But none of those European countries had the piss-poor infrastructure of the sub-Saharan African countries, a lot of the Africans had to basically start from zero with new borders, starting national ideas with no national identities and having to apply new systems. The African situation is much much more complicated, and no one gives an actual shit to actually examine it.

Some of the most successful post-colonial basically modern countries outside the New World were Saddam Iraq, North Africa and some of the Gulf states (Oman always had a degree of independence and fares by far the best). Even from Latin America, forming new countries out of nothing (Colombia, Venezuela, Central America) is damn fucking hard, and that's hoping your leaders don't turn out to be corrupt inept bastards (the Mexican case) or corrupt badly educated bastards (a lot of African countries, the way Ghaddafi ruined Libya). The countries with the harshest histories in Europe (the ex-Yugoslavs, the abomination that is Moldova, Greece with military dictatorship, brutal World War 2 occupation, brutal civil war, the ex-European North Korea Albania, Ukraine) are also the messiest, while those with comfy histories like the Scandinavian (minus Norway, which became rich thanks to fuckton of oil and good government which is had a lot of time to develop) countries do exceedingly well with mostly comfy modern histories, while a country like Mexico has an excruciatingly brutal history, a war for independence fraught with infighting and a completely destroyed infrastructure, French attempt at colonizing them, the USA stealing half the nation and civil wars, and getting hit very hard by global economic crisis.

EDIT: The only reason Malta is not in such shit is because of our size and population. Rival political leaders could have gone to the same barbershop and definitely to the same university. And we still had a very troublesome period where government collapsed, some violence appeared and half of the Maltese people live in Canada, Australia or the UK. Now imagine you are Congo, which is massive with a huge amount of land separating people and had the Belgians, or Nigeria, with the north having little connection to the south, or South Africa, Ethiopia or Burma/Myammar, with a history of wars and hatreds and supremacy united only by empire, and Ethiopia having the misfortune of having the craziest communists on the continent.

EDIT Numru Tnejn: Malta was rather well treated by the British Empire in relative to others (not counting colonies formed by Brits moving there and being seen as citizens, like Canada, the US, New Zealand or Australia), meaning that when there was no wars Malta could benefit from (GLORY TO WORLD WAR 1 BEST TIME IN MALTA'S LIFE), we were stuck in a position of almost-total poverty and close to starvation. This is one of the best treated. Imagine now you are Nigeria.