"Is doing", not "did". France has a private army in Mali right now, and the UK and US have about 20 puppet dictators spread across Africa.
These dictators are well educated in the same sense that George "Harvard" Bush was well educated.
And they are not "corrupt because they are in power". They are 1) put in power because they are corrupt, 2) attain power because megalomaniacs are strong and good at beating competition.
I think, generally, anyone attracted to ruling is the worst person for the job. The best people for leadership don't seem to possess the desire to rule.
I wouldn't know how. Sometimes I think that all this killing and bloodshed and exploitation might be a kind of necessary and unavoidable process.
Look at India. India was ruled by a bunch of different feudal Kings and warlords. The British came and basically unfied the country. In the process they killed about 2 billion Indians. They did more damage than the Kings and warlords did, but they neverthess created some kind of new nation state. They caused "progress". The "progress" that the British brought to India wasn't really progress - all those gains were off-set by the immense loss of life - but it nevertheless laid a foundation for a future India that might, hopefully, be "better" and might, hopefully, "benefit" everyone.
Rather than wasting all those lifes, wouldn't it have been better for India if it, in the 1500s, simply created some kind of system or nationstate to replace the Kings and noblemen who ruled the provinces? But how do you organise this? You can't. Humans are too dumb, disorganised, entrenched and the task is too complicated. And historically, anyone who tries gets killed anyway.
Maybe Africa is the same way. Maybe the best thing to do is just let yourself get raped, let the old Empires do what they want, let all the local religious and tribal factions kill each other till they're tired, bear with the poverty, and just slowly slowly hope for very slow reforms.
Maybe African countries, like India, should just let the West make the continent up in the image they desire. Then play things slow and let the West's power in Africa collapse naturally on its own.
There's a scientist called Immanuel Wallerstein who used to write about this kind of thing. He started a field called World Systems Theory, which basically attempted to predict the evolution of nations. He predicted alot of what would happen (has happened) in Africa and the Middle East. In regards to Africa, he saw the continent becoming First World in about 250 years. He said some of its nations would become small superpowers, after the US and China themselves decreased in power. From that point onwards, the globe is run by several mini superpowers, some in Latin America, some in Africa, some in Europe, some in Asia. Each struggles with debt, unemployment, oil, wealth gaps and so on, at which point we jump from techno-capitalism to something else, like we jumped from feudalism to mercantile capitalism.
Wallerstein was just theorising, but that nevertheless seems to be how history cyclically plays out. Aside from aliens or Gods coming down and teaching us to stop being dumbasses, we seem to just proceed clumsily from A to B . Our destinations are generally good, we just can't get there without doing a lot of unnecessary collateral damage.