How far behind is Africa compared to the west?

It’s hard to calculate how far behind in years Nigeria is compared to the US, but let’s make a try.
We need a yardstick for the measurement, we could use economic advancement, religious orientation etc but I’d prefer we use technological advancement.

More specifically, military technological advancements. The reason is that military might is a good way to measure how advanced a city-state is because it tells a lot about their ability to step into any region on earth and mine its resources for their own use.
The Kardashev’s scale proposes that human technological advancement can be measured in their ability to mine needed resources at scale.

So, which piece of technology should we use? The airplane comes to mind, the Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903. That’s 117 years ago.

Since Nigeria has not been able to invent the airplane to date, we can safely say that Nigeria is at least 117 years behind the west.

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There is better technology: the gun. Our local blacksmith manufactures illegal guns but none has ever been able to come up with a machine gun. So we can use the machine gun for our measurement, the machine gun was invented in 1884, that’s about 136 years ago.

In the 17th century, Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutch polymath inventor invented the submarine under the employ of British King James I. That’s about 400 years ago!

Given that the submarine is one of the most powerful military tech still in use today, and Nigeria has not been able to invent one, it is safe to say that Nigeria is at least 400 years behind the West in technological advancement.

That is, for a powerful African country like Nigeria to be able to stand the West in an armed conflict, we need to advance 400 years at least, while their advancement pauses during the period.

It is left to be debated what causes Africa to fall so far behind.

Wu tif awa pant?

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