[Type R]

Tiktok, i agree when you say it is not an excuse, but at least we must factor in our challenges when we plan to develop africa.

Whenever you are preparing for a journey, you must take into account the length of that journey in order to decide what resources you are going to require to finish the job. For example, i live in nairobi. I know that with a full tank of petrol, my car can take me slightly past malindi. I know that petrol now costs about 90/= per litre.

My tank is about 43 litres in size. When petrol was 60/=, i could thus go to mombasa with 2400/= and have some fuel (and money) left in the tank for some escapades. At 90/=, i am talking a crazy 3,600/=, one way. I can look at my wallet/bank account and see if i have this money. If i don't, i look around.

Originally Posted by tiktok

you were doing well until you mentioned the above. Canada and usa combined are roughly the same size as africa with almost 1/3rd of the population. Canada, and russia are the least densely populated countries. South america is almost the size of africa with fewer countries. Size is not an excuse or a reason.

One way to mess someone up is to make them underestimate the challenges they face. A student may mislead another, "that subject is easy!" if you plan to develop africa, you must first understand its challenges. Only then, will you be prepared for the challenges. You don't want to run out of money, out of personal energy, out of staff, etc. When purchasing a company or going into a merger, you hire lawyers to do a "due diligence" to make sure you are not buying a debt ridden junk. When you want to start a mine, you call in geologists to analyse the quality, quantity, difficulty of extraction of the raw materials.

I repeat my earlier point, one of the biggest failures of men and women of goodwill is failure to understand the physical magnitude of africa.

Mr tik tok, from your response, i can see you are a victim of this misunderstanding. You say that "canada and usa combined are roughly the same size as africa." for many years, the standard map of the world - the one you probably had in school understated the size of africa.



in fact, russia used to be "larger" than africa. I believe this is where you get your wrong impression of africa = north america. A few years ago, that map was revised, showing the true relative size of our continent.



however, they still haven't got it right, so here we are (geography lesson): - africa: 30,301,591 km² compare that with the sum of: -
china: 9.6 million km²
usa: 9.4 million km²
western europe: 4.9 million km²
india: 3.2 million km²
argentina: 2.8 million km²
=========================
total (others): 29,900,000 km²



president abdoulaye wade says that africa needs to be split into economic units, maybe 5 of them, free trade areas. Comesa could be one, sadc another, ecowas another, plus one for central africa, another for north africa. That's it. 5 states!!! maybe we leave on neutral state just in case (like switzerland). Politicians will not like to lose power to larger state units, but they must swallow and allow africa to develop. A kenyan president may end up being a governor of jimbo kenya in a larger federal unit.