If there was an 'Africa', 'natural' resources would not save her
My response to the question: Why are African leaders blind to the power of natural resources they possess and keep enslaving their people for money?
The images below are snapshots of global trade in 2023, courtesy of the WTO.
This image represents exports from Africa, Asia, the Commonwealth of Independent States (Russia, Belarus and the Stans), Europe, the Middle East, North America, South & Central America.
China, the USA, Germany and the Netherlands sell the most globally.
Below is a snapshot of global imports.
Countries like the USA, China and Germany are some of the largest consumers of global resources. African countries, in contrast, are minnows on both ends.
Your envisioned powerful natural resources are absent in the data. The CIS countries don’t have up to 300 million people. They’re also primarily commodities exporters. Yet, they produce nearly as much as the more than 1 billion people in the 54 countries of the continent. Similarly, eyeball Saudi Arabia (the purple rectangle in the Middle East). Notice how no African country sells or buys as much as the Saudis and their grand population of 36 million souls? How would you describe the commodities Russia and Saudi Arabia possess compared to the powerful natural resources you see? Are they supreme, preeminent, or unrivalled?
Scarcity is the fundamental problem that most African countries confront. Their needs outweigh their means. Yet, there is a conspiracy of silence between officials and their supposed critics who prefer to indulge in fantasies dreamt up by 19th-century fiction writers trying to make a buck.
Make peace with the reality that there are no secret mines in Africa that’ll make your fortune or that there is even a political actor called Africa in the first place! The Namibians, all three million of them, will be exploiting one of the more lucrative gas field finds in recent times by the end of the decade. Whatever they do with their proceeds from that venture is for Namibians to decide. All 123m Ethiopians whose largest export (out of $4bn total) is $2bn worth of coffee beans will not Africa must unite their way to even a kobo(!) of that money. Even if they could, $10 billion per annum is $3,300 in the pockets of 3 million. In the pockets of 126m, it’s $79. Congrats on natural resourcing your way back to poverty.
Further, your basic premise is false: natural resources are worthless. It’s their artificial byproducts that matter. Further, the level of human impact on the environment separates wealthy countries from poor ones. The United States of America is the most prosperous large country in the world, and I doubt there is any place still natural in that country.
A determination to master one’s environment and bend it to the human will is the first step up the rung of prosperity and might. Honesty doesn’t solve any problem, but it won’t worsen it. A soaked person must first identify whether the rain or sweat made them wet. Obviously, a fan and a roof solve entirely different problems. So, if they prefer lies to honesty, it’s possible to waste time and resources investing in a solution to a completely different problem than what they face.