There are plenty of unambitious Africans in America now. I'm not talking about black Americans, I'm talking about actual African immigrants. There's a family of west Africans in my apartment building that have taken to depositing their bags of garbage on the third floor landing instead of walking a 100 feet outside to the dumpster. I know that's just one instance of African immigrant laziness but I've seen plenty of other examples, I live in a town w/a high African immigrant population. (I'm not really disagreeing w/you, just want to point out that when a lot of the "ambitious" Africans get here they stop being so ambitious.)
Based on that graph, Sub-Saharan Africa crossed the 50%-threshold for "with electricity" about 2023. About 25 years earlier in the late 1990s, it has been 25% "with electricity."
The current crisis in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR-Congo) might be mentioned here. With reference to "relative electricity rates" and what those rates suggest for geopolitical developments.
Steve Sailer is bound to take interest in the current DR Congo conflict, sooner or later. So far, all signs point to it being a case of "Nilotic" military expansionism.
A well-trained, competent, and driven Rwanda-aligned group has seized a DR-Congo provincial capital, Goma. The Nilotic rebel leaders stand at the cusp of hegemony over a swathe of the state of DR-Congo (national capital of this state being far to the east, at Kinshasa). The Kinshasa government is now leveling angry threats of war against Rwanda (in addition to egging on mobs in the capital to attack European embassies). The Tutsis in Rwanda, including the relevant ministers of state, are saying: "Okay, DR-Congo, with your war talk; go ahead and try it."
The fighting in DR-Congo looks, anyway, to be an ongoing bid to undermine DR-Congo's "Bantu-Congoid"-controlled central government authority out in the Great Lakes region. And more widely, to make a bid for power for the Nilotics, not just in this part of DR-Congo but in Eastern-Central Africa writ large(r).
If things get too "dicey," the current president of France, Mssr. Macron is exactly the type to intervene (not sure about Mssr. Trump and co.). To what medium- and long-run effect, it's hard to predict.
On those relative elecriticiy rates:
_______________
The DR Congo (pop. estimated to have exceeded the 100-million mark a few years ago) rates of population "with electricity," per CIA Factbook:
- electrification, total: 21.5% (2022 est.)
- electrification - urban areas: 45%
- electrification - rural areas: 1%
DR Congo's overall electricity rate of 21.5% in 2022 puts it far below the Sub-Saharan Africa average. It's poorer and more dysfunctional than the average Black-African state.
Chances of instability, outside interventions, and adventurism (as with the Rwanda-backed rebels reportedly beating DR-Congo military forces) are therefore a higher baseline-likelihood.
________________
Rwanda (pop.: 14 million) electricity rates:
- electrification - total population: 50.6% (2022 est.)
- electrification - urban areas: 98%
- electrification - rural areas: 38%
Judging by those relative electricity-rates, we'd be inclined to say that this kind of thing -- a Rwanda-backed, pro-Nilotic insurgency succeeding against the DR-Congo state forces -- was bound to happen sooner or later.
Paul Kagame is an admirable figure but as Assad 's rise and fall shows, it's dubious policy to put all your eggs in the basket of a single nuclear family. At the end, Assad apparently became devoted more to maintaining the position of the Assad family and lost the mandate of his countrymen.
Definite parallels with Trump. American politics have become very, "Roman."
I notice that Rwanda's President Kagame (b.1957) is a single short year older than the venerable Mr Sailer (b.1958).
Paul Kagame (Tutsi, Nilotic) has since 1994 been near the top of power in Rwanda. (Since shortly after the dust cleared following he anti-Tutsi/Nilotic massacres of 1994, perpetrated by Hutu/Bantu-Congoids).
The fighting in eastern DR-Congo this year breaks along similar lines to 1994 and probably hundreds of identifiable conflicts down through many centuries (if Africa had a historical-documentation tradition as strong as Europe's).
By the 2020s, after a long period of good administration, Rwanda is quite a capable power, despite its small size. Rwanda is pro-Nilotic force and may be capable of slicing apart DR-Congo, making relatively short shrift of militant Bantu-Congoid groups such as may exist. Those militias seem to be more of a ground threat than the DR-Congo state-military and the UN Peacekeepers peppered around the area.
Kagame has been in full control of the state of Rwanda since 2000 (and his latest presidential term nominally lasts thru July 2029). Pro-DRCongo partisans, if any, might blame the longlastingness of his regime for the upsurge in the fighting: the temptation of foreign-adventurism similar to Putin's mistake with starting the 2022 war in Ukraine (arguably).
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I believe Steve Sailer once had a considerable interest in Paul Kagame's career, but hasn't written much about him in a few years.
Steve Sailer's only published musing on Kagame in the 2020s was after a NYT write floated the ideathat a 2020s Back-to-Africa movement might get going:
(quote, Sailer) "Which African countries work out best for African Americans? Botswana? Rwanda? Ghana? Kenya? Which are the most English-speaking? Which have reasonable levels of competence and not too much corruption and crime? And where can you be reasonably confident about the long term. E.g., Rwanda has had a talented dictator for the last 30 years, Paul Kagame. But he’s getting old. What happens next?" (Feb 2024)
Perhaps a decade ago, I blogged about an article about Paul Kagame that ran in perhaps the New York Times Magazine. Mostly it was about how everybody at Davos, such as Bono, thinks Kagame is a genius and a saint. But toward the end there was a scary incident in which Kagame goes berserk with rage toward somebody, an aide IIRC, who accidentally offends him. For a minute, the reporter seems worried that Kagame will murder the poor guy with his bare hands.
The lesson I took away is that Kagame, despite being able to present a polished front, is a scary guy, which is probably what Rwanda needed. On the other hand, if he stays the ruler for his whole life and lives a long time, things may catch up with him.
