[amolo]

this is incorrect. Majority of African leaders and regimes are not interested in addressing high youth unemployment among educated workers by giving their domestic internet firms the room to take root. Even local startups have little to no support from their own countries. This is purely authoritarian. They are more interested in retaining power to continue exploiting their own people.

[arp242]

I think this depends a lot on the country, no? From what I heard, something like Rwanda is doing quite well these days (pre-COVID at least, not sure what happened since). The situation in, say, Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, or Algeria might be very different still.

There are probably some reasonable generalisations that are fair, but sometimes I feel people generalize a bit too much when it comes to Africa.

[WaxProlix]

Can you back that up with anything? Sounds a lot like pure ideologue speak in the absence of any backing. The person you're replying to made some claims that seemed to make sense on their face, and it'd be nice to have more than a "that's wrong, they're not. it's just not" as a response, since I'm actually curious what the on-the-ground situation is in these places.

[BoorishBears]

What are they supposed to back it up with?

A headline of "Local President admits focus on internet censorship is driven by personal greed, not economic protectionism?"

I'm from Ghana, a country that's been touching the line of internet censorship from time to time, and I see nothing wrong with their statement.

It's laughably naive to imply that they're censoring outside services to prop up the local tech scene when they can hardly be assed to get kids a proper education without using it as a political bargaining chip.

Like saying they're playing 4d chess when they're not interested in checkers unless it suits them...

[petre]

Youth unemploynent + unstable region = young men with time on their hands that could easily get recruited and become rebels. So the gov't must be totally interested addressing the issue.

[imtringued]

That's how it would work in a democracy.

You're forgetting that authoritarian governments do not have to address these things by eliminating the root cause. They can just silence the opposition with arrests or execution [0]. Uganda is so famous for this to the point that there is an entire movie [1] about Idi Amin.

If you actually cared about youth unemployment you could address it with simple economic measures first and you would seek funding from western investors, not get rid of them.

Implementing tariffs in an industry that you are never going to be a world leader in is just plain stupid. Ugandan app developers can just develop for the Google and Apple store and get access to a bigger audience instead of restricting themselves to Uganda only.

It only works out in China because their internal market is bigger than EU+USA combined. It could work out for India (unlikely unless they address corruption). Uganda only has 44 million people it just doesn't make sense.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455590/

[petre]

It works like that in troubled countries and areas where civil wars are frequent events. In a democracy youth goes out and protests without being shot live rounds at.

I was not equating blocking the app stores with addressing youth unemployment.

Silencing the opposition didn't quite work for Idi Amin, because the opposition became part if the military which topped him and tge next president.