Why is the African continent poor?

[Maedhros]

54. Africa: “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/179050/why-us-military-averaging-more-mission-day-africa#

Last year, according AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez, the US military carried out a total of 546 “activities” on the continent—a catch-all term for everything the military does in Africa. In other words, it averages about one and a half missions a day. This represents a 217 percent increase in operations, programs and exercises since the command was established in 2008.

From 2008 to 2013, the number of missions, exercises, operations and other activities under AFRICOM’s purview has skyrocketed from 172 to 546, but little substantive information has been made public about what exactly most of these missions involved and just who US forces have trained. Since 2011, US Army Africa alone has taken part in close to 1,000 “activities” across the continent, but independent reporters have only been on hand for a tiny fraction of them, so there are limits to what we can know about them beyond military talking points and official news releases for a relative few of these missions. Only later did it become clear that the United States extensively mentored the military officer who overthrew Mali’s elected government in 2012, and that the US trained a Congolese commando battalion implicated by the United Nations in mass rapes and other atrocities during that same year, to cite two examples.

Since its inception, US Africa Command has consistently downplayed its role on the continent. Meanwhile, far from the press or the public, the officers running its secret operations have privately been calling Africa “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”

I presume this is the reason: