Venezuela is one thing, but bringing Africa into this is actually very dumb. First of all, it's 100% false that African's failed to maintain the infrastructure left by the Europeans; they did in the aggregate, and they also expanded it. Turns out not every piece of infrastructure the colonialists built was useful once the economic structure changed. The rust belt jog any memories? Everything from roads, ports, electricity, hospitals, etc, almost every single form of infrastructure left by the Europeans was expanded by the Africans they left behind. For example, Nigeria's roads grew by 30x post-independence, Ghana at least 10x, and Botswana, 600x. 99% of roads in almost every African country were built after independence. It's the same for air and sea ports, power plants, electricity grids, you name it. Now, going back to why Africa is actually poor today, turns out actually resources aren't that valuable, and their prices are volatile, so Africa has been getting bitchslapped by boom and bust cycles for decades. What this means is that when resources are in demand, you get infrastructure; when demand drops, the government runs out of money, the infrastructure decays, and the economy resets. Remember all those "Africa rising" articles you used to see every few decades? yeah those were from boom periods. African countries consistently hit 7%+ growth rates during those periods, sometimes as high as 10%+ In the bust periods, the GDP can be cut in half, wiping out decades of economic gains. Add to this the population explosion and debt crises, and you have a perfect storm None of this is to excuse African leaders, as they are a bunch of failures for delaying industrialization; however, you can criticize Africa without literally lying about it. Managing resources has never been the problem; the problem is that unless you a very specific kind of country, you cannot get rich off of resources. You must industrialize.