The African Strong Man model suits the purposes of European imperialists and the United States, perfectly. Their overarching concern– especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union – is for the multinational mineral and petroleum-extracting corporations – what Europeans and Americans are actually referring to when they speak of their “national interests” on the continent. Representing himself and a small base of supporters/dependents, the Strong Man can be counted on to bully civil society into steadily narrowing spaces, snuffing out all independent social formations, while at the same time stripping the society of the means to protect itself outside of his own, capricious machinery. The nation itself atrophies, or is stillborn, as in Congo. Where nations have not had the chance to take full root or have been deliberately stunted, the Strong Man wraps the thin reeds of sovereignty around himself, denying the people their means of connectedness to one another, except through him. The state is a private apparatus and – from the standpoint of civil society – there appears to be no nation, at all. The people act, accordingly – that is, they do not act as citizens of a nation.
Thus, the Strong Man’s most valuable service to the foreign master is to retard and negate nationhood through constant assaults on civil society.
What is commonly described as American “neglect” of Africa is nothing of the kind. Over the course of the decades since the end of formal colonialism, the governments of the corporate headquarters countries have arrived at a consensus that a chaotic Africa, barely governed at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure, incapable of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least troublesome environment for Western purposes. The extraction corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa are insecure.