While formal colonial rule has ended in much of Africa western multinationals and mainly European banks and governments have huge influence on the continent. Formal empire was never the preferred option of the colonial powers. Formal occupation was undertaken to protect economic interests and markets. However, it was expensive to maintain and administer.
The end of formal colonial rule gives Buisness and Banks increased ability to manipulate the economy of African countries without the same consequences. Starving children in a formally independent country are not percieved as the problem of the Colonial master, it can be blaimed on local corruption and mismanagement.
Meanwhile there is little that moves in Africa that isn't linked to European banks, buisnesses and supermarkets. Oil, minerals and land are all controled by European and US companies on a grand scale.
Next time you go in the supermarket look at the labels on the food and remember if you are eating foods from Africa its because someone in Africa is going hungry for lack of land. Ditto the petrol in you car.
This is not to say that African regimes aren't corrupt but that it is easy to criticise from a wealthy powerful country like the UK where officials are paid enough to live on.
After all - whoever heard of a functioning democracy in a poor country.

Warning- the initial message here has been posted by a known fascist sympathiser. So don't waste your breath!

Apart from the fact that your name is so unfortunate ( Union Jack? Jack Boot? To all you scrupulously un-racist Jacks out there, my sincere apologies, but this Jack I'm addressing here is at least a dyed in the wool reactionary right-winger and, entirely believably, a fascist sympathiser or at worst a Nazi in sheep's clothing ), why is it that you purvey superficial crap about Africa, implying that Africa is incapable of running its affairs effectively? ( which, by the way, is clearly false: precisely because the people of Africa are NOT free to run things themselves as a result (1) of the policies of the World Bank, IMF, etc., (2) of the connected interests of the ruling classes of the so-called First World which control these countries for their own economic ends and (3) of the fact that these systems are all too often corrupt capitalist states, the responsibility for which is deeply tied up with the appalling legacy of colonialism and its current informal neo-colonial extensions, as a previous contributor points out ).

Why also do you keep talking darkly about creating a New Order which would ensure the destruction of the SWP ( I paraphrase )? Now whether you love the SWP or not, that's not the question here. The question here is: are you a Nazi or not? If so, you should get a life. If not, you should get a brain. And, by the way, you were not called a Nazi ( but a fascist sympathiser: a subtle difference, but significant as you are at least a Western colonial sympathiser - which ain't too far away now, is it? Would it have been better if he merely called you a racist sympathiser?! ). Why in addition were you so happy at the fact (?) that the BNP is so well ensconced at Leeds University! What is the BNP, but a Nazi organisation at its core? ( As PANORAMA clearly demonstrated last year. ) If you are not a Nazi, are you not convinced by the need to combat racism and any spread of the Far Right?

Lastly, how did Jay B block your freedom of speech? All s/he said was don't debate with fascist sympathisers, essentially, and you went into a ridiculous rant about the virtues of free speech. Well, yes, free speech, doooh ( as my teenage step-kid would say ), but you also have the responsibility to engage in debate that is defensible intellectually: your 'very telling' remark on a noxious quote from the Times was absolutely pathetic!

You are probably not worth this, as Jay B said, but well I fancied writing something so what the Hell?!! And the mind of someone so pulled this way arrests and disturbs me. What has made you this way, made you so bitter, so reactionary? I await your CALM response. Can you do that?

We achieved such an Empire because we were industrious, informed, educated, skilled, capable, at times ruthless and just well…simply put…. better than the others! I cannot say anything more than that, we had a larger, more productive Empire than our European neighbours because we were simply better. "Better" being one of those words than the social engineers of Blair's Britain do not like one to use these days. Somehow we can all engage in the game but we must have no winners, no losers, the partaking of the game is of more importance than the outcome! Well tell that to the millions who are suffering because of British spinelessness in its former colonies!

Mr. Blair I demand that next time to fly off to anywhere in Africa you ask the real natives who they would rather have running the country. Despotic thugs like your friend Mugabe or the former colonial powers. One suspects there will be two sets of answers; the answer given in the presence of a Mugabe faction thug and quite the opposite in such a thug's absence.