why everyone is wrong about what Africa needs to do and what it actually needs to do

lots of people love to talk about what Africa economically needs to do. they love to talk about how much Africa needs to industrialize and become a part of the global "line-go-up-and-to-the-right" obsession

lots of people talk about these things and they are all very wrong

what they mean is basically zooming in and focusing on how it can best contribute to the global economic engine, and trying to catch up with the "developed world" in GDP per capita terms as quickly as it can

this is what it means to them for a society to make it

in practice, what this means is narrowly focusing on the highest-quantity goods/services it can best produce for the world, and importing everything else from other countries who also narrowly focus on what they supposedly are best at

this entire system as it currently works is in the hand of the biggest, most powerful players who then use their economic and attendant political might to cleverly impose certain ideas on your society/get you to act in their own interest, irrespective of what that means for you

they can own you in a sense, depending on how much leverage you have

one other thing it means is becoming exactly like the West is becoming:

morally degenerate, and declining, with certain death to come because of cultural degradation certain to happen when there are no concrete, long-term civilizational goals and mindless consumption is the only thing people live for

Africa's industrialization ideally has to be about pursuing its own definite and specific goals, not plugging into the global economic chain to get wealthy so as to be as consumerist as everyone else

what Africa specifically needs right now for example is to locally and independently solve its basic material problems around food, clothing and shelter. it doesn't matter if it's cheaper to import from an existing mass producer from across the world

your basic material needs should not be dependent on being in some other nation/supra-nation's political good favor, or for their superior technological sophistication

the long-term costs of that are civilizationally ruinous

because real life is a complex system, trying to solve these basic material problems (food, clothing, shelter etc) comes with other things like developing attendant transportation, communication, security etc competencies

so this is the immediate thing Africa needs to do: independently and locally solve problems around basic material needs entirely for its own sake, not whatever nonsense your favorite economist likes to spout