"The Global Elite’s Favorite Strongman," by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times Magazine, Sept 2013:
"Nyamwasa warned me that I should not be fooled by Kagame’s cerebral air, that, in fact, he is quite violent. [...] In 2009, Himbara said, Kagame ordered two subordinates — a finance director and an army captain — into his presidential office, slammed the door and started shouting at them about where they had purchased office curtains. Kagame then picked up the phone, and two guards came in with sticks, Himbara said. Kagame ordered the men to lie face down, and he thrashed them. After five minutes, Kagame seemed to tire, and the bodyguards took over beating the men, as if they had done this before. Himbara said he was sick to his stomach witnessing the scene. Just about every former colleague of Kagame’s I spoke to shared some sort of beating story. [...]
When I asked Kagame about the beatings, he leaned toward me in his seat. We were about three feet apart, then two. I could see the individual gray hairs in his goatee. He didn’t interrupt as I detailed my evidence, with names and dates. He didn’t deny physically abusing his staff, as I thought he might, though he gave me a watered-down version of the 2009 event that Himbara described, saying that he hadn’t swatted anyone with a stick but shoved one of the men so hard that he fell to the floor.
“It’s my nature,” Kagame said. “I can be very tough, I can make mistakes like that.” But when I pressed him on other violent outbursts, he responded irritably, “Do we really need to go into every name, every incident?” He said that hitting people is not “sustainable,” which struck me as a strange word to use, as if the only issue with beating your underlings was whether such behavior was effective over the long term."
_____________
(Also of interest from the same article:)
"Many of the diplomats and analysts I talked to weren’t entirely bothered by Kagame’s authoritarian streak. Some even told me — and maybe this has something to do with the low expectations for Africa — that this is exactly what the continent needs: more Kagames, more highly skilled strongmen who can turn around messy, conflict-prone societies and get medicine in the hospitals and police officers on the street and plastic bags out of the trees. Liberties aren’t so important in these places, the argument goes, because who can enjoy freedom of speech or freedom of the press when everyone is killing one another? A premium is put on preserving stability and minimizing physical suffering, saving lives from malaria, from hunger, from preventable, poverty-driven diseases that are endemic across Africa.
But donor nations like the United States have drawn a line at Kagame’s involvement in Congo...."
Headline: "DR Congo’s president says country won’t be humiliated after rebels claim takeover"
One surprise: The Rwanda-backed Nilotic militia (DR-Congo alleges the Rwandan regular-military and intelligence are among them and effectively running the thing) have bagged large numbers of prisoners from among the DR-Congo forces during the takeover, including hundreds of European/Western mercenaries. The largest group: 280 Romanians...
Is fighting in a regular or semi-regular military force one of those "jobs [Congolese] just won't do"?
We’ve had two Bushes, almost two Clinton’s, and the cries for Michelle Obama to run this past cycle were deafening. The Roman style in American politics didn’t start with Trump and isn’t even well-exemplified by him.
Note that population estimates in sub-Saharan Africa are nowhere near as reliable as in the First World. When the World Bank—or whatever prestigious development orgs—publishes African population numbers, these do not come from their staff going around and counting noses in the way that the US or UK census does. Rather, within a nation, any given District Commissioner will phone up a local interested party, say, the Village Headman or the ruling party's local delegate, and ask for a population number. The local chap *might* go around and count noses, but that is a lot of work and may not lead to the best result (for him) either, so instead he is more likely to enquire as to what number has his neighbor and rival registered? Apprised of this fact, the local chap will award himself a slight headcount advantage over his rival and hang up the phone. Then the process repeats at the District level, and again at the national level. Then the World Bank gets the result of this competitive lying contest as their Official Number.
Since the lying is probably not vastly disproportional, intra-African comparisons, such as your Congo/Rwanda one, are still meaningful, and since African immigration to the First World is a glaring liability at any level, this doesn't affect immigration debate, but just an FYI that African government stats cannot be consumed unsalted.
A foreign policy by the West that seeks to support anti-migration regimes in Africa is needed.
Paul Kagame's Rwanda is one such regime, to take a maybe-easy example.
The UK government took a step in this direction with its anti-migration concordat with Rwanda. (The "Rwanda asylum plan," agreed to in mid-2022 soon after the end of the last of the Covid-lockdowns, was cancelled by new Labour Party government in mid-2024.)
According to the UK-Rwanda deal, Rwanda would host stateless deportable migrants which the UK desired to be gotten rid of, in exchange for cash pay-offs. Similarly-spirited deals to enforce an anti-migration policy are possible and needed (obviously).
Speaking of Rwanda, I point those interested to its military intervention in the ever-backwards superstate of DR-Congo, which looms so menacingly next-door to Rwanda:
And meanwhile once prosperous South Africa descends into tribalism and chaos. Replacing leadership with an average IQ of 100 with that of 85 (or less?) has consequences.
Solar power, despite its’ simplicity and increasingly low costs, requires periodic attention to remain reliable. (Monitoring batteries; protecting panels). The extreme turnover in residents of low-income housing in much of Africa makes this someone else’s problem, hence it doesn’t get done.
A few countries have reduced this problem…Botswana and Namibia seemed to have made progress, but RSA is certainly sliding backwards. I loved my years there.
Keeping airline prices from Africa expensive is in the interest of America. Yet there is the Mediterranean Sea for Africans to cross into Europe that is a problem. The nations of northern Africa should be paid to prevent boats from leaving its shores.
> "The nations of northern Africa should be paid to prevent boats from leaving its shores."
They used to be, but then Hillary & Co. decided they'd rather kill their North African barricade-holders. (Why has never been explained.) That promptly unleashed the biggest wave of immigration Europe has ever seen, most of it predatory.
Since then some Europeans have decided that maybe the Pay-'Em-To-Hold-The-Line policy was wise after all. But it's harder to recruit new barricade-holders after everyone saw what happened to the last ones.
Why yes it was. And not just to North Africa, but to the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
Twenty-three years ago, but it seems like it was yesterday, in the weeks and months after 9/11, I can recall reading in the pages of the prestige press how imperative it was that we bring Democracy to the benighted savages who simply know not what they do. Then they wouldn't be beastly anymore.
My thought at the time (I was living in a Muslim Arab country) was that, "These writers must not know too many Arabs or Muslims."
