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I am an African but I dislike the African mentality and this is one of the reasons why they can't live up to the standard if the developed countries, sometimes I just laughed at us, when ever I come across some saying that we are free from the colonial masters of slavery and the rest, but the truth is are we truly free, freedom means being free in your domain and taking charge of everything that you have and being responsible for them.
Here are my reasons, in Africa, we are blessed with diverse natural resources in abundance and yet we depend on the foreign countries to help in defining them, do you know that cars are imported to African, same applies as phones and many other standards electronics, machines and devices we make use of, I got to discover that the mobile phones we use do have Sim card chip, which serves as a connector from the phone to the area network, and this sim card chips were made of gold which many don't seem to realized, we sold to foreign countries our natural resources very cheap and they utilize them in the production of many items we still come to buy from them very expensive, just to mention few, there are many in the same manner that exists.
The tragedy is, Africa sells gold, cobalt, lithium, oil (you name it) and then purchases the finished product at 10X the price. That is not a lack of resources, it is a lack of processing power, industry, and long-term vision. And, as you correctly point out, foreign powers understand this cycle well, and have regulated the rules so that Africa remains the supplier, never the builder
But other countries like China are filling the same vacuum that Europe used to fill, but with new tools. Loans, infrastructure, and partnerships which appear as "win-win" but which keep people in a state of dependency. So how do we break the cycle? Maybe it begins with governments developing real midstream industries, not just selling raw rocks. Or even regional groupings, so that African countries stop competing with each other to offer the lowest export price