[blackhawkC17]

Okay, we can keep making excuses. If we follow your logic, these countries (including mine) are destined to be mediocre and nothing can change it in the short term.

We should never push for change...it's the colonizer's fault always.

[pasabagi]

I guess it's a question of what change you push for. Imagine you go to post-revolution Haiti, and you just try to push for economic growth. You recognize that the country has an internationally competitive sugar industry. So you work out ways to convince everybody to go back and work on the sugar plantations, producing sugar for export. Except, you're in competition with the slave plantations, so you can't really pay people good wages or have good conditions. People don't like that, so they revolt, and you repress them with force. Before long, you have produced something like pre-revolution Haiti.

Sometimes it's important to recognize the history in order to push in the right direction. I don't know what the right direction is, but I think saying that Africans just suck because they've been dealt an awful hand seems unfair. I figure it's just really hard to get out from under the feet of an international system that was built for and by colonizers, and there are very few clearly good choices about how to do it.