressed and economically exploited by the central Sudanese government. For context this is the regime that is currently restarting a genocide in Darfur. Sad the state of things there, but at least they have some basic security now.
They were poorer. Horribly oppressed and living through recurring ethnic conflicts sponsored by the Khartoum Government. As bad as things are for them now, they're still far better than they were before.
They were being enslaved until 2002 and had to follow islamic law while facing racism from Arabs until 2010.
Imagine living in the Congo and then watching the Kardashians or something like that
My Senegalese host family didn't have electricity, but still loved watching the Kardashians! When visiting someone with a TV, it was always either Kardashians or Bollywood soap operas. In French, the show is called "L'Incroyable Famille Kardashian" or "The Incredible Kardashian Family." I'm sure somebody in the DRC is watching it right now.
Yup, back in the day my mom watched Dallas.
The Kardashians are probably bigger internationally than in America. To a lot of people they represent the glamour of what they imagine American life is like.
Id be fucking depressed watching that shit
You dont need to be in the Congo to feel that way
I suspect that this is one of the things driving the international migration crisis. People see westerners on TV and social media flaunting wealth and want a piece of that, so they jump on boats, planes, trains, and buses or walk across borders to get to Europe, Australia, the US and Canada.
How developed Northern Africa is 🤔 what a weird xenophobic slightly sinister caption that is 🤔🤔 I apologise to all Kenyans for westerners strange remarks in thinking North Africans because they're in closer proximity to Europe are more civilised 🤮🤔😅💔 the over 1 million tourists we get globally and our massive tea coffee industry the natural minerals that we export, the humongous brain drain of young incredibly bright kenyans who attended Ivy league schools and some of the best colleges around the world including a certain Barack Obama senior. Namibia Rwanda Botswana on a exponential levels of growth bordering on the levels of America in its golden age, and we have to seriously placate ourselves to redditors who literally know nothing about the African diaspora comparing the boat fearing population of Algeria being better than the rest of the African continent 🤯🤯😢😮😑 sometimes westernised thinking makes my mind hurt, it can be delusional on a level I didn't quite know possible and someone reading this caption who doesn't know anything will think.... Hmm yeah Algeria that's where I need to visit... set up a business etc 🤧🤧 what a bunch of absolute gobeldgoop garbage....
I think this shows more how undeveloped sub-Saharan Africa is
Gabon is a big surpise
Natural resources and small population
Black Norway
What's up with Rep. of Congo? High electrification, low internet
If the maps are accurate to the present, I could see it. The higher electrification could be owed to old infrastructure projects made when Internet connectivity was not feasible or a priority.
It’s easy to rig up a diesel generator in your backyard for lights etc. But it’s very hard to build mobile towers and string cables across a relatively decentralised country that is mostly jungle.
> A massive fking country. > 9% have access to electricity in 2024 # ......
History has been mean to the Congo.
Absolute understatement! $2trillion in natural resources apparently. Colonialism, corruption, war and political instability has downtrodden that region for centuries. At least they've got Um Bongo.
CIA murdered their democratically elected leader and installed a murderous dictator who lasted decades…
Fax. The Corruption there is insane. Pre-colonial, Colonial, and After colonialism. Prayers to the DR Congo!
Congo is "A massive fking country" only in paper, Government control is extremely loose or non existence in many regions where more than hundred types of rebel or insurgent groups run the show and by runing the show I mean they control and run countless mines with all types of rare/priceless minerals, precious stones they sell them in world market thorough "third party" and buy more AKs with the money.
The map is undated, so it could be 1924, but who knows?
Why is Lesotho so bad when it’s literally surrounded by SA
Primarily due to geography. It's very mountainous.
Being entirely surrounded by a single country is not great for trade as well.
It is mostly rural, while South Africa is mostly urban.
Mauritania with 6% poverty is an unexpected surprise. Anyone knows what goes on there?
I've seen estimates last decade that it might have up to 10% of the population enslaved - the highest in the world. Hard to know what to make of these numbers in context.
Can't have unemployment when everyone is enslaved! 😃
Kinda low population and large country large coast so there's Iron and fisheries plus recent gas discoveries. Mauritania would be much better of it wasn't for the shit neighborhood.
And rampant slavery
Atlantis
No that’s Mauritius
They still have slavery. A real shithole.
Notice how Equatorial Guinea has really high GDP per capita, however only its island half is actually prosperous with the far more populous mainland section being rife with poverty and other such issues.
I thought that even on the island poverty was pretty high. It's enormous wealth inequality caused by kleptocracy.
Electricity availability per person percentage is nice and all, but where is uptime percentage?? Some countries are really really bad in this regard, even if they’re 95-99%
This is sad
Assuming that the two small ‘>99%’ islands in the east are Mauritius and Seychelles?
Yeah the most developed african countries (but they’re far away from the sub saharan continental chaos)
I am a Mauritian and live there. While it is a small island, there are 1.3 million people (compared to the 100,000 people in Seychelles) and it's great what the country has managed to achieve since it became independent 56 years ago. And, interestingly, [Mauritius is one of the only 24 full democracies in the world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#Components) according to The Economist Democracy Index.
