Sorry, Africans, you are no longer allowed to have your own countries

An imaginative proposal in a column by Pierre Englebert in today's NYT:

the international community must move swiftly to derecognize the worst-performing African states.

The problem of Africa that Professor Englebert is nicely fixing was that 50 years ago:

these countries were recognized by the international community before they even really existed.

So because the Western powers (affectionately called here "the international community") supported with abundant aid dollars the tyrants who oppressed their own citizens, those same citizens are going to be further punished by those same Western powers who will turn them into stateless persons without a country.

Characteristically for most grand schemes to "fix Africa" from outside, the column does not consider how this proposal might affect individual Africans; it only offers highly speculative hopes for how erasing countries from the map might make the rulers behave better after they no longer have a state to rule.

I have a couple of random thoughts on this for Professor Englebert:

(1) shouldn't you have considered an intermediate step of stripping the tyrants of just the aid dollars, while allowing the citizens to keep their own countries?

(2) do you really think the World Cup was the best time to propose such a scheme? I myself had not noticed the phenomenon of Africans not caring about the football teams of their non-existent nations.