There is a story many Africans tell themselves.
It goes like this: “We cannot prosper because the West will not let us. The system is rigged. When our leaders try to develop, they get removed.”
I am not here to say that nothing bad was ever done to Africa. Unjust things happened. Colonial powers carved up the continent and left behind extractive institutions. The Cold War turned African nations into pawns.
But here is what also matters: Africa is not the only place this happened to. Asia was colonized. Latin America was colonized. Vietnam was literally bombed into rubble. These regions suffered enormously at the hands of Western powers, and many of them found a way forward anyway.
The question is not whether Africa was wronged. It was. The question is whether that history must be a permanent sentence — or whether it can be what it was for Vietnam, Botswana, and Mauritius: a painful chapter that ended when better choices began.
What about Vietnam?
Vietnam was not merely “interfered with” by the West. It was bombed for over a decade. Millions died. The country was physically destroyed. After the war, the United States imposed a total trade embargo that lasted until 1994.
If Western interference is what keeps countries poor, Vietnam should be the poorest nation on earth.
Instead, it is one of the great economic success stories of the last forty years. In 1986, facing 700% inflation and chronic food shortages, Vietnam launched the Doi Moi reforms — opening markets, welcoming investment, and allowing private enterprise. A country that could not feed itself exported 1.4 million tons of rice by 1989. GDP per capita went from roughly $100 to over $4,700 today. Poverty dropped from over 70 percent to around 2 to 3 percent under the national poverty line.
Vietnam did not achieve this by blaming America for the war. It achieved this by changing its own economic policies. The same country America tried to destroy is now one of its largest trade partners.
The proof is here
Now let’s look at Africa itself, because we do not even need to leave the continent to find the evidence.
When Botswana gained independence in 1966, it was one of the poorest countries on the planet with 12 kilometers of paved road, only 22 university graduates, and a budget dependent on British aid. Its first president, Seretse Khama, chose a different path from most post-independence African leaders. He adopted low taxes, liberalized trade, protected property rights, fought corruption, and negotiated a 50-50 split with De Beers on diamond revenues. He reinvested in infrastructure, healthcare, and education.
Botswana was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies after 1966, with rapid growth sustained for about three decades. Khama governed until his death from natural causes in 1980. Nobody stopped him, and nobody overthrew him. He built, and his country got more prosperous.
Then there is Mauritius. In 1961, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade predicted the island would fail because Mauritius was “too small, too remote, too dependent on sugar.” Instead, the country opened export processing zones, attracted investment, invested in education, and maintained fiscal discipline. Per capita income went from under $1,000 in the 1970s to roughly $12,000 today. A comparative study between Mauritius and Senegal, two countries with similar colonial backgrounds and political stability, found that the divergence comes down largely to policy choices. Mauritius averaged 3.6 percent per capita growth since independence while Senegal averaged 0.6 percent.
“But they kill our leaders”
This is the objection I hear more than any other: “The West kills any African leader who tries to develop the continent.”
It comes up every single time. And I understand why people believe it, because there is a real history behind it. African leaders have been overthrown and assassinated with Western involvement. That happened, and I’m not here to pretend it didn’t.
That said, I need you to actually ask yourself a question. Were any of those leaders killed for opening markets? Were any of them killed for lowering tariffs, simplifying a tax code, attracting investment, or making it easier for ordinary people to start a business?
The answer is no. Every single case, when you actually look at what happened, comes back to Cold War geopolitics. Ideological alignments, superpower rivalries, things that had nothing to do with building a free economy.
Now think about who wasn’t killed. Seretse Khama liberalized Botswana’s economy, welcomed foreign investment, protected property rights, and governed peacefully until he died of natural causes. Nobody touched him. Mauritius dropped trade barriers, opened export processing zones, and built one of the freest economies in Africa. No coup, no assassination, no foreign intervention. Rwanda has climbed into the top tier of African countries for business environment and ease of doing business, and nobody has tried to stop that.
Give me one name. One African leader who pursued genuine economic liberalization and was killed by the West for it. Just one.
There isn’t one. Because it has never happened.
The leaders who were targeted were targeted over ideological conflicts and geopolitical power struggles. The leaders who focused on building open, growing economies were left alone to do exactly that. And they prospered.
So the real question was never whether the West would allow Africa to develop. It’s whether we’ll choose the policies that actually create prosperity. Again, every time an African leader has made that choice, nobody stopped them.
Everyone wins
Here is what people on every continent should understand: a prosperous Africa is not a threat to anyone. It is an opportunity for everyone.
A rich Africa would add 1.4 billion consumers to the global market, which means more demand, more trade, and more business for everyone. It would also mean African entrepreneurs solving African problems at scale, then exporting those solutions abroad. And as living standards rise, the pressure that poverty puts on migration systems falls.
Today, millions of Africans leave the continent each year because earning a decent living at home is too hard. They leave families, languages, cultures, and communities behind, not out of adventure, but because opportunity is elsewhere. That is not the kind of movement people celebrate. It is economic exile.
Someone once said it perfectly:
I want to live in a world where people leave their countries out of taste, not out of hunger.
That is what economic freedom makes possible. People move because they are curious, ambitious, or simply in love with another place, not because their hometown cannot offer a future. A Senegalese engineer chooses Montreal because she likes the city and the work. A Nigerian developer stays in Lagos because Lagos is where the best options are.
This is not mystery. When the rules stop treating builders like suspects, prosperity shows up fast. When the rules reward work, investment, and honesty, people stop feeling like they have to run away to breathe.
Vietnam proved it. Botswana proved it. Mauritius proved it.
So what exactly are we waiting for?
What is stopping Africans from being rich might have been colonialism once (that is true in some cases but not true in all) but post-independance gpovernments with exceptions that include those the author mentions. Many African leaders post-independance blindly followed Western radical socialism or resurrected African neo-monarchial systems. These were not based on traditionalism like say Eswatini but in one case, on Napoleon Bonaparte! Bokassa the First. Or else on personality clurtsists like Mobutu, Said Baree, Mugabe and so many others, some like Nguema in Eqiatorial Guinea, extraordinarily murderous. Others devolved into pure kleptocracies.
Africa will not become rich until African states trade amongst themselves, based upon individuually distinct free economies that utilize competitive advantage. Wiith governments that encourage pluralism and democratic processes , open economic incentives andfsound plans. Not just trade more with Europe, Asia or the Orient. The author will probably generate many negative comments with an article like this that repudiates the idea of Africans as perpetual victims of others. But it is a timely and refreshing one.
There are pictures of Hiroshima and Detroit in the late 1940s (after the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima) and in the early 2000s. In the 1940s Hiroshima was rubble and Detroit was flourishing. Now, it's the opposite.