Chapter 858 Rubber Industry

An obvious example of the laziness of the native blacks in Kolo is that before this, Kolo had allocated a special fund of 100 billion Kolo shillings to issue interest-free and low-interest loans to eligible Kolo people through the United Bank of West Africa to help them engage in self-employment and start companies.

The maximum amount of interest-free loans for individuals is 100,000 Kolo shillings for a 10-year period, and the maximum amount of low-interest loans can be up to 1 million Kolo shillings.

At that time, Kolo made huge profits from offshore oil fields, and this measure was implemented to stimulate the domestic economy. After all, the Kolo shilling itself was issued by the United Bank of West Africa with the permission of the Monetary Authority - they chose to provide people with interest-free and low-interest loans to help them run industries and start businesses to increase their income, rather than directly giving the money to individuals.

But a few years later, the effect of this original measure has also emerged.

It is true that a few people have seized the general trend of Kolo's economic development through these interest-free and low-interest loans, and have become a surplus class by expanding production and operations.

But more people regard these loans provided by the government to individuals for business and production as "welfare" and have already squandered them.

At present, Kolo has issued a total of more than 100 billion Kolo shillings in loans, and less than 5% of them have been successfully recovered...

However, Kolo had expected this situation at the beginning - it's just that the repayment rate is lower than they expected. It doesn't mean that the loans that cannot be recovered are completely wasted. After all, they issued Kolo shillings, which were printed by Kolo and circulated, which also has some effect on promoting social consumption.

And in itself, this is also a screening of those lazy and unmotivated people among the people - according to the relevant regulations issued by Kolo, those who cannot repay the loans on time, the Kolo government will implement compulsory measures, "detain" them, and use labor to repay the loans.

Maybe this method will cause protests in developed Western countries, but it is really nothing in Africa.

After all, this is all for those who take state loans for enjoyment and are unable to repay.

In some areas of Kolo, the state-owned KFAT (Kolo Development Investment Company) has invested in many industries, including plantations of cash crops such as rubber, cocoa and coffee beans, as well as primary processing factories for these crops. Most of the people who owed government loans and could not repay them on time were restricted from working in these plantations and factories.

Of course, they were not too exploited, but the rewards they could get were only used to maintain their survival, and the rest were used to repay the state loans.

That is why the Kolo government also saw the widespread laziness among the people, so they needed to use various systems to suppress it.

Speaking of which, compared with the population of 7 million when the new government was just established, with the social stability and economic development of Kolo, their population has increased to nearly 7.7 million.

But even so, Kolo's population density is not high. After all, Lijiapo, with a population of 5 million and an area of ​​less than one-seventy-seventh of Kolo, is really extremely densely populated.

Moreover, the largest city in Africa is Cairo, with a population of over 10 million. Even Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, has a population of 8 million, which exceeds the population of Kolo.

Currently, the largest city in Kolo is Loti, the southernmost port city, which was once the capital of Kolo. Although a considerable number of government agencies and company headquarters have moved there with the construction of the new capital, Britta, Loti is the first good port in West Africa and has the support of industries such as petrochemicals and shipping. Its population has still increased compared to the initial population. The current population has reached 2.6 million, accounting for one-third of the total population of Kolo.

Barron hopes that within ten years, Kolo will have one of the top cities in West Africa, but for the urbanization of Kolo, he hopes that it will be a city with industries such as industry and manufacturing as its support, rather than like many cities in Africa, where many people are completely moved into the city without corresponding industrial support, resulting in slums all over the city except for a few "prosperous areas" rich areas.

Therefore, in the policies formulated by Kolo, relying on industry, attaching importance to education, and forming a quality population growth are what they pursue.

For this reason, Kolo also promulgated the corresponding immigration law - because the quality level of Kolo people was much worse than that of developed countries, and the growth of people's quality is a slow process. At the beginning, they mainly absorbed people with special skills in the "illegal immigrant settlements" in Benin and Ghana through the "repatriation of illegal immigrants" cooperation with Britain and France.

These immigrants mainly come from the Middle East, and a few come from Eastern Europe, but because of screening, the "new immigrants" absorbed by Kolo over the years are only more than 10,000 people...

In addition, because of Kolo's cooperation with China in many aspects such as infrastructure and manufacturing, many Chinese came to Kolo, and eventually some of them stayed here, and the number of these was not large.

As for those who come to Colo from Benin, Ghana, Burkina Faso and other countries around Colo, they mainly get short-term work visas, and Colo rarely gives these people formal nationality.

In addition, although Colo will not take compulsory measures to control the population growth of the country, it will also implement the so-called "eugenics" policy in many ways.

For example, in Colo, there are free "condoms" distribution points everywhere, and there are also many special institutions that distribute these free measures in public places.

In addition to avoiding the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, it also prevents some people at the bottom from having more children...

Colo itself has some factories of such rubber products-Africa itself is an important banana planting area in the world. From the map, areas such as Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria are roughly at the same latitude as China's Qiongdao Island, and their climate is very suitable for rubber planting.

Among them, of course, Colo is included.

Among them, Cote d'Ivoire has the largest rubber plantation in Africa, followed by Nigeria, Ghana and other countries.

Although the rubber planting area in Kolo is not as large as those countries, Kolo's capital is still relatively strong. The West African Group and Kolo's state-owned Kefa Investment have invested in rubber plantations in Ghana, Nigeria and other countries, and have built a number of related rubber product manufacturing industries in Kolo.

For example, the production of "condoms" in Kolo is not small. They have joint ventures with related companies such as Yinglun and Huaxia, and some of their brands are still very popular in Africa.