Rebirth of England.

Chapter 858 Rubber Industry
An obvious example of the laziness of the local black people in Kolo is that before this, Kolo had allocated a special fund of 1000 billion Kolo shillings to provide interest-free and low-interest loans to eligible Kolo people through the United Bank of West Africa to help them engage in self-employment and start companies.

The maximum interest-free loan amount for individuals is a 10-year loan of Ksh10, while the maximum limit of low-interest loans can be as high as Ksh100 million.

At that time, Kolo was making huge profits from offshore oil fields, and the implementation of this measure was to stimulate the domestic economy. After all, the Kolo shilling itself was issued by the United Bank of West Africa with the permission of the Monetary Authority. They chose to provide people with interest-free and low-interest loans to help them run industries and start businesses to increase their income, rather than directly distributing the money to individuals.

But a few years have passed, and the effect of this initial move has become apparent.

It is true that a small number of people seized the general trend of Colo's economic development through these interest-free or low-interest loans, and became a wealthy class by expanding production and operations.

But more people regard these loans provided by the government to individuals for business and production as "welfare" and have already squandered them.

At present, Kolo has issued a total of more than 1000 billion Kolo shillings in loans, but has successfully recovered less than 5% of it...

However, Colo had anticipated this situation - it's just that the actual repayment rate was lower than they expected. It doesn't mean that the loans that couldn't be recovered were completely wasted. After all, what they issued were Colo shillings, which were printed in Colo and circulated, which had some effect on promoting social consumption.

And in itself, this is just a screening of those lazy and unmotivated people among the people - according to the relevant regulations issued by Colo, for those people who cannot repay the loan on time, the Colo government will implement compulsory measures, "detain" them, and use labor to repay the loan.

This approach may cause protests in developed Western countries, but in Africa, it is really no big deal.

After all, these are aimed at those people who took out state loans, used them for enjoyment, and are unable to repay them.

In some areas of Kolo, the state-owned Kolo Development Investment Company has invested in a number of industries, including plantations of cash crops such as rubber, cocoa and coffee beans, as well as primary processing factories for these crops. Most of the people who owe government loans and are unable to repay them on time have their freedom restricted and are forced to work in these plantations and factories.

Of course, they are not overly exploited, but the compensation they can get is only enough to maintain their survival, and the rest is used to repay the state loan.

For this reason, the Kolo government has also seen the widespread laziness among the people, so they need to use various systems to curb this.

Speaking of which, compared to the population of nearly 700 million when the new government was just established, with the social stability and economic development of Colo, their population has increased and is now close to 770 million.

But even so, the population density of Kolo is not high. After all, a place like Lijiaopo has a population of 500 million and an area of ​​less than one seventy-seventh of Kolo. That is really a very densely populated place.

Moreover, the largest city in Africa is Cairo, which has a population of over 1000 million. Even Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, has a population of 800 million, which exceeds the population of the entire country of Kolo.

Currently, the largest city in Kolo is Loti, the southernmost port city, which was once the capital of Kolo. Although a considerable number of government agencies and company headquarters have moved there with the construction of the new capital, Britta, Loti is the best port in West Africa and has industries such as petrochemicals and shipping, so its population has still increased compared to the initial population. The current population has reached 260 million, accounting for one-third of the total population of Kolo. Barron hopes that within ten years, Kolo will have one of the top cities in West Africa, but for the urbanization of Kolo, he hopes that it will be a city with industries such as industry and manufacturing as its support, rather than like many cities in Africa, where many people are completely relocated to the city without corresponding industrial support, resulting in slums throughout the city except for a few "prosperous areas" where rich people live.

Therefore, in the policies formulated by Kolo, relying on industry, attaching importance to education, and achieving quality population growth are what they pursue.

For this purpose, Kolo also promulgated a corresponding immigration law - because the quality level of the people of Kolo was much lower than that of developed countries, and the growth of the quality of the people is a slow process. At the beginning, they mainly cooperated with Britain and France to "repatriate illegal immigrants" and absorbed people with special skills in the "illegal immigrant resettlement sites" in Benin and Ghana.

These immigrants mainly come from the Middle East, and a few come from Eastern Europe. However, due to screening, over the years, the number of "new immigrants" absorbed by Kolo is only more than 1...

In addition, because of the cooperation between Colo and China in many areas such as infrastructure and manufacturing, many Chinese people came to Colo, and some of them eventually stayed here, but the number was not large.

As for those who come to Kolo from neighboring countries such as Benin, Ghana, Burkina Faso, etc., they mainly obtain short-term work visas, and Kolo rarely gives these people formal nationality.

In addition, although Colo will not take compulsory measures to control the country's population growth, it will implement the so-called "eugenics" policy through many means.

For example, in Colo, free condom distribution points can be found everywhere, and there are also many specialized agencies that distribute these free measures in public places.

In addition to preventing the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, it also prevents some people at the bottom of society from having more children...

There are some factories producing such rubber products in Colo itself - Africa itself is an important banana-growing area in the world. Looking at the map, areas like Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria, which are roughly at the same latitude as China's Qiong Island, have a climate that is very suitable for rubber cultivation.

This, of course, includes Chloe.

Among them, Côte d'Ivoire has the largest rubber plantation in Africa, followed by Nigeria, Ghana and other countries.

Although the rubber planting area in Kolo is not as large as those in these countries, Kolo's capital is still relatively strong. Both the West African Group and Kolo's state-owned Science and Technology Development Investment have invested in rubber plantations in Ghana, Nigeria and other countries, and have built a number of related rubber products manufacturing industries in Kolo.

Take products like "condoms" for example. Kolo has a considerable domestic production. They have joint ventures with related companies in Britain, China and other countries. Some of their brands are still very popular in Africa.

(End of this chapter)