Flags and Freedoms in Africa: Why Africa is the Way it is

For which particular reason Africa belongs to Sad-World, that is, place worse than Third-World? After all, Africa is blessed with all sorts of natural resources. You name it, it is found in Africa. Yet, Africa is 'the dark continent', fraught with all kinds of misery, most of which have been forgotten in the 'civilized' world. 

'Civil wars', the farthest you will ever find a war being civil, are staged in Africa. The more resourceful the African country is, the more prone it is to civil war. Talk of the old Oil Curse... but only in Africa. Elsewhere, striking 'the black gold' usually is a harbinger of good fortunes to come. In Africa, not necessarily.

Why?

What do the other, First-World nations, have, that Africans do not?

In a few 'developed' nations I have been lucky to visit, I have not seen anything strange upon arrival. The landscape appeared 'normal' -- nothing I would not have seen in my home nation. Even after longer stays I never saw something, anything, that was the top-secret natural thing that separates wealthy 'Northern' nations from our destitute 'Southern' countries.

Are the Northerners perhaps more intelligent than we in the global South? With objective data one might be able to answer this question, especially when comparing populations to populations. But on individual levels, when we compare intelligent Southerners and intelligent Northerners, there appears little or no difference. Southerners who immigrate to the Western nations, and assimilate to their culture, do not fare much differently from other ethnic groups. Do they?

So, what is it then that separates developed world from African developing nations?

Freedoms.

African rulers conflate national independence with personal freedoms. As long as an African nation got rid of some colonial power decades ago, a particular day is celebrated each year as a marker of when the 'people of this nation became free'. Celebration of 'self-rule'.  

The jump from national independence to personal freedoms is designed to make the populace feel they are now freer just because the rulers du jour appear of the same skin tone as the majority. However, the rulers could point out few, if any, freedoms conferred to an individual as a result of national independence from colonialism. 

Most freedoms Africans enjoy today are a result of government inefficiency in enforcing its own rules. In all areas where the government reach is practically absent, people thrive on their own. Where the government tentacles reach, freedoms sublime.

A quote allegedly attributed to Idd Amin of Uganda, 'I guarantee freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech', appears to be the motto by many African rulers. 

Freedom of (own-body, political, religious) speech is not comparable to what (used to be?) the Northerners enjoy. Property rights and other individual freedoms also cannot stand meeting government nanny-state policies and procedures.

Even when we have well-meaning, popular leaders with good intentions, they seem unable to escape the trap of limiting individual freedoms.

While freedom in Africa continues to mean flag independence from some boogeyman colonial power, and the real freedom of people to go on living independent of the government is thwarted, development in Africa will continue to lag other continents.