African Entrepreneurship Record

Ernst said: ”Light industry has begun to receive attention at this stage of our country’s development, but industrialization is a complex and enormous issue.”

”For the past thirty years, the focus of East Africa’s development has always been agriculture, infrastructure, and heavy industry. Even if the One-Five Plan is completed, the problems of East African light industry cannot be resolved, so during the Two-Five Plan, developing light industry will become one of the key government tasks.”

Although East Africa is already an indisputable world power in terms of size, its level of development is slightly stronger than Japan and Tsarist Russia among world powers. In comparison with relatively developed countries, East Africa is relatively poor in terms of capital, technology, and foundation.

However, East Africa’s advantages as a colonial country appropriately alleviate this point. For example, in terms of per capita consumption of agricultural products, East Africa is far higher than Russia and Japan, but due to insufficient productivity, it hasn’t reached the level of the United States, and barely matches many European countries. Otherwise, based on East Africa’s territory, arable land, and resources, it should surpass most European countries.

After all, East Africa currently does not have a population over one hundred million, while Europe has more than three hundred million people, and at the same time, East Africa’s total land area is two million square kilometers more than Europe’s.

”Now, if the Russo-Japanese War breaks out, it would be an opportune time for East Africa. The main reason is to expand the Russian market. Without considering colonies, Russia is the world’s second-largest in population and largest in area, and its level of industrial and agricultural development is above the global average.”

”Russia has always been one of our important markets, but the competition we face in the Russian market is also quite intense, including Western European and American capital, which have the first-mover advantage in Russia.”

”So the Russo-Japanese War will be an important opportunity for us to expand the Russian market. Even increasing our market share in Russia by one percentage point would be a huge progress.”

For a country with a population over one hundred million, one percentage point could mean a market of millions of people, which is very attractive to any country.

Naturally, Ernst does not intend to support Russia in defeating Japan, but even if East Africa shows more goodwill to Russia than other countries in this war, it would facilitate East Africa’s business trade in Russia.

A good example is Germany in the previous life’s Russo-Japanese War. With the UK and US clearly supporting Japan, France, due to the UK and its own interests, did not support Russia in its conflict with Japan in the Far East region.

This is understandable. Although relations between France and Russia were warming, the purpose of the French government was to let Russia restrain Germany, rather than waste energy in the Far East region with Japan, making France maintain neutrality in the Russo-Japanese War, whereas Germany gave Russia the greatest support.

Of course, although Germany profited in the Russo-Japanese War, the geopolitical and political disagreements with Russia were too large, and such short-term ”friendship” ultimately could not play a role.

East Africa, on the contrary, is different. East Africa and Russia have almost no fundamental conflicts of interest, allowing East Africa to support Russia in the war, and relations between the two countries to improve further. Although the current Russian government probably has only a dozen years of life left, East Africa needs this ten-year window to boost its own development.

”We must seize every opportunity, so we can achieve rapid and healthy development of East Africa’s industries in a relatively short time. Therefore, in the latter half of the One-Five Plan, we must quickly solve the problem of our industrial product market.”

It’s easy to expand East Africa’s industrial scale in a short time, but the market is relatively fixed. If we can’t solve the market problem, East Africa can only further exploit the potential of domestic nationals to achieve its goals, and this is only a last resort.

Currently, there are very few countries in the world with independent sovereign power; apart from a few top-ranked Great Powers, most are colonies or semi-colonies. Therefore, in East Africa’s foreign markets, Russia is an important part with large scale and strong consumption power, and it does not form competitiveness with East African industries.

Russia’s industry is weak, and East Africa seems like a hard brother alongside Russia, but East Africa has already left Russia behind in heavy industry, and in light industry, Russia also lacks the advantages of East Africa.

Take the textile industry as an example. Russia’s domestic textile industry, like Germany’s, lacks supply of raw materials. In the previous life, the Soviet Union built a large number of water projects in Central Asia to ease this problem. The current Russian government, although having similar ideas, cannot achieve what the Soviet Union did, having the intention but lacking ability. This is precisely East Africa’s advantage.

In East Africa’s foreign markets, the most important is the Central and Eastern European market, with the Central European market undoubtedly centered on the German and Austria-Hungary markets of the German region. The Eastern European market could basically be summarized as the Russian market, followed by the Far East Market, and lastly, the Middle East Market, forming East Africa’s three major foreign markets.

Outside the three major foreign markets, the South American market is expanding quickly, but ultimately cannot form competitiveness with the three major markets. Additionally, East Africa lacks the opportunity to accelerate entering the South American market. The last time was when Spain was defeated in the Spanish-American War, and East Africa seized a foothold in the South American market through its relations with Spain.

Although Spain and Portugal are the main sovereign countries in South America, the South American economy is mainly held by the United Kingdom. If it weren’t for this, the increase in East Africa’s trade in the Argentine market should be able to rise quickly.

Many South American countries are economic colonies, their politics and economy heavily influenced by European countries. So for East Africa to achieve relatively outstanding results locally, it would require Europe to have no concern for the South American region.

In the previous life, this opportunity was World War I. When European countries were too busy, the United States took the opportunity to enter the South American market and replaced other countries’ advantages locally. Therefore, before a large-scale war erupts in Europe, East Africa cannot smoothly carry out infiltration work in the South American region.

The Far East Market and Middle East Market also have similar situations, with the Far East Market dominated by the ”Economic Alliance” of the US, UK, and Japan holding absolute advantage, putting East Africa at a disadvantage locally, so East Africa can only develop in economically weaker areas, focusing on defense.

The scale of the Middle East Market barely meets East African needs, with little room for further rise. After all, the Middle East is dominated by the Ottoman Empire, and because of climatic reasons, the population of the Middle East is small, and consumption power is insufficient. The richest coastal area along the Persian Gulf in later years is now most famous for pirates.

Therefore, among many markets, the Russian market is the most important for East Africa currently. Even if the future Soviet Russian regime comes to power, they cannot completely shake off East Africa’s influence, as Russia’s geographical position determines its certain dependency on tropical products like rubber.

Therefore, East Africa’s layout in Russia, even if affected by political changes, would not be too significant. Moreover, as long as Ernst makes good use of his foresight advantage, it can avoid some losses and maximize benefits.

Ernst said: ”Industrialization cannot be a closed-door creation. East Africa, under certain conditions, is not as good as Russia. Therefore, we must not ignore the importance of the international market, and the connection with the international market has always been an East Africa disadvantage, posing higher demands for our government departments and enterprises.”

Even if East Africa adopts a planned economy now, there must be flexible means to alleviate some drawbacks of a planned economy. A planned economy equally needs commercial trade, especially under Eastern Africa’s resource conditions, which is not yet at the level of Russia’s development.

Connecting to the international market is a long-term task for many state-owned enterprises in East Africa, whether in the previous life of the US or Soviet Union, despite their economies heading in two extremes, both had their own forms of market. East Africa cannot create an economic mutual aid committee, so East Africa’s foreign trade and its current planned economic system need long-term exploration for integration.