Maybe they recalled their college roommate who was the son of an Egyptian Minister or some such, and assumed they could extrapolate from him to the entire Muslim world. Whatever the reason, the entire elite consensus, from media though government and the academy, was that Democracy was the cure for whatever ails the world. And they promptly launched a worldwide campaign to bring Democracy by Whatever Means Necessary: bombing or bayoneting, bribing or bullying.
It was blazingly obvious to me that this wasn't going to end well, but the Elite Consensus is apparently immune to any negative feedback even from reality, much less from the remote criticism of a humble laborer on the frontier. So over the next decade the inevitable happened, and with characteristic immunity to negative feedback, over the following decade the Democracy Bringers brought their dubious techniques back home, and here we are.
A funny anecdote of an elite's glancing contact with reality was in, I think, Condoleezza Rice's memoir where she describes their project to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict by using Democracy™ in the mid-aughties. The Palestinians had been bribed and bullied to elect the candidates that the US and Israel had carefully selected and groomed. The night of the election, Rice went to bed in her DC condo in the calm assurance that Democracy would work its magic. In the morning she began her exercise routine and flicked on the news. She was so stunned to learn that the Islamic-hardline Hamas had won that she forgot she was on a running treadmill and was promptly flung to the floor. A great cinematic moment if anyone ever makes the movie of "Democracy: The God That Failed" or "The New Crusade" or whatever.
It's not so much that democracy doesn’t work in Muslim countries. It's just that Muslims don't want what we want them to want.
Solar is also highly modular, so it’s much lower in cost and schedule risk during construction compared to other generating assets. This is good for getting foreign investment - there is a TON of private equity interest in renewables in emerging markets (i.e., the third world), and the political risk is generally greater than the execution risk.
Solar doesn’t provide base load, though in a very sunny place with small, low load grids it might do fine. But as the demand rises it would need to be combined with battery storage, which would be another investment opportunity. Any African nation that could provide enough stability could see a lot of investment. They’ll have to dial back on the graft, though. A lot of the PE money comes from pension funds (incl. national ones). Their appetite for scandal is nonexistent.
Relatedly, the current wave of LNG export started gaining momentum in the early teens with massive interest from India in bringing electricity to the large slice of its population without it and Japan not wanting to buy more gas from Russia. Grok says the percentage of Indians without electricity 10 years ago was about 20. I remember it being higher, but the key point is that in 10 years they’ve succeeded in electrifying most of that population. Obviously, they’re better at big organizations than sub-Saharan Africa. Has it made any difference to Indians’ desire to emigrate in general? I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to have made America less attractive.
Steve needs to come up with a catchy name for the 21st century's Great Question: will Africans move to Europe faster than the Europeans elect far-right parties to keep them out?
The AfD in Germany now looks like it could take (as much as) 30% of seats in the Bundestag in the Feb 2025 elections.
The real question is when Western Europe will stop trying to enforce and police an anachronistic (and now ridiculous-looking) "cordon-sanitaire strategy" against the ethnonationalist elements in their own politics.
The centrist status-quo parties now cast themselves as valiant gatekeepers. Within easy living memory, all of these parties had tacit ethnonationaist tendencies or wings, all of which were ejected or disavowed and pushed away, in a process that begins at earliest in most places around the 1980s and which was complete, or near-complete, by around the 2000s.
The beach-heads already established by radically-undesirable elements, like Black-African and Muslim, in most West-European countries occurred in tandem with the process just described. New parties, called "Far Right" but really just occupying open political space abandoned by the others, were the result. Finally we see real results in the 2020s.
To return directly to the question: of "a race between Black-Africans moving in and 'Far-Right' parties being voted in." It's likely not going to be the "Far-Right" breakthrough but a choice by the political center to make a deal with the Far-Right. Once it happens in one major country, it will, within a few years, happen in all of them. Who will be the first?
Doing so would be reversing the guilt-ridden, suicidal thinking of White leftists (especially women); sadly, I don't think that will happen, and Europe will continue its slide into third-world territory.
Thanks for the link--I hadn't realized that the CDU might relent. That would be good, but even a full-on AfD triumph may be too late to save Germany.
I'm not German--my father was born in Hungary and I'm a U.S. citizen. I love Europe and travel there often, which is why I'm so concerned about the destruction of European culture.
I've met many Germans who grew up in the '60's, as I did. The level of guilt that was heaped on them in their childhood--from the schools, media, and pop culture--was astonishing. They were essentially brainwashed to hate anything White, German, or European.
Munz may not have crossed the Rubicon, but he appears to have waded into it—or maybe more stumbled into it. We'll see which bank he exits on.
The colorless German political class has no real leaders today, so the ultimate determinant may not be the politicians but the electorate. Once the poll-watching pols realize that there is no path to victory without the allegedly "rightwing" AfD-ist vote, they may do the right thing just out of crass careerist calculation.
Whether that will happen before Germany is fatally injected with die-versity remains to be seen.
The far bank of the Rubicon should also be "kept an eye on," IMO.
If the point as phrased there isn't clear enough: the AfD of the mid-2020s is not likely to be nearly as radical/effective as its opponents claim. (As a sideline-support of the AfD since the Migrant Crisis of 2015-16, I say that with some regret.)
It's been common for years to hear the observation something like this:
"AfD-circa-2020 = CDU-circa-1995." Or similar. Although the AfD also clearly has a committed core, or 'wing' as the German media calls it, that is as ethnonationalist is legally permitted to be under their system, elements that for decades were marginalized to activist right-wing parties almost always below the "5%-Hurdle."
Yes, there are majorly important elements of the AfD even of today that are committed to doing the right thing, especially the circle still around Hoecke. A national-level AfD that really does take 30% of Bundestag seats, especially if Frau Weidel exerts power on behalf of her vision of things, well, it seems would be difficult to maintain the lithe political-physique necessary to the ideological-radical.
It's long been speculated that the CDU could fracture into a muddling-middle Status-Quo faction and a bumbling-conservative AfD-Accodmodationist faction. The latter would be the one to make the "Rubicon"-crossing step of siding with the AfD in a serious way. I've believed this would first happen at a state level. It would be a better development, in fact, than a buy-off attempt from a major Status Quo figure like Merz.
