They have way bigger problems to deal with than that. The biggest issue facing most African countries is corruption, not the western kind where the economy keeps on rolling but the truly crippling kind that can grind a country to a standstill. For a country to bother projecting it's influence it has to have a governance that isn't overwhelmed by internal issues or isn't robbing the country blind.
To make a comparison Nigeria not too long ago in the past, used to have a stronger currency than the UK did. Widespread corruption dealt with that.
Correct.
I'd like to add that due to deliberate and aggressive miseducation -- and
not uneducation -- the people in a lot of African countries rarely question the poor leadership, poor policies, and incidents of poor governance that are all a direct result of corruption. In an unfortunate way, it's like a 10 year old who believes his dad is the greatest man on Earth, and due to that belief, the 10 year old fails to notice the never ending bruises, scars, black eyes, and red marks around his mother's neck.
Here's an example of a recent corruption scandal in one country that, due to a change in administration, was able to make the corruption known to the public. So the new president of Tanzania (a country in East Africa) gets into office and starts to check the books of various departments. He notices a
humongous amount of money has been spent and is being spent in various departments that are all performing poorly. He decides to start making unannounced (and televised) trips to the various departments headquarters. His thinking is that the discrepancy between the amount spent and results seen is an outcome of poor performance of the employees, so he thinks that if he shows up and gives speeches etc. he'll motivate and get the employees to get on the ball. He starts making trips and within a matter of days, he notices that the majority of offices he showed up to looked understaffed. President thinks "That's ...odd", because all of the employee numbers he was presented with did not indicate a shortage of staff. So the president orders members of his immediate staff to start going to the various departments and do a physical count of all of the employees. About a month of data collection and investigation passes, and the new collected data comes back and reveals why the billions of dollars spent over the last decade were not reflected in the output of multiple departments. It turns out that every single department in the country has
hundreds of nonexistent employees, and the new data showed that in some of the departments,
over 90% of the employee salaries were going to a handful of accounts that were set up to collect and distribute as much of the employee salaries as possible. To date, over 16,000 nonexistent employees have been discovered, and estimates (from independent non-government bodies that operate without a gun pointed to their temple) believe that the actual number of nonexistent government workers -- over the last 10 years -- is more than
forty times of the discovered figures.
Here's where it gets worse. It turns out that the loans and financing that had been and are being distributed by the various departments (e.g. Department of education giving loans to students, dep. of agriculture financing farmers) were also being given out to nonexistent people. Not only were the departments paying people who didn't exist, but they were also helping people who didn't exist. So you now have a situation where billions of dollars have been paid to a select few people, and due to the exceedingly poor record keeping, digital, and online infrastructure, figuring out who the money went to is next to impossible.
Now, billions of missing dollars isn't a huge deal in a wealthy economically stable developed country -- no one in Wyoming will lose sleep if the government can't trace some billions. But billions of dollars in a poor economically deficient underdeveloped country is an entirely different situation, because those very same billions that were supposed to go towards things that directly affect the economy -- employment, agriculture, education, health etc -- have instead disappeared into a maze of accounts. What this means is that all measures of economic growth, economic stability, upwards mobility, and overall improvement in the country have been horrifically inaccurate and fraudulent for over 10 years.
This is why I, as well as many others, do not put a lot of faith in the idea that Africa will get better through unification/citizenship changes/removal of boundaries etc. All that will do is make corruption easier, more widespread, and more difficult to trace.
