Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Despite the eruption of military coups, civil strife and political instability, a sense of optimism about Africa’s future prevailed throughout the 1960s. . . . In the 1970s Africa was struck by a series of calamities. A prolonged drought between 1968 and 1973 had a devastating impact on the Sahel region, a thin strip of semi-arid land south of the Sahara desert . . . In 1973 came the first of the oil shocks. . . . The effect was to put a severe strain on their balance of payments, forcing governments to reduce imports of many essential goods and to raise domestic costs and prices. . . . The main causes of Africa’s growing economic malaise were not external factors, like the increases in oil costs, but internal factors. The drive for industrialisation, regarded as the key to economic development by most African governments, had encountered severe difficulties. . . . Private investors, both foreign and domestic, were deterred by numerous obstacles – bureaucratic obstruction, stringent regulations, import licensing, political risk, the shortage of skilled labour and operational hazards like unreliable electricity supplies and malfunctioning telephone systems." [The Fate of Africa, p. 277]