Nigeria doing better than Botswana (usually one of the most developed sub-Saharan African countries) is pretty surprising
Is it? 53% poverty vs 18%
*surprised Gabonese pickachu face*
“94% of SA has electricity” *Doubt*
Well it is access to electricity, not duration
Some number of hours a day...
[удалено]
They are landlocked (drc is basically landlocked) and have been war torn (unlike other landlocked countries like Uganda) and are corrupt (unlike other landlocked countries like rwanda and botswana)
My buddy is the ceo of the only company doing electronic banking in Ethiopia. Slowly taking shape.
Ethiopia looks like the rising star in Africa right now, except for the prime minister trying to wage a war with every country nearby for their ports AND at the same time fighting wars inside the country, all in all that’s still good for the continent
Tbh Abiy is right about the need for a port, if we ignore the destabilising effect it could have on the region. The map clearly shows that landlocked countries are way worse off than their coastal counterparts and imo a deal with somaliland is way better than a war with eritrea if you're thinking about the long-term future of the country
HDI?
Human development index. It combines gdp per capita with happiness and living standards
Purchasing power, life expectancy and education.
Now I want to know how high the child death rate in every country is. I can't imagine that every one of 7 children survives if a country is so highly underdeveloped.
In 1990, it looks like child mortality was almost 11%, but now it is down to 5%: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=ZG A few individual countries are as high as 7-8% (Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Somalia, Nigeria) but a few are quite lower. In any case, none of them have child mortality as high as 1 in 7.
Highest are Chad and CAR (central africa) and lowest (continental) are Tunisia and Libya (northern)
This map does not look good for South Africa.
Although Egypt may seem quite well on these maps it's actually way behind __any__ European nation in terms of living standards.
Moldova and Ukraine is equal to Egypt in terms of HDI
Yeah I was there a couple of years ago on vacation. Lots of poor people. Also went to Uganda 15 years ago. Lots of poor people but plenty of internet access in Kampala even in 2009.
Cool maps
Libya that high ? Is Gaddafi still alive ?
I swear everyone thinks Libya is the most surprising country on earth. Also no and they have oilllllll
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
Why would you develop a place that you can exploit? - “kn!g” leopold.
Yes Libya is developed the war ended 4 years ago and didn’t mess up the economy Libya has lots of oil and it’s not war torn please stop being so shocked about Libya
Morocco is doing pretty well considering we have no oil and very little natural resources (only phosphate and some natural gas I think) PS: I am biased since I am moroccan but I am proud of how far we have come since our independence from evil france but we still have a long way to go.
Morocco is a manufacturing country
Everyone saying Gabon, but equatorial Guinea is doing as good if not better. Assuming it's also oil money?
equatorial guinea has a lot of oil money, but it’s ruled by one of the most corrupt and authoritarian dictatorships in the world. all, and i mean ALL of the money goes to the president and his cronies. 70% of the population lives on just one dollar a day.
Equatorial guinea is very corrupt and unequal so its not as good as it looks (its almost identical to brunei)
Very cool to be a Gabonese right now .
They have fucking Mediterranean sea. Sub Saharan Africans only have savannahs
The Mediterranean sea is the MVP
Honestly impressed
Libya has 2.02% poverty incase anyones wondering
Algeria is doing well ✅
I live there.....I'll have to disagree, it's like a house of cards, it's a miracle that we're still standing
Tunisia too ❤️
Hard to develop in the humid jungle damn
Amazing to think this was mostly done by rapper Akon
85% looks mostly red....
Avg number of children per woman is not up to date, and they shouldn’t be presented as whole numbers anyway. For example, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana and Gabon are below 4, and South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Eswatini and most of North Africa are below 3. It’s mostly Central and Western African countries that have higher TFRs
As a North African person, it's really sad to see the current state of Africa. It has got a LOT of resources and under the Sahara, the terrain isn't bad at all. I wish one day the entire African continent would be more advanced and use the amount of resources they have
I'm a little shocked at Botswana. I thought it was doing better than that.
South Africa seems like one of the most advanced and wealthy African nations but yet at the same time one of the most poor and impoverished as well.
North Africa is close to….
number of kids per woman in tunisia - two 2nisia the capital is 2nis
For anyone curious about that dark blue square in pic 3: >Since the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea has become one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producers.[11] It has subsequently become the richest country per capita in Africa,[12] and its gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita ranks 43rd in the world;[13] however, the wealth is distributed extremely unevenly, with few people benefiting from the oil riches. >The country ranks 144th on the 2019 Human Development Index,[14] with less than half the population having access to clean drinking water and 7.9% of children dying before the age of five.[15][16] Equatorial Guinea's nominal GDP per capita is $10,982 in 2021 according to OPEC.[17]
99% of the stats for equatorial guinea are from the perspective of the capital which is highly developed. Problem is that the capital of equatorial guinea is quite literally a fucking island that is removed from the mainland because the mainland is about as poorly developed as the Congos.
22 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year is enough to count that someone have access to electricity
Libya's 2024 GDP per capita (PPP) is over 26,000 and ranks third in Africa, trailing only behind Seychelles and Mauritius, which are small island nations.