The issue comes down to so-called poverty traps. Being a land-locked nation without access to shipping ports is one kind of poverty trap; being stuck in a cycle of civil war is another. One of the most insidious of these is the resource curse, which goes like this: When a developing nation discovers a new natural resource, this causes its currency to rise against other currencies and has the downstream effect of making other exportable commodities uncompetitive. The discovery of oil reserves in Nigeria in the 1970s destroyed the country’s peanut and cocoa industries.
