African Entrepreneurship Records 2

Chapter 1185 Quick Success
If we want to discuss the shortcomings of East Africa, it is that its civilization has a short development time. Before East Africa, there was no decent modern country in the whole of Africa.

Egypt was the top student in the African region before East Africa, but Egypt was completely unable to compete with other blocks in the matching mechanism of the Eurasian region.

Therefore, after East Africa has become the most representative big country in Africa, the most important thing to do is to make up for the lessons learned. This is also the basic logic for East Africa to quickly transform from a big country to a truly world power through immigration, industrial development, infrastructure construction and other means.

The late 19th century to early 20th century can be said to be the last window of opportunity for the African continent. If the countries on the African continent could not rise rapidly during this period, they would basically have no chance of facing the encirclement and suppression of the Western world in the future.

East Africa is the country that suddenly emerged and led the African continent to play at the top level. However, when East Africa took over most of Southern Africa, the poor conditions can be imagined.

In terms of the latitude of human civilization development, the level of civilization in sub-Saharan Africa in the late 19th century remained at the same level as at least five thousand years ago.

After all, at that time, the Far Eastern Empire and the Middle East had already developed relatively mature agricultural civilizations, and many regions had entered slave society from primitive society.

Therefore, when the East African colony was established, it was truly poor and backward, the kind that would have made the new government of the Far East Empire in 1949 cry when they saw it.

This also led to East Africa having to adopt the most radical means and methods in the early stages of colonial and national construction, such as the early "militarism" model, the rationing system, the complete nationalization of land, the most radical "centralized" model, and later the "completely planned economy" of the first two five-year plans, and the current "New Economic Policy."

Yes, the new economic policy was also very extreme. It can be said that during the Third Five-Year Plan, East Africa adopted an outrageous degree of relaxation towards the private economy, basically achieving the goal of "anything is allowed unless prohibited by law", and even turning a blind eye to some companies that violated East African laws.

All these extreme policies and systems have one thing in common, that is, "quick success". Basically in every economic development cycle, East African governments like to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, sacrificing and ignoring some interests, thereby allowing East Africa's national strength, economy, population, military, infrastructure, agriculture and other fields to expand rapidly.

Of course, East Africa’s strategy is obviously successful. It is no exaggeration to say that it took East Africa only about fifty years to complete the journey that took other countries hundreds or even thousands of years.

At least in East Africa, thorough modernization has been achieved. Land that had not been developed for tens of thousands of years has been turned into farmland, villages and cities, roads, canals, etc. The Zambezi River, Congo River and other rivers that have never been managed have been artificially managed for the first time on a large scale. The population of East Africa has also changed from 30 to 40 million primitive indigenous people to more than 100 million modern people who have received primary education...

Although the last point is a bit unethical, it is true that large-scale immigration has given birth to the greatest country in history on the African continent.

By the time of the outbreak of World War I, East Africa was clearly no longer the novice village it once was, but a world power that the entire world could not ignore, and could now compete with any other major power in the world.

The First World War was also a crossroads for East Africa. If it was used well, East Africa would make further progress. It can be foreseen that East Africa would become unprecedentedly powerful after the war.

Now Britain is the stumbling block on East Africa's rise, so it is particularly important for East Africa to break the British interference in East Africa's trade.

Merkel said: "Your Majesty, to bypass the British obstruction, we must open up more trade routes, and the construction of the Basra Railway should be accelerated."

The progress of the Basra Railway is relatively slow. According to East Africa's original plan, it was planned to take one year to open this 700-kilometer-long passage, but now Britain is on the first day of the month, and East Africa is naturally on the fifteenth day of the month.

Ernst nodded and said, "I originally wanted to use the Basra Railway to trade with the Ottoman Empire, but now it seems unnecessary, so the Ministry of Railways has accelerated the construction progress of the Basra Railway and strived to officially open the Basra Railway before July this year."

Originally, Ernst planned to use the Basra Railway to support the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottoman Empire obviously did not want to speed up the construction of the Basra Railway through territorial transactions. However, Ernst is not too concerned about this now. Although Ernst used to covet the oil off the coast of Saudi Arabia in his previous life, East Africa is no longer what it used to be.

With the incorporation of new territories such as Gabon, the Tonkin Gulf Territory, and East Kalimantan, as well as East Africa's early layout in Venezuela, Romania, the United States and other regions, East Africa has gained sufficient security in terms of oil resources.

Today, East Africa has three ways to obtain oil. The first is the local area. The oil resources in the north and west of East Africa can basically guarantee East Africa’s daily production and living needs.

The second is the overseas colonies in East Africa. Alaska, the Tonkin Gulf Territory, and East Kalimantan are all regions with relatively rich oil resources. Relying on these overseas colonies, East Africa will not lack oil supply.

The third is East Africa’s overseas investment. For example, the United States, Romania, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russia, Venezuela and other major oil producers in the world have investments in East Africa.

The oil producing areas of these other countries can also stabilize East Africa's energy security. Among them, only Tsarist Russia is at greater risk, after all, Tsarist Russia is internally unstable.

Therefore, now that a three-level firewall has been established for East Africa’s oil energy security, Ernst does not need to worry too much about it.

Ernst said: "The construction of the Basra Railway is one of the key trade routes to stabilize our relationship with the Allied camp, so the sooner it is completed, the better it will be for our current economy."

It is worth mentioning that East Africa has not yet repaid all its debts to the two major camps. Therefore, in order to pay off the debts quickly and make a profit, East Africa urgently needs to maintain its trade scale with Europe.

The main factor causing this result is the United States. With the United States in East Africa, it is impossible for the country to have a monopoly. Instead, the competition between the two countries has further diluted the profits of trade with Europe, which has resulted in neither East Africa nor the United States having paid off their pre-war debts to European countries.

The main reason is that East Africa borrowed too much money before the war. Relying on these loans, East Africa's local industrial production capacity almost doubled.

In 1910, the total industrial output value of East Africa was 1914 billion Rhine guilders, which had now expanded to more than billion Rhine guilders in .

With money from European countries, East Africa's industry has achieved qualitative development, and the economic and industrial growth rates have even exceeded those of the previous two five-year plans.

More than 270 billion Rhine guilders is only about 40 billion US dollars when converted into US dollars, while the total industrial output value of the United States before the war was only more than 24 billion.

The current industrial output value of the United States should be more than 30 billion, but at this stage in the previous life, the United States had already reached 50 billion. This shows how much market share East Africa has snatched from the United States.

However, Europe's purchasing power is limited after all. As the two industrial powers, the United States and East Africa, compete, their respective profits will naturally be less. According to the East African government's estimates, it will take at least another seven months to completely repay the debts owed to European countries.

But now Britain's deliberate obstruction will obviously prolong East Africa's debt repayment time, so the East African government has to find another way to maximize East Africa's benefits in the war as much as possible.

"After all, the Basra Railway has limited transport capacity, so we have to think of other ways. As the war progresses, trade between us and the Allies will certainly become more difficult, so we need to strengthen trade with the Allies at this stage. When it comes to the middle and late stages of the war, it will be more difficult to make money from the Allies."

(End of this chapter)