A real possibility, I think, in the event of a co-opting attempt by Status Quo forces would be an AfD break-apart scenario. The AfD may well really take 30% of Bundestag seats in Feb 2025 upcoming, possibly even with the huge psychological or prestige boost of being the biggest party, and definitely at-least the second-biggest party (after CDU). At that point, the AfD itself could split into an accomodationist faction (willing to be bought off by Merz or another such figure) and, for lack of a better term, a non-accomodationist faction. The question is the price asked by the Status Quo forces who float an offer.
The entire point of parliamentary-coalitional politics is to influence the government towards policies we prefer, through the mechanism of securing control of policy-making government ministries and influence within the inner-circle of the prime minister (chancellor), including via the implied threat to take him down ("vote of no-confidence") if the prime minister doesn't hold up his end of the bargain. But the AfD has always been oppositionist and a scenario in which Status Quo forces "make an offer they can't refuse" changes the game entirely.
The question will be: what issue might these two potential factions of the AfD split over.
All the baseline-dynamics already exist for a split. Driving a wedge within the AfD would be a way for the Status-Quo forces in Germany to continue enforcing the "cordon sanitaire"; an element of the AfD would be "bought off," or "coopted" if you prefer, and things proceed as normal as the "non-accomodationists" are now the ones outside the 'cordon'.
Still another scenario, which looked possible (but not likely) before Merz, was that AfD together with parties outside the CDU could unite to defeat the CDU. Much more likely at a state level at first, and it would require forces outside the usual other Status Quo parties (especially SPD, who would simply never ever do this and would probably sooner disband as a party and transfer their funds to the Monster Raving Loony Party or similar). A lot of talk of exactly this happened soon after the founding of this left-wing, immigration-restrictionist, anti-NATO-leaning BSW party, but finally its leader said she had consulted the relevant oracles and tea-leaves and experts in palmistry to say cooperation with AfD was not possible under the current astrological influences
The big question remains: Who crosses the Rubicon in the true sense of that term (no tricks). Where/when especially does a non-accomodationist form of the AfD (or a similar party; "to the Right of the CDU") get into power, especially control of a state government.
I believe a lot of puzzle pieces could fall fast after that happens, and far beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Germany, in important ways, remains the moral-leader of Europe. In important ways the destiny of ALL of core-Europe (EU) is in its hands. Not just because of economic power but because of the prestige emanating off from a high-trust society; moral leadership, as it were. Even low-trust people tend to look up to a high-trust power (as, for example, how a low-trust Third Worlder might look up to the USA despite being unable to create a traditionally-high-trust polity like the USA's was for so many generations).
For anyone reading this far and who hasn't seen the below, I direct you to this essay on High-Trust in Europe. It focuses in part on this question of German leadership in Europe and has much more similar commentary from me on the same questions:
Surely your lead question is in jest? Lack of electrification hasn't been holding Africans back, it's African culture (primarily violent tribalism) and society that has.
I was in SA in 2023. The safari outfitter had solar and diesel generators because the government turned off the power most nights at 7 pm. He said solar had advanced significantly in the past 5 years and they would soon be off the government grid completely.
A square meter of solar panel can provide 7 KW hours on summer day in Phoenix. So, with 15 hours of daylight, you're getting about 500 (7000 ÷ 15) watts electric when the sun shines.
Now Phoenix in the summer is an optimal case. Maybe the Average African Sunny Area solar panel half of Optimal Phoenix, or 3.5 KW hours per day. Add in a battery to average out power during the night, and you can probably run a laptop, a phone, a Starlink node, and minimal lights.
A well run family farm could maintain such a system. Of course, keeping away grabby gangs and neighbors is another story.
I believe it was the hard copy “The Atlantic Magazine” ( my favorite magazine about history, politics and culture ) revisiting the 1970s Jean Respaul end of White Western novel “ the Camp of the Saints “ that “ noticed” ( S Sailer term ) that French , Italian television was getting picked up via satélite dish to millions of North African TV viewers on the other/Southern side of the Mediterranean Sea , including lots of adverts and Sports programming showing Black African and Arab North African young male sports stars with expensive fancy cars and sexy European Gfs.
I m sure this problem has only gotten worse with the Internet , porn .
So to answer your question S Sailer , hundreds if millions of additional ( young male) Africans getting electricity , TV , internet , NBA, British Premier League Soccer - Al Jazeera will only increase the “ pull factor “ enticing hundreds of millions if Africans , East Indians to try to migrate to the 1st world , Europe, UK, USA/Canada
I must have missed it S Sailer - have you reviewed Respaul’s “ Camp of the Saints “?
The problem of not having electricity in Africa isn’t access to capital, but rather corruption and terrible maintenance practices. the question then is do you deal with corruption and terrible maintenance practices on a centralized level (I.e. one large utility state controlled or regulated entity) or across dozens or even hundreds of communities/municipalities. Economics might be different, but the fundamental problems will be the same.
Solar panels would seem to change the equation somewhat. But they too are expensive and, to some extent, hard targets. They'd also need distribution networks. Not quite the same as "cell phone towers," I'd think.
“If hundreds of millions more Africans get on the Internet, that will both make life in Africa better and make it much easier to plan to…”
Stay home, and enjoy the good life in Africa.
Indeed.
https://youtu.be/zndUfV1i1Co
"If Africa electrifies, do Africans stay home or leave?"
Ambitious Africans will leave. Average IQ will go down, both in Africa and in the First World.
There are plenty of unambitious Africans in America now. I'm not talking about black Americans, I'm talking about actual African immigrants. There's a family of west Africans in my apartment building that have taken to depositing their bags of garbage on the third floor landing instead of walking a 100 feet outside to the dumpster. I know that's just one instance of African immigrant laziness but I've seen plenty of other examples, I live in a town w/a high African immigrant population. (I'm not really disagreeing w/you, just want to point out that when a lot of the "ambitious" Africans get here they stop being so ambitious.)
Yes, that's kinda what I'm saying. Just imagine the ones who did not even bother emigrating.
Based on that graph, Sub-Saharan Africa crossed the 50%-threshold for "with electricity" about 2023. About 25 years earlier in the late 1990s, it has been 25% "with electricity."
