Poorer Africa

Moeletsi Mbeki deputy chairman of the SA Institute of International Affairs stated that "...The average African is poorer than during the age of colonialism..." with goverments "....wasting money on enormous entourages of civil servants...while China had lifted some 400,000 people out of poverty in the past 20 years, Nigeria had pushed 71 million people below the poverty line...",BBC. Referring to the empowerment/redistribution model in South Africa he makes an observation that is relevant to Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole "...instead of devoting their energies to creating new companies, to creating new products, to providing and creating employment the elite tend to spend most of their time, if not all of their time, looking for redistributing mechanisms to get shares in pre-existing companies. So what you are actually getting is that the brightest among the black people in this country, instead of creating wealth, building up their own companies, are becoming secondary fiddle players to the existing companies...",MineWeb.