Project Sabon Afirka (Hausa: New Africa) is a major regional rebuilding and rehabiliation program taking place throughout West Africa, which is under the economic control of Pravus International, who is overseeing the project's development through its largest and most profitable subsidary Makamashi, a Nigerian energy company based in the region. Focused on the rebuilding of the cities and nations that make up West Africa, Project Sabon Afirka has been an ongoing effort since 1998, overwhich period of time Pravus International has come to play a major role in the social frabic of the West African nations and their fragile economic expansion programs.
Under the supervision of Pravus, many of the nations have experienced economic booms that likes of which had not been since the post-colonial era. Pravus-backed troops have kept rebel and extremist activity supressed for much of the project's history, allowing for political stability and social freedoms often supressed across much of the rest of Africa. Though its motives have come suspecion many times, Pravus has pulled through the accusations as a hero to many living in West Africa, and though its methods of keeping the peace are often draconian in act, such behavior is common to the populace, and thus ignored for the most part as Pravus does much to increase the security in the region.
Background[]
Startup and Government Cooperation[]
Pravus International had always held a deep interest in the region of West Africa for some years before the start of Project Sabon Afirka. The owners and founders of the company, Julius Marshall, Abigail Townsend, and Stephan Nash were strong supporters Pan-Africanism, and for the most part supported any plans to provide aid to the region through any means possible. However, their disgust that the Western powers were doing nothing or doing too little to help the nations the trio considered largely responsible for ruining in the first place, led to their unianamious decision to step in themselves, and do what the West was not. Citing Rwanda as a major point for their reason for going into Africa with agreesive determination, the corporation was granted a number of contracts by the local governments who sought the aid of a well connected and relatively powerful international corporation, which they saw had the potential to free them of the enoromous debts and unemployment they were suffering.
Using the failures of the economic schemes set up by the African governments as a reason to allow them to assist, Pravus International was allowed to establish a joint free trade agreement with many of the West African governments, permitting them to oversee the running and distribution of important resource facilities and mineral reserve centers, while in exchange taking a small percentage of the profits and returning the rest to the partner country. The corporation built the city of Luksurya in Nigeria in 1999 as the center of the operations in West Africa following their aquisition of the young Nigerian energy company Makamashi, one of the few utility companies free of state ownership at the time. Pravus was determined to gain the support of the people to hasen the development of important facilities such as water pumps, waste removal, and transportation, all important but poorly funded and equipped sectors of the West African economies.
Expansion of the Project[]
Pravus International was gaining momentum in several major areas of the economy in West Africa. High technology was firmly under their control by 2001, when Pravus bought out most of the competitors, though at the cost of losing much of the trust of the national governments, which feared Pravus was establishing itself as a monopoly in the region. Many attempts to stop this were made, though Pravus was able to circumvent the issues by bringing up the progress it was making, especially in the rural regions of the area. By establishing new businesses which paid well for the region's typically pay rates, farmers and fishers which had nominally made up most of West Africa's population began moving into the cities in search of work, increasing manpower and industrial output to level never seen before.
This landmark achievement also had dual effect of weakening many of the rebel movements in the nations, which had relied on the dissatifaction of the locals against the government for their poor standards of living to join them and bolster their power and influence. With the main base and pool and recruits drying up, many rebel armies simply vanished, while other more determined forces simply became more aggressive. This resulted in the start of highly active rebel campaigns to remove Pravus from Africa, a major threat to rebel power, and destablizer of the status quo. Pravus responded to these assaults by bringing in their mercenary armies, made up largely of contractors from the Zvver Security Network, a Russian private military company created by Pravus to move into the PMC sector.
Pravus crushed many uprisings and stopped innumerable rebel organizations all seeking to survive as the squalor that they depended on for power dissappeared around them. Pravus' role as a peacekeeper had firmly established by 2005, when a permanent force of 25,000 mercenary soldiers were stationed outside of the city of Man, Ivory Coast as the Pravus West African Legion. While many national authorities and watchdog groups complained about the move, many West Africans supported it, stating that the presence of the mercenaries allowed for the freedom of economic growth and the freedom from the threat of rebel retailiation against the villages that supported Pravus' economic program. With no military contenders to deal with, Pravus was free to focus all of its attention on its economic development schemes.
Monopolization of West Africa[]
With most of the big players removed as viable threats to Pravus, Pravus' economic control was firmly established, and with it in control of economy, most if not all West African leaders answered to Pravus, for the corporation controlled the cash flow, and with it, the power of the purse. Nations could not make withdraws without the corporation's permission, as that money rightfully belonged to Pravus. Most of the populations worked on Pravus-owned land, in Pravus-owned buildings, with Pravus-owned tools. Some of the workers even lived in Pravus-built homes and relied on Pravus' agricultural subsidary the Eckstein Company for its grain imports after it moved in the region to capitalize on West Africa's rich farming soils and abundant water sources. Many of Pravus' subsidaries were responsible for building up the nations that had allowed Pravus into enter their lands, and were thus in debt to each company, which in turn made them liable to Pravus International.
By 2009, no one could dispute the invisible hand of Pravus, wielding the collective will and power of forteen seperate nations in its palm, and maintaining a stranglehold on the economies of each. The worst part of the matter was that whereas any force could be defeated either by political and military means, Pravus' economic was unassailable. The countries had no money to begin with, and thus had no money to fight that of Pravus'. Politicians relied on Pravus loans and donations to get into office, and the police and security forces that keep the cities of the nations safe where all in the unfathomably deep pockets of Pravus International. The few that fought the industial machine of Pravus either saw their lives ruined by Pravus public relations committees, brow-beatened by their crack legal teams, or simply nonpersoned out of existence, kidnapped by Pravus death squads never to be seen again.
By 2010, Pravus was unstoppable, the ultimate power in West Africa to whom no one could surpass. With hundreds of billions of dollars in their pockets, countless police forces on the payroll, and politicians incapable or unwilling to fight back, Pravus had West Africa under its control. However, it had done so with the intention of brining the region's standards of living up to those comparable to Europe or East Asia, and had so quite nicely. However, it was no longer the hero it had been in the years before. Many of the elite with the money to stand their ground, used their resources to expose Pravus' vice grip on the region, and some were quite successful in doing so. Some managed to pull away long-time supporters of the corporation, but in the process destroyed any possibilities of regaining the respect of those who had benefited from Pravus' work.