The current crisis in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR-Congo) might be mentioned here. With reference to "relative electricity rates" and what those rates suggest for geopolitical developments.
Steve Sailer is bound to take interest in the current DR Congo conflict, sooner or later. So far, all signs point to it being a case of "Nilotic" military expansionism.
A well-trained, competent, and driven Rwanda-aligned group has seized a DR-Congo provincial capital, Goma. The Nilotic rebel leaders stand at the cusp of hegemony over a swathe of the state of DR-Congo (national capital of this state being far to the east, at Kinshasa). The Kinshasa government is now leveling angry threats of war against Rwanda (in addition to egging on mobs in the capital to attack European embassies). The Tutsis in Rwanda, including the relevant ministers of state, are saying: "Okay, DR-Congo, with your war talk; go ahead and try it."
The fighting in DR-Congo looks, anyway, to be an ongoing bid to undermine DR-Congo's "Bantu-Congoid"-controlled central government authority out in the Great Lakes region. And more widely, to make a bid for power for the Nilotics, not just in this part of DR-Congo but in Eastern-Central Africa writ large(r).
If things get too "dicey," the current president of France, Mssr. Macron is exactly the type to intervene (not sure about Mssr. Trump and co.). To what medium- and long-run effect, it's hard to predict.
On those relative elecriticiy rates:
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The DR Congo (pop. estimated to have exceeded the 100-million mark a few years ago) rates of population "with electricity," per CIA Factbook:
- electrification, total: 21.5% (2022 est.)
- electrification - urban areas: 45%
- electrification - rural areas: 1%
DR Congo's overall electricity rate of 21.5% in 2022 puts it far below the Sub-Saharan Africa average. It's poorer and more dysfunctional than the average Black-African state.
Chances of instability, outside interventions, and adventurism (as with the Rwanda-backed rebels reportedly beating DR-Congo military forces) are therefore a higher baseline-likelihood.
________________
Rwanda (pop.: 14 million) electricity rates:
- electrification - total population: 50.6% (2022 est.)
- electrification - urban areas: 98%
- electrification - rural areas: 38%
Judging by those relative electricity-rates, we'd be inclined to say that this kind of thing -- a Rwanda-backed, pro-Nilotic insurgency succeeding against the DR-Congo state forces -- was bound to happen sooner or later.
Fascinating.
Paul Kagame is an admirable figure but as Assad 's rise and fall shows, it's dubious policy to put all your eggs in the basket of a single nuclear family. At the end, Assad apparently became devoted more to maintaining the position of the Assad family and lost the mandate of his countrymen.
Definite parallels with Trump. American politics have become very, "Roman."
I notice that Rwanda's President Kagame (b.1957) is a single short year older than the venerable Mr Sailer (b.1958).
Paul Kagame (Tutsi, Nilotic) has since 1994 been near the top of power in Rwanda. (Since shortly after the dust cleared following he anti-Tutsi/Nilotic massacres of 1994, perpetrated by Hutu/Bantu-Congoids).
The fighting in eastern DR-Congo this year breaks along similar lines to 1994 and probably hundreds of identifiable conflicts down through many centuries (if Africa had a historical-documentation tradition as strong as Europe's).
By the 2020s, after a long period of good administration, Rwanda is quite a capable power, despite its small size. Rwanda is pro-Nilotic force and may be capable of slicing apart DR-Congo, making relatively short shrift of militant Bantu-Congoid groups such as may exist. Those militias seem to be more of a ground threat than the DR-Congo state-military and the UN Peacekeepers peppered around the area.
Kagame has been in full control of the state of Rwanda since 2000 (and his latest presidential term nominally lasts thru July 2029). Pro-DRCongo partisans, if any, might blame the longlastingness of his regime for the upsurge in the fighting: the temptation of foreign-adventurism similar to Putin's mistake with starting the 2022 war in Ukraine (arguably).
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I believe Steve Sailer once had a considerable interest in Paul Kagame's career, but hasn't written much about him in a few years.
Steve Sailer's only published musing on Kagame in the 2020s was after a NYT write floated the ideathat a 2020s Back-to-Africa movement might get going:
(quote, Sailer) "Which African countries work out best for African Americans? Botswana? Rwanda? Ghana? Kenya? Which are the most English-speaking? Which have reasonable levels of competence and not too much corruption and crime? And where can you be reasonably confident about the long term. E.g., Rwanda has had a talented dictator for the last 30 years, Paul Kagame. But he’s getting old. What happens next?" (Feb 2024)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/blaxit-tired-of-racism-black-americans-try-life-in-africa/
Perhaps a decade ago, I blogged about an article about Paul Kagame that ran in perhaps the New York Times Magazine. Mostly it was about how everybody at Davos, such as Bono, thinks Kagame is a genius and a saint. But toward the end there was a scary incident in which Kagame goes berserk with rage toward somebody, an aide IIRC, who accidentally offends him. For a minute, the reporter seems worried that Kagame will murder the poor guy with his bare hands.
The lesson I took away is that Kagame, despite being able to present a polished front, is a scary guy, which is probably what Rwanda needed. On the other hand, if he stays the ruler for his whole life and lives a long time, things may catch up with him.
I believe you are referring to this:
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/09/world-war-n.html
"The Global Elite’s Favorite Strongman," by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times Magazine, Sept 2013:
"Nyamwasa warned me that I should not be fooled by Kagame’s cerebral air, that, in fact, he is quite violent. [...] In 2009, Himbara said, Kagame ordered two subordinates — a finance director and an army captain — into his presidential office, slammed the door and started shouting at them about where they had purchased office curtains. Kagame then picked up the phone, and two guards came in with sticks, Himbara said. Kagame ordered the men to lie face down, and he thrashed them. After five minutes, Kagame seemed to tire, and the bodyguards took over beating the men, as if they had done this before. Himbara said he was sick to his stomach witnessing the scene. Just about every former colleague of Kagame’s I spoke to shared some sort of beating story. [...]
