Have you ever thought about which are the most powerful countries in Africa?
Every time Africa is mentioned in the news, there is always a correlation with its poverty. It is the world’s second-largest continent, but also known as the poorest one. Africa has the population of 877 million people out of which 130 million lives in Nigeria, and 71 million in Egypt. This continent has a growing issue of malnutrition, hunger, diseases and lack of basic human needs, not to talk about the rights. However, many African countries are very wealthy in natural resources. For example, Sudan and Nigeria are its two leading oil producers. Botswana, Congo (Kinshasa), South Africa and Angola together make 46% of the world’s key production of diamonds. Moreover, Ghana, Tanzania, and Mali are known to be rich in gold. If you are keen to find out more about developed countries of Africa, we advise you to take a look at the most economically developed countries in Africa.
But, natural resources aren’t the only beautiful thing in this country – if you don’t believe us check our piece on 10 Countries With The Most Beautiful Women in Africa. As we can see, African countries have a lot to offer, but we shouldn’t forget that most of them were colonies, so their exploitation influenced their poverty. Not to mention other problems such as extremely high temperatures that result in water scarcity. So, out of the total number of 53, we wondered which are the most influential countries in Africa?
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Lots of things could be understood as influence or power of one country or in this case, continent. However, when thinking about influence and power of one country what the first thing that comes to your mind is? In my case, it would be the military force. The strongest military in Africa in 2017, according to Global Fire Power Index, belongs to Egypt. However, when searching for the strongest military in Africa, Nairaland, African online community, provided us with a rather different answer. They targeted Nigeria to be the strongest military in Africa, because of the number of people that can be mobilized into a fighting force. However, if we look at the regions of Africa, strongest military in East Africa is considered to be Kenya’s, according to The East African. As you are probably familiar with, the military force consists of an Army, Navy, Air Force, and in some countries the Marines and Coast Guard. Therefore, we searched for Africa’s best forces in all fields. What we found out is that North Africa has the best air force, and especially Morocco, as suggested by the African Globe. The best navy in Africa can be found in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and Morocco. Even though we haven’t found results for the best Army force on this continent, we came upon Recces, South African special forces brigade, which is also widely known in the whole Africa. It is their primary special operation unit and counter-insurgency elite.
To create our list of most powerful countries in Africa, we first took a suggestion from earlier mentioned Global Fire Power list that ranks strongest military countries in this continent by including all previously mentioned forces. However, we started thinking a bit more widely on this topic. As we live in the era of globalization, one of the most powerful things in that sense is interconnection and openness between countries. Commerce, as just one of the examples, is highly depended on the good relations between different nations. Therefore, for the second measurement of power, we took Africa’s most powerful passports, according to the Global Passport Power Ranking. We contrasted countries from the list of the strongest military countries with the countries with the highest passport index. In addition, we summed the numbers from these two rankings, then divided them by two. What we got was the average of these figures for each country. We named that value “power index” in the following list. The bigger is the number; the less power has the given country. So let’s see which countries made it to our list of the most powerful countries in Africa!
