Many radical African patriots have started asking what “evil” France is plotting for Africa, after Paris’s leading role in the allied air strikes to enforce the United Nations “no-fly” zone over Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.

And when French troops started mixing it up close and personal with troops loyal to Ivory Coast’s usurper president Laurent Gbagbo (at the urging of the UN), they got their answer.

France, they concluded, is plotting to once again dominate its former colonies.

If true, it is only part of the story.

As the shooting continued in Libya and Gbagbo went into hiding in the bunker of the presidential residence in the capital Abidjan, some 250 migrants were reported to have drowned after a boat that set off from Libya carrying about 300 people sank on April 6 off the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The poor souls were mostly from Bangladesh, Chad, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan.

So as long as Africans continue taking extremely high risks in order to get to Europe, North America, and Asia, the continent cannot defend itself.

The people who will take such desperate measures to escape from Africa to France, will not put their necks on the line to defend it when the same France intervenes.

As former US president Bill Clinton said in a different context, France and other powers are intervening in Africa because they can.

Many Africans would rather run away from Africa than fight for it, because life in most countries on the continent remains terrible.

True, a few countries have made progress in building infrastructure, reforming their economies, putting millions of children in school, and instituting reasonable levels of democratic governance.

However, in most countries thieves and murderers are the presidents, stealing elections, killing and torturing their citizens, and looting national treasuries.

Africa has the highest level of youth unemployment in the world.

Africa’s new ticket out of hell was supposed to be China. There are problems with China’s game in Africa, but on the whole it has built roads, dams, government offices, in ways that were thought impossible in the days when the West was Africa’s dominant business partner.

However, these Chinese-built roads are cruised by expensive four-wheel drives that Africa’s fat cats have gifted themselves from taxpayer’s money.

They have not resulted in more efficient production on African farms, nor increased most countries’ trade with the rest of the world — except, of course, with China.

The Chinese-built offices have not produced more efficient state bureaucrats or reduced corruption. Most of Africa is still doing business the same old way.

China’s big entry into Africa has been greeted with embarrassing amounts of fawning.

Everywhere in Africa, you hear how China is a “better trading partner than the West,” and how it will help pull Africa out of poverty.

Rather than compete, many Africans are content to scratch themselves on the roadsides and watch and marvel at the Chinese as they work three unbroken shifts to complete big projects.

China is doing well in Africa for the same reason France is emboldened to be more aggressive in its intervention — because it is the one continent where it is meeting the least resistance to the pursuit of its economic interests.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]