When I asked Kagame about the beatings, he leaned toward me in his seat. We were about three feet apart, then two. I could see the individual gray hairs in his goatee. He didn’t interrupt as I detailed my evidence, with names and dates. He didn’t deny physically abusing his staff, as I thought he might, though he gave me a watered-down version of the 2009 event that Himbara described, saying that he hadn’t swatted anyone with a stick but shoved one of the men so hard that he fell to the floor.
“It’s my nature,” Kagame said. “I can be very tough, I can make mistakes like that.” But when I pressed him on other violent outbursts, he responded irritably, “Do we really need to go into every name, every incident?” He said that hitting people is not “sustainable,” which struck me as a strange word to use, as if the only issue with beating your underlings was whether such behavior was effective over the long term."
_____________
(Also of interest from the same article:)
"Many of the diplomats and analysts I talked to weren’t entirely bothered by Kagame’s authoritarian streak. Some even told me — and maybe this has something to do with the low expectations for Africa — that this is exactly what the continent needs: more Kagames, more highly skilled strongmen who can turn around messy, conflict-prone societies and get medicine in the hospitals and police officers on the street and plastic bags out of the trees. Liberties aren’t so important in these places, the argument goes, because who can enjoy freedom of speech or freedom of the press when everyone is killing one another? A premium is put on preserving stability and minimizing physical suffering, saving lives from malaria, from hunger, from preventable, poverty-driven diseases that are endemic across Africa.
But donor nations like the United States have drawn a line at Kagame’s involvement in Congo...."
Update: https://lite.cnn.com/2025/01/30/africa/congos-tshisekedi-m23-rebels-intl/index.html
Headline: "DR Congo’s president says country won’t be humiliated after rebels claim takeover"
One surprise: The Rwanda-backed Nilotic militia (DR-Congo alleges the Rwandan regular-military and intelligence are among them and effectively running the thing) have bagged large numbers of prisoners from among the DR-Congo forces during the takeover, including hundreds of European/Western mercenaries. The largest group: 280 Romanians...
Is fighting in a regular or semi-regular military force one of those "jobs [Congolese] just won't do"?
We’ve had two Bushes, almost two Clinton’s, and the cries for Michelle Obama to run this past cycle were deafening. The Roman style in American politics didn’t start with Trump and isn’t even well-exemplified by him.
Thanks for your interesting, as usual, comment.
Note that population estimates in sub-Saharan Africa are nowhere near as reliable as in the First World. When the World Bank—or whatever prestigious development orgs—publishes African population numbers, these do not come from their staff going around and counting noses in the way that the US or UK census does. Rather, within a nation, any given District Commissioner will phone up a local interested party, say, the Village Headman or the ruling party's local delegate, and ask for a population number. The local chap *might* go around and count noses, but that is a lot of work and may not lead to the best result (for him) either, so instead he is more likely to enquire as to what number has his neighbor and rival registered? Apprised of this fact, the local chap will award himself a slight headcount advantage over his rival and hang up the phone. Then the process repeats at the District level, and again at the national level. Then the World Bank gets the result of this competitive lying contest as their Official Number.
Since the lying is probably not vastly disproportional, intra-African comparisons, such as your Congo/Rwanda one, are still meaningful, and since African immigration to the First World is a glaring liability at any level, this doesn't affect immigration debate, but just an FYI that African government stats cannot be consumed unsalted.
So....many....jokes....
A foreign policy by the West that seeks to support anti-migration regimes in Africa is needed.
Paul Kagame's Rwanda is one such regime, to take a maybe-easy example.
The UK government took a step in this direction with its anti-migration concordat with Rwanda. (The "Rwanda asylum plan," agreed to in mid-2022 soon after the end of the last of the Covid-lockdowns, was cancelled by new Labour Party government in mid-2024.)
According to the UK-Rwanda deal, Rwanda would host stateless deportable migrants which the UK desired to be gotten rid of, in exchange for cash pay-offs. Similarly-spirited deals to enforce an anti-migration policy are possible and needed (obviously).
Speaking of Rwanda, I point those interested to its military intervention in the ever-backwards superstate of DR-Congo, which looms so menacingly next-door to Rwanda:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/if-africa-electrifies-do-africans/comment/89439282
And meanwhile once prosperous South Africa descends into tribalism and chaos. Replacing leadership with an average IQ of 100 with that of 85 (or less?) has consequences.
It almost seems like Africans are incapable of building much less sustaining infrastructure without White supervision.
See the South African Air Force, South African Navy, South African electric grid, etc.
Solar power, despite its’ simplicity and increasingly low costs, requires periodic attention to remain reliable. (Monitoring batteries; protecting panels). The extreme turnover in residents of low-income housing in much of Africa makes this someone else’s problem, hence it doesn’t get done.
A few countries have reduced this problem…Botswana and Namibia seemed to have made progress, but RSA is certainly sliding backwards. I loved my years there.
Keeping airline prices from Africa expensive is in the interest of America. Yet there is the Mediterranean Sea for Africans to cross into Europe that is a problem. The nations of northern Africa should be paid to prevent boats from leaving its shores.
> "The nations of northern Africa should be paid to prevent boats from leaving its shores."
They used to be, but then Hillary & Co. decided they'd rather kill their North African barricade-holders. (Why has never been explained.) That promptly unleashed the biggest wave of immigration Europe has ever seen, most of it predatory.
Since then some Europeans have decided that maybe the Pay-'Em-To-Hold-The-Line policy was wise after all. But it's harder to recruit new barricade-holders after everyone saw what happened to the last ones.
Wasn’t that during the attempt to bring democracy to North Africa? Democracy doesn’t seem to work in Muslim countries.
Why yes it was. And not just to North Africa, but to the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
Twenty-three years ago, but it seems like it was yesterday, in the weeks and months after 9/11, I can recall reading in the pages of the prestige press how imperative it was that we bring Democracy to the benighted savages who simply know not what they do. Then they wouldn't be beastly anymore.
My thought at the time (I was living in a Muslim Arab country) was that, "These writers must not know too many Arabs or Muslims."
