Algeria’s Arrogance and Its Hatred Toward Morocco Have Led to Its Own Collapse

Algeria, even more than Venezuela, has become a victim of its own gas and oil. Although the country is potentially rich, its population has become poor, extremely poor and deeply hopeless. Today, the Algerian people reject their aging military regime, a system that has grown senile, exhausted and eaten away by institutionalized corruption never seen anywhere else in the world.

One might assume that a nation sitting on massive natural resources, like Algeria, would naturally rise among emerging powers. That belief is an illusion. It ignores a harsh truth: easy hydrocarbon wealth is a double-edged sword, especially when controlled by a closed, opaque system corrupted by mafias, networks of privilege and a governance model built on impunity.

Instead of becoming an engine of development, this enormous wealth quickly turned into a curse under a military regime clinging to its privileges. Oil and gas revenue became tools for predation and clientelism, leading to the widespread impoverishment of the population.

What should have been a blessing for Algerians has instead become a political and economic poison, one capable of destroying any state unable to break from authoritarianism and systemic corruption.

Algeria’s ruling oligarchy, formed mostly of rival family clans, the endless “Bouteflikas,” former FLN executioners and leaders of the National Army once serving as simple corporals in the French forces before self-promoting themselves to “Generals” to divide the spoils, has enriched itself by siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars. A true criminal elite.

To maintain a fragile “social peace,” the Algerian junta created an artificial welfare state, wasteful, ineffective and deeply incompetent.

Today, aside from hydrocarbon extraction, which represents 98 percent of state income, Algeria has no remaining industry. Unemployment has become endemic, exceeding 50 percent of the working population. For youth, who represent the majority, the situation is catastrophic. They see no future and their anger is justified.

Since independence, Algeria has multiplied disastrous economic choices, all fueled by its HATRED for Morocco and its foolish ARROGANCE toward everyone. It even sabotaged its own agricultural reform simply to avoid “copying the poor Moroccan model,” its imagined eternal rival, despite Morocco relying heavily on agriculture to build its economy. The result is staggering: today Algeria is the world’s second-largest importer of wheat after Egypt, despite vast agricultural potential.

Its industrial policies of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the Soviet model of heavy state-controlled industry, also ended in failure. Algeria’s ruling class, kept in place by the military, has survived only through the flow of easy hydrocarbon money. They will not give up their grip on power easily.

Crushed by its own failures and obsessed with Morocco’s success, Algeria remains incapable of reforming or opening its economy to foreign investment. One could even wonder whether Algerians would have been happier without this cursed oil.

With its natural resources, Algeria enjoyed a rent-based economy for decades, but this rent resembled more a “poison” than an advantage. Combined with corruption and pathological arrogance, the so-called oil fortune could only end in downfall.

What we witness today is tragic for the Algerian people, because the delay accumulated by Algeria in the race for development is now almost irreversible.

Translated from Abderrazzak Boussaid’s French article – le7tv