[7sidedmarble]

It has been noticed that resource rich countries in Africa actually do worse on average than those without. There's a lot of theories as to why: a common one is that it leads to brittle economies with all their eggs in one basket. If your country is rich in emeralds let's say, it doesn't take the entire countries population to mine enough to sell, so what does everyone else do when the whole economy is built around emerald mining? This leads to higher unemployment that's been seen in the mineral rich African states. It also means the economy is very sensitive to the market of the few goods they are rich in.

In essence: it is the effect of the entire European world coming in, taking whatever they want, and then absolutely ensuring that independence would be doomed to fail. These economies fail because they're not modern. If Europe wanted Africa to succeed post-colonialisn: it could have helped train people, build infrastructure, etc. Instead they secured rights for foreign companies to continue the work of imperialism even today.