Most of what you hear about Africa is pretty dismal. Poverty, genocide, children who are going to stave if you don’t finish your plate- sometimes it seems the whole continent is royally messed up. Which countries buck the trend?
I’ve heard Botswana is pretty decent, in infrastructure and goverment. True, half the country is dying of AIDS, but it’s a democracy, it’s not at war, the economy is pretty good, and the people are pretty laid-back (according to Alexander McCall Smith, anyway).
My first guesses would be the Arabic countries in the north (Morocco to Egypt, and those in between) as being at least above the extreme poverty and strife we see in places like Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda. Also, there is South Africa, which is essentially a first-world Western country.
In West Africa, Ghana is usually cited as the shining example of stability and relatively high standards of living. Admittedly, it doesn’t have a huge amount of competition among its neighbours.
A decade ago, Zimbabwe was doing pretty well, the breadbasket of Africa. Nowadays, not so good. 
Gabon is also considered fairly propserous.
Ironically Somaliland an unrecognized but defacto independent country is also stable and doing well. Though this may be more to a comparison to neighbors than anything else
You could always look at the Human Development Index for African countries. If we’re restricting attention to sub-Saharan, mainland African countries, then the top five HDIs are those of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa (in that order.) For comparison, Gabon’s HDI is comparable to that of Sri Lanka or the Phillipines.
The UN sorts countries by their HDIs into four broad categories: “very high”—the developed world, “high”, “medium” and “low”. All of the countries above are considered to have “medium” human development. If you’re willing to go north of the Sahara or to islands, then Libya, the Seychelles, and Mauritius are all considered to have “high” human development. Libya’s and the Seychelles’ HDIs are comparable to Costa Rica, Mexico, or Venezuela; Mauritius is comparable to Lebanon or Ecuador. Sadly, every single country considered to have “low” human development is in sub-Saharan Africa except for two: Afghanistan and Timor-Leste.
That said, the HDI doesn’t take into account democracy, war, or disease specifically, except inasmuch as they affect life expectancy, education, and GDP. So it’s not a perfect surrogate for what you’re looking for.
Tanzania, which sits towards the lower end of the “medium” section of the Human Development Index, remains politically stable compared to its neighbors Kenya and Uganda.
I’ve worked in Zambia - its not too bad.
The map of world happinesssays that inhabitants of Togo, Gambon, Nigeria (!) and Tanzania are the happiest of all African nations.
My daughter was in Namibia, and they seem to be doing fine. It helps that they have a small population and diamond mines to help fund the government, but she lived in a small town that had running water and electricity. I think much of that is a relic from apartheid – the Boers built up an infrastructure and set an example that remained once they left. Their post office never lost a package we sent.
Politically, the government is very stable. It’s something of a one-party state, but the elections are free; SWAPO always wins because people still see them as the ones that gave them independence. The last election, there were several opposition parties, and things got hotly contested, but there was no hints of corruption.
I’ve been to Gabon five times, and have also visited Cameroon, Nigeria, Congo-Kinshasha, Kenya, South Africa, and Madagascar. Gabon is in pretty decent shape, The fact that they have both oil and a small population (about 1 million) has helped. The government has been stable (if corrupt). People from many other African countries come looking for work since the country is comparatively well off.
South Africa has lots of things that are of first-world quality, but there is still widespread poverty and serious crime in some areas.
When I last visited Kenya in 1993 it was doing pretty well, but political turmoil has since knocked it back a bit.
I wouldn’t go that far. True, South Africa is the richest country in sub-Saharan Africa, and various pieces of South Africa look just like first-world Western countries–but millions of black South Africans are still in conditions of extreme poverty with little available infrastructure (e.g., 82% of black families have no running water; that’s not “first world”). In fact, while the breaking of apartheid has indeed allowed some black South Africans to rise in status and prosperity (and some white South Africans to sink), the overall structure hasn’t changed that much. (It’s only been 16 years, FWIW.)
South Africa has an appallingly high population suffering from AIDS. The infection rate is estimated at 12%, and with a large population that makes them the country with the most people infected. And that was exacerbated by a period where the government denied that the disease existed, or that it was a problem, or that it could be treated by antiretroviral drugs. That policy caused an estimated 343,000 deaths and 171,000 infections.
IMO, the AIDS denialism was nothing short of an atrocity, and the health ministers that perpetuated the denial should have the same moral and legal culpability as leaders of genocide.
That sort of thing is not the result of a competent government, or healthy society. That firmly places South Africa in the “very dismal” category, IMO. Luckily things have started to turn around on that front…
Lets not exagerate now. The government never denied the existence of AIDS or the utility of anti-retrovirals. The problem came in when the then health minister* veared off into insanity by trying to claim that there were alternative, natural treatments for HIV. Despite this the government continued to proscribe and issue anti-retrovirals, at no cost, but under restrictive regulation for exactly who needed to receive treatment.
The current health ministry is definitely doing more to combat AIDS, but the countrie’s resources are limited and there are other just as urgent health concerns, TB, measles et cetera.
*Who died shortly after leaving office so there is not much that can be done in terms of punishment for her misdeeds.
There was of course Thabo Mbeki’s bizarre insistence that AIDS was caused by poverty and not by HIV… but this is turning into a hijack…
I sometimes refer to South Africa as “second world” as there are first world parts and third world parts, so it is somewhere between the two.
Nigeria gets a bad rap. If you want to move somewhere in sub-saharan Africa unlikely to have a civil war soon, that’s the place. Also in terms of pure economic power, I don’t think any of their neighbors compare. Sure, their per-capita GDP isn’t the best, but they have a LOT of freakin’ people to take care of. They have TWICE as many people as the next most populous African nation, Ethiopia, and are making a much better time of it than them. The government is stable, although admittedly corrupt. AIDS isn’t as much a problem in Nigeria as in other African nations. If I were going to bet on the future of any sub-Saharan African nation, it would be on Nigeria.
I always thought that Botswana was the poster child for best governed sub-Saharan African country? The lede of their Wikipedia article seems to suggest that they’re very well governed and doing quite well.
South Africa, Namibia and Botswana are the most functional SSA countries, and depending on your definition of “functional”, SA outstrips the other two in regards things like telecoms, infrastructure, tertiary education, science, agricultural output, industrial output etc. Nam and Botswana are primarily mineral producers and little else.
Despite a large part of the population being below the poverty line and with limited infrastructure, there are resources put towards helping the impoverished that ensure that, for instance, the South African poor don’t starve, can access some form of medical care, can receive government grants etc.
The world’s biggest brewing company? South African. Africa’s biggest electricity generator (world no 7) - South Africa. Largest African airlines? South African. Banks? South African. Biggest mobile companies? South African.
Yah, Botswana is pretty neat. Not only is it a democracy - it’s always been a democracy, since Day 1 of independence. No apartheid regimes, no military coups, no crazed religious fanatics kidnapping children to brainwash them into child soldiers in the bush. Nothing.
Botswana belongs to that elite group of countries where the police really are your friends, the soldiers really do honor the ideal of civilian leadership, and so on.
Heh. I’m very surprised to see Equatorial Guinea on that list - the government is a particularly unpleasant and corrupt dictatorship that’s fostered a damn big gulf between rich and poor, even by sub-saharan African standards.
Coolest setting for a science-fiction movie? South Africa. 
If Nigeria ever managed to sort out its governmental corruption problem (and there are those who are trying) it’d be a seriously powerhouse for Africa. There’s a lot of of oil and other mineral money floating around. They’re even got booming movie industry (“Nollywood”), although we’re talking videos rather than cinema films. It’s not all 419ers there.