"How comes Africa is in the shape it is?"
Most of it are societies that never really went beyond the tribal dimension... as soon as the state becomes a foil for the tribe of the last cleptocrat, people trust goes to zero, and everybody starts just looking out for himself and maybe, the family, the clan.
And this can be said of every country on Earth where the state is nothing more than a clique with power intent in furthering its primacy.
Problem is, it does not take much to revert a democracy to a similar state of affairs...
Nazi Germany was in that shape, though its propaganda managed to hide it - it was a hugely inefficient, bureaucratic gang-land with internecine wars going on, that was forced to loot a continent to avoid the implosion of its debt-funded military expansion.
The Allies managed to win the war also because, among other things, they were much more ruthlessly meritocratic and efficient than the Nazi regime.
The democracies, because it is in their nature when they work well, and the SSSR because Stalin was much more pragmatic than Hitler... the politic commissar made the army inelastic and inefficient? They were gone. In many ways, Stalin and the system he created were much fairer than Germany, in that everybody could end in a gulag - and getting out of it. Crazy, criminal, but fairer.
When the system is fair and balanced, people play the game of life.
When the system is unfair and rewards the friends of friends, that same people spend their energies just to game the system. When energy goes there instead than in doing real stuff, the system after a while starts breaking down.
It doesn't take much - a leader with executive power that gives the worst example is often all that it is needed as, as it is in so much in life, once the process starts the feedback will keep it going.
It is apparent that the U.S.A. have their worst leader ever.
Let's hope that the USA are really God'sm country, and that it will not be enough to make it take the Zimbabwe route.