Maybe they recalled their college roommate who was the son of an Egyptian Minister or some such, and assumed they could extrapolate from him to the entire Muslim world. Whatever the reason, the entire elite consensus, from media though government and the academy, was that Democracy was the cure for whatever ails the world. And they promptly launched a worldwide campaign to bring Democracy by Whatever Means Necessary: bombing or bayoneting, bribing or bullying.
It was blazingly obvious to me that this wasn't going to end well, but the Elite Consensus is apparently immune to any negative feedback even from reality, much less from the remote criticism of a humble laborer on the frontier. So over the next decade the inevitable happened, and with characteristic immunity to negative feedback, over the following decade the Democracy Bringers brought their dubious techniques back home, and here we are.
A funny anecdote of an elite's glancing contact with reality was in, I think, Condoleezza Rice's memoir where she describes their project to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict by using Democracy™ in the mid-aughties. The Palestinians had been bribed and bullied to elect the candidates that the US and Israel had carefully selected and groomed. The night of the election, Rice went to bed in her DC condo in the calm assurance that Democracy would work its magic. In the morning she began her exercise routine and flicked on the news. She was so stunned to learn that the Islamic-hardline Hamas had won that she forgot she was on a running treadmill and was promptly flung to the floor. A great cinematic moment if anyone ever makes the movie of "Democracy: The God That Failed" or "The New Crusade" or whatever.
It's not so much that democracy doesn’t work in Muslim countries. It's just that Muslims don't want what we want them to want.
And by "we", I mean elite consensus.
Wasn’t Gaddafi (Libya) being paid to stop Africans?
Then he was assassinated during a NATO-backed uprising. Mind you, he was pretty brutal.
Libya no longer has a central government.
Yes. Quaddafi was paid to keep Africans off the boats and he did a fine job.
Solar is also highly modular, so it’s much lower in cost and schedule risk during construction compared to other generating assets. This is good for getting foreign investment - there is a TON of private equity interest in renewables in emerging markets (i.e., the third world), and the political risk is generally greater than the execution risk.
Solar doesn’t provide base load, though in a very sunny place with small, low load grids it might do fine. But as the demand rises it would need to be combined with battery storage, which would be another investment opportunity. Any African nation that could provide enough stability could see a lot of investment. They’ll have to dial back on the graft, though. A lot of the PE money comes from pension funds (incl. national ones). Their appetite for scandal is nonexistent.
Relatedly, the current wave of LNG export started gaining momentum in the early teens with massive interest from India in bringing electricity to the large slice of its population without it and Japan not wanting to buy more gas from Russia. Grok says the percentage of Indians without electricity 10 years ago was about 20. I remember it being higher, but the key point is that in 10 years they’ve succeeded in electrifying most of that population. Obviously, they’re better at big organizations than sub-Saharan Africa. Has it made any difference to Indians’ desire to emigrate in general? I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem to have made America less attractive.
Indians moving to Canada as fast as Trudeau can import them.
He’s been forced to cut back as the resulting housing shortages has angered the population.
Steve needs to come up with a catchy name for the 21st century's Great Question: will Africans move to Europe faster than the Europeans elect far-right parties to keep them out?
The AfD in Germany now looks like it could take (as much as) 30% of seats in the Bundestag in the Feb 2025 elections.
The real question is when Western Europe will stop trying to enforce and police an anachronistic (and now ridiculous-looking) "cordon-sanitaire strategy" against the ethnonationalist elements in their own politics.
The centrist status-quo parties now cast themselves as valiant gatekeepers. Within easy living memory, all of these parties had tacit ethnonationaist tendencies or wings, all of which were ejected or disavowed and pushed away, in a process that begins at earliest in most places around the 1980s and which was complete, or near-complete, by around the 2000s.
The beach-heads already established by radically-undesirable elements, like Black-African and Muslim, in most West-European countries occurred in tandem with the process just described. New parties, called "Far Right" but really just occupying open political space abandoned by the others, were the result. Finally we see real results in the 2020s.
To return directly to the question: of "a race between Black-Africans moving in and 'Far-Right' parties being voted in." It's likely not going to be the "Far-Right" breakthrough but a choice by the political center to make a deal with the Far-Right. Once it happens in one major country, it will, within a few years, happen in all of them. Who will be the first?
Doing so would be reversing the guilt-ridden, suicidal thinking of White leftists (especially women); sadly, I don't think that will happen, and Europe will continue its slide into third-world territory.
Are you German? (Guessing by your name/handle.)
Didn't the CDU just (perhaps inadvertently) break the "cordon sanitaire"?
https://x.com/eugyppius1/status/1883939576034562483
Thanks for the link--I hadn't realized that the CDU might relent. That would be good, but even a full-on AfD triumph may be too late to save Germany.
I'm not German--my father was born in Hungary and I'm a U.S. citizen. I love Europe and travel there often, which is why I'm so concerned about the destruction of European culture.
I've met many Germans who grew up in the '60's, as I did. The level of guilt that was heaped on them in their childhood--from the schools, media, and pop culture--was astonishing. They were essentially brainwashed to hate anything White, German, or European.
There is good reason to NOT trust Herr Merz to be the one to really cross this Rubicon. But I'd be very-okay with being wrong on that.
Munz may not have crossed the Rubicon, but he appears to have waded into it—or maybe more stumbled into it. We'll see which bank he exits on.
The colorless German political class has no real leaders today, so the ultimate determinant may not be the politicians but the electorate. Once the poll-watching pols realize that there is no path to victory without the allegedly "rightwing" AfD-ist vote, they may do the right thing just out of crass careerist calculation.
Whether that will happen before Germany is fatally injected with die-versity remains to be seen.
The far bank of the Rubicon should also be "kept an eye on," IMO.
If the point as phrased there isn't clear enough: the AfD of the mid-2020s is not likely to be nearly as radical/effective as its opponents claim. (As a sideline-support of the AfD since the Migrant Crisis of 2015-16, I say that with some regret.)
It's been common for years to hear the observation something like this:
"AfD-circa-2020 = CDU-circa-1995." Or similar. Although the AfD also clearly has a committed core, or 'wing' as the German media calls it, that is as ethnonationalist is legally permitted to be under their system, elements that for decades were marginalized to activist right-wing parties almost always below the "5%-Hurdle."
