> Poverty didn't start yesterday, nor did the exploitation of natural resources. How is that country so poor and others such as Qatar aren't?

Well because Uranium just isn't gas or petrol, there's no way around it. There's a very limited amount of buyers and most of the actual value is in the power plant. Nobody ever got rich from a Uranium mine.

What will probably happen is they will sell it cheaper to China instead and get less money.

  Which countries with such policies are you speaking of by the way? (I'm curious, I honestly don't know)

I'm from Tunisia, North Africa. We have successfully inverted the birth pyramid in ~50 years with the help of funding from UN.

And by the way, I'm not sure what other thing we're disagreeing about, to be clear, I don't think wars in Niger (and all ancient colonies in Africa) are endogenous.

> How is that country so poor and others such as Qatar aren't?

Corruption, corruption, corruption, and incompetence. Qatar doesn't have illiterate and corrupt clowns running the show. Seriously, I'm African, and I don't understand why people find it difficult to say the truth to us.

We are our own problem because we keep giving birth to more people than we can handle and voting in buffoons to run the economy.

It's not the rank that counts, but the overall share. Niger's uranium ore can easily be replaced with Australian or Canadian ore in the next years. The price of ore in the final electricity cost is meaningless.

Niger is the top recipient of international aid in the region, worth 1.8bn$ last year. French taxpayers contributed 131M$. Most of the population still live under the poverty line (2.15$ a day).

Where will Niger get the capital to double its power grid in the next 20 years? Territory size is meaningless, by your standard Hong Kong should be poorer than Russia given the extreme density differences. Most of Niger land is aride and can't be cultivated anyway, so food needs to be imported. Parabolic population growth will only make things worse.

Regarding multi-ethnic empires, can you give me a source? I believe that it's mainly tribal oppression against enslaved dominated ethnicities. Similar to Pygmee slaves still owned by Bantu people.

Improving the region would mean understanding what's wrong instead of blaming the white men for all of the trouble. Not sure we're on the good path.

> Nigeria seems to do better in spite of those fertility rates you speak of.

Nigerian here; no we're not. Our economy is dismal and barely growing, yet the population is exploding. Poor (and I mean dirt-poor) people account for the majority of this population explosion, giving birth to offspring that'll face a lifetime of suffering.

I agree with the person you're replying to. African countries cause their own problems because they give birth to more people than their economic growth can cater to.

Here's a dire stat; Nigeria is currently about 224 million, and 63% are classified as "multidimensionally poor" [1]. Yet, we're expected to surpass China in population at year 2,100 [2].

How on earth do we expect those hundreds of millions more people to survive when we can't even take care of the ones we have? Answer is no one has a plan, but poorer people keep giving birth like flies and most of their offspring won't escape poverty. This is what sheer lack of education causes, coupled with excessive corruption that hinders economic growth.

1 - https://nigerianstat.gov.ng/news/78#:~:text=In%20Nigeria%2C%....

2 - https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/nigeria-to-...