Development through borrowing was the foundation of East Africa's Third Five-Year Plan and New Economic Policy, while the European War was one of the key avenues for resolving the debt issue.
The main reason this model had emerged was that East Africa's first two Five-Year Plans had enormously consumed the capital primitively accumulated over its first thirty-odd years.
Over its first thirty years, East Africa had amassed vast social wealth by squeezing its own cheap labor force dry, freeloading off Africa's land and mineral resources, and employing every other conceivable means. Colonization itself was a matter of winning great gains with small stakes; setting aside the military expenses required for colonization, it was practically a business that yielded ten thousand profits from one investment.
It was merely that, like the United States, East Africa had turned its colonies into land that had "belonged to it since ancient times," sacrificing the interests of nearly forty million Black natives for East Africa's development.
But colonization could not solve every problem. East Africa could not focus solely on plunder; it also had to shoulder construction. Agricultural reclamation, massive infrastructure projects, and the establishment of a national defense industrial system in nineteenth-century East Africa had all required enormous expenditures.
Thus, East Africa had looked glamorous in the nineteenth century, but had not earned all that much. This was also the main reason why, after entering the twentieth century, East Africa's first two Five-Year Plans had been far smaller in scale than those of the Soviet Union in 1991 in Ernst's previous life.
Nor could the development model of the nineteenth century possibly be maintained forever. By the early twentieth century, East Africa's Black slaves had nearly been used up.
Looking back over East Africa's first fifty years of economic development, they could roughly be