Yes, there are majorly important elements of the AfD even of today that are committed to doing the right thing, especially the circle still around Hoecke. A national-level AfD that really does take 30% of Bundestag seats, especially if Frau Weidel exerts power on behalf of her vision of things, well, it seems would be difficult to maintain the lithe political-physique necessary to the ideological-radical.
It's long been speculated that the CDU could fracture into a muddling-middle Status-Quo faction and a bumbling-conservative AfD-Accodmodationist faction. The latter would be the one to make the "Rubicon"-crossing step of siding with the AfD in a serious way. I've believed this would first happen at a state level. It would be a better development, in fact, than a buy-off attempt from a major Status Quo figure like Merz.
A real possibility, I think, in the event of a co-opting attempt by Status Quo forces would be an AfD break-apart scenario. The AfD may well really take 30% of Bundestag seats in Feb 2025 upcoming, possibly even with the huge psychological or prestige boost of being the biggest party, and definitely at-least the second-biggest party (after CDU). At that point, the AfD itself could split into an accomodationist faction (willing to be bought off by Merz or another such figure) and, for lack of a better term, a non-accomodationist faction. The question is the price asked by the Status Quo forces who float an offer.
The entire point of parliamentary-coalitional politics is to influence the government towards policies we prefer, through the mechanism of securing control of policy-making government ministries and influence within the inner-circle of the prime minister (chancellor), including via the implied threat to take him down ("vote of no-confidence") if the prime minister doesn't hold up his end of the bargain. But the AfD has always been oppositionist and a scenario in which Status Quo forces "make an offer they can't refuse" changes the game entirely.
The question will be: what issue might these two potential factions of the AfD split over.
All the baseline-dynamics already exist for a split. Driving a wedge within the AfD would be a way for the Status-Quo forces in Germany to continue enforcing the "cordon sanitaire"; an element of the AfD would be "bought off," or "coopted" if you prefer, and things proceed as normal as the "non-accomodationists" are now the ones outside the 'cordon'.
Still another scenario, which looked possible (but not likely) before Merz, was that AfD together with parties outside the CDU could unite to defeat the CDU. Much more likely at a state level at first, and it would require forces outside the usual other Status Quo parties (especially SPD, who would simply never ever do this and would probably sooner disband as a party and transfer their funds to the Monster Raving Loony Party or similar). A lot of talk of exactly this happened soon after the founding of this left-wing, immigration-restrictionist, anti-NATO-leaning BSW party, but finally its leader said she had consulted the relevant oracles and tea-leaves and experts in palmistry to say cooperation with AfD was not possible under the current astrological influences
The big question remains: Who crosses the Rubicon in the true sense of that term (no tricks). Where/when especially does a non-accomodationist form of the AfD (or a similar party; "to the Right of the CDU") get into power, especially control of a state government.
I believe a lot of puzzle pieces could fall fast after that happens, and far beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Germany, in important ways, remains the moral-leader of Europe. In important ways the destiny of ALL of core-Europe (EU) is in its hands. Not just because of economic power but because of the prestige emanating off from a high-trust society; moral leadership, as it were. Even low-trust people tend to look up to a high-trust power (as, for example, how a low-trust Third Worlder might look up to the USA despite being unable to create a traditionally-high-trust polity like the USA's was for so many generations).
For anyone reading this far and who hasn't seen the below, I direct you to this essay on High-Trust in Europe. It focuses in part on this question of German leadership in Europe and has much more similar commentary from me on the same questions:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2024/12/23/the-persistence-of-high-trust-in-europe-west-of-the-hajnal-line-and-the-future-of-western-uniqueness-in-the-21st-century/
Building solar fields isn't that hard, maintaining those fields and the transmission lines? This is Africa we are talking about.
Surely your lead question is in jest? Lack of electrification hasn't been holding Africans back, it's African culture (primarily violent tribalism) and society that has.
I was in SA in 2023. The safari outfitter had solar and diesel generators because the government turned off the power most nights at 7 pm. He said solar had advanced significantly in the past 5 years and they would soon be off the government grid completely.
A square meter of solar panel can provide 7 KW hours on summer day in Phoenix. So, with 15 hours of daylight, you're getting about 500 (7000 ÷ 15) watts electric when the sun shines.
Now Phoenix in the summer is an optimal case. Maybe the Average African Sunny Area solar panel half of Optimal Phoenix, or 3.5 KW hours per day. Add in a battery to average out power during the night, and you can probably run a laptop, a phone, a Starlink node, and minimal lights.
A well run family farm could maintain such a system. Of course, keeping away grabby gangs and neighbors is another story.
I believe it was the hard copy “The Atlantic Magazine” ( my favorite magazine about history, politics and culture ) revisiting the 1970s Jean Respaul end of White Western novel “ the Camp of the Saints “ that “ noticed” ( S Sailer term ) that French , Italian television was getting picked up via satélite dish to millions of North African TV viewers on the other/Southern side of the Mediterranean Sea , including lots of adverts and Sports programming showing Black African and Arab North African young male sports stars with expensive fancy cars and sexy European Gfs.
I m sure this problem has only gotten worse with the Internet , porn .
So to answer your question S Sailer , hundreds if millions of additional ( young male) Africans getting electricity , TV , internet , NBA, British Premier League Soccer - Al Jazeera will only increase the “ pull factor “ enticing hundreds of millions if Africans , East Indians to try to migrate to the 1st world , Europe, UK, USA/Canada
I must have missed it S Sailer - have you reviewed Respaul’s “ Camp of the Saints “?
Jaye
Left behind in Chicago
The problem of not having electricity in Africa isn’t access to capital, but rather corruption and terrible maintenance practices. the question then is do you deal with corruption and terrible maintenance practices on a centralized level (I.e. one large utility state controlled or regulated entity) or across dozens or even hundreds of communities/municipalities. Economics might be different, but the fundamental problems will be the same.
Solar panels would seem to change the equation somewhat. But they too are expensive and, to some extent, hard targets. They'd also need distribution networks. Not quite the same as "cell phone towers," I'd think.