If it is the nature of railway metro to be subsidized as is in the US and UK where feasibility studies are done and claimed not to be done in Africa, why do you expect the metro to be profitable in Addis Ababa if this is not a self defeating argument especially reading from Bloomberg which has no record of wishing Africa well and is financed from state funds to spread negative propaganda against supposed unliked people.
If governments in Africa don’t sacrifice to modernise and give citizens better working conditions with hopes of future cost recovery then who should do it? Bloomberg or pentagon? they sure won’t and can’t.
Everything is risky for example; research or going to the moon where those billions have never been recouped from, but they are still going anyway and even talking about Mars. Isn’t it better to invest in the productivity of the African people who constitute 18 to 20% of the planet but are currently producing only 3% of global GDP?
Whatever must be done should be done to enhance Africa’s productivity in order to make it equivalent to our population constitution on earth.
There and then we will not become a perpetual laughing stock of the rest of humanity.
If anyone has ever heard of britains HS2 a british highspeed train network , it was cancelled to stop almost midway due to cost overruns, was a feasibility study done in Britain? Have we seen Bloomberg publish in its criticism or is it because it was not financed by China?
Productivity comes from investment by the state eg, Joe Biden’s inflation reduction act and Chips act. Even when they know they don’t have enough market to absorb all their production of chips, they invest to create jobs and enhance productivity. So, African governments must invest regardless of the risk especially in infrastructure.
Sure Africans can make feasibility study mistakes, but is this an African thing or it is something that is everywhere? Facts say differently, making it look like Africans working with the Chinese are making mistakes is a biased imperialistic, and as usual hypocritical approach. This hypocrisy being copied and pasted by other Africans in the name of being scholars is unfortunate and ultimately dangerous.
Kwame Gonza is a Mechanical Engineer, architect of the African Railway Triangle Network Master Plan and Pan Africanist Member of the African Continental Unity Party.
