Why wouldn't it be? Of course the answer is yes, but that position is so obvious that it becomes unintresting to even discuss. Why Africa today is a place of so much poverty and misery and how the region could begin to lift itself up, is a much more intresting subject to discuss.

How then, could that happen? and why does poverty seem to have such a grip on the continent?

Democracy is a good system if what is subjected to democratic rule also is what holds most of the power in any given society. A society where an increasing amount of power is transferred from the democratic system to, for example, corporations, the democratic system becomes increasingly meaningless.

What do you mean "they will get nothing in return"? They could just install a puppet regime like they had before (Batista) and "open up the market" for american companies to buy the natural resources from that puppet regime and turn the population into low-wage laborers in the companies that exploit their resources, while all the profits flows back home to the US. So you can be calm, the US wouldn't do anything unless they would be sure they would get something in return.

The origins of ownership, in contrast to for example gravity, is man. Ownership is a concept that we as humans have to outline, explain and assign meaning to aswell as agree on between ourselves in order for it to be anything. It is as such, in my opinion, a beliefsystem similar to religion. In your example of the sirloin, the man who steals the sirloin doesn't violate anything but the manmade law of ownership that assigned the butchers right to ownership of the sirloin in the first place.

Ownership is to me simply formalized possesion and formalized might. That someone posseses something is not a judgement, it's simply an observation that says: that man has got a sirloin. He will be in posession of the sirloin until someone takes it away. Then he does not posess it anylonger. The concept of ownership regulates if the transaction is legal or not, and law is as we all know certainly manmade. Without the law of ownership and concepts of property rights, no one owns anything, one only have what one have until one don't.

For example: a man is hungry and kills a bird. As he is about to eat it, someone else attempts to take it away. To keep the bird he needs to sucessfully defend it, if he does not, it is not his to eat anymore. To refeer to some natural law of ownership in this instance would be useless, and it is evident that "our endeavors to own anything" is NOT governed by some natural law of ownership.

In short, ownership is a claim and ownership only exists as long as one can defend and back up that claim.

I think we forget that the foundation of our ownership of our posessions (the TV, car etc.) is really only rooted in our states capability to uphold and enforce the law. A document of ownership is useless without some legal power that recognizes